Giulio Tadolini, ‘Pauline’

Moira says “she’s brilliant to try drawing.  I’ve always been fascinated by Napoleon’s family stories.”

Giulio Tadolini (1849–1918) was an Academic-trained Italian sculptor, who was born and died in Rome, where he passed his career in the family atelier, which he inherited from his father Scipione Tadolini (1822-92), who in turn was the son of Adamo Tadolini, Antonio Canova’s favourite apprentice. Aside from his numerous portrait busts and memorial sculpture for private persons, he executed sculpture for three famous public monuments, the monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Perugia (1890) and for the funeral monuments of Umberto I of Italy (1900, Pantheon), and of Pope Leo XIII (1907, St John Lateran, illustration), in which Baroque conventions of gesture and iconography in polychome and white marbles are combined with theatrical realism and bravura renditions of the textures of flesh and textiles.

Pauline is a tribute to Antonio Canova’s “Pauline Borghese Bonaparte” depicted as Venus.