Camillo Pacetti

This beautifully modelled plaster portrait bust of the great Milanese Neoclassical painter Andrea Appiani (1754-1817) is likely to be an original model by the sculptor Camillo Pacetti (1758-1826). Several sources record a posthumous portrait bust of Appiani by Pacetti, dated 1820, as having once been located in the Accademia di Brera in Milan (see Piva, op. cit. pp. 93-95); this marble bust appears to be lost. However, a plaster portrait of Appiani, signed C. PACETTI F. and dated 1820, was recently on the Milan art market as attributed to Pacetti’s younger contemporary Pompeo Marchesi. This plaster has been associated with a reference in the archives of the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan to a plaster bust of Appiani by Pacetti having been one of a number of plasters gifted by Pompeo Marchesi to the lawyer Salvatore Fogliani (Cucciniello, op. cit., p.409). Marchesi appears to have used his plaster version of Pacetti’s bust as the model for his own portrait of Appiani with herm truncation which once stood at the entrance to his studio, paired with a bust of Canova, and which is now in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan (inv. no. GAM 696).

Camillo Pacetti was one of the most consequential sculptors operating in Milan in the last decades of the 18th century and first quarter of the 19th century. Born in Rome, Pacetti became a member of the Accademia di San Luca, and was encouraged in his career by Antonio Canova. In 1805 he succeeded Giuseppe Franchi as Chair of Sculpture at the Accademia di Brera, and was responsible for many of the most important sculptural projects in Milan, including figures of the façade of the Duomo and reliefs on the city’s Arco della Pace. Pacetti executed a number of beautifully carved and engaging portrait busts which, with their deeply carved blank eyes, dynamic poses and stark classicism, recall the present bust: see his Bust of Giuseppe Bossi in the Brera loggia and the Bust of Franz II in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. INV-SK 876).

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Sapori, Scultura italiana moderna, Rome, 1949, p. 82; O. Cucciniello, in M. Fratelli, F. Valli (eds.), Musei nell’Ottocento: alle origini delle collezioni pubbliche lombarde, Turin, 2012; C. Piva, Pacetti, Camillo, in Dizionario Biografico degli italiani, 80, Roma 2014; M. G. Picozzi, M. Di Macco, C. Gasparri, L. Pirzio Biroli Stefanelli, A. Cipriani, G. Fusconi, Vincenzo Pacetti, Roma, l’Europa all’epoca del Grand Tour, Rome, 2017