Samson mauling the lion

Provenance: Varese, private collection

Exhibitions: Milan, 1852, Imperial Regia Accademia di Belle Arti, Brera Palace

Bibliography: Esposizione delle opere di belle arti per l’anno 1852, edizione corretta ed accresciuta, Milan 1852, p. 47, cat. 335; Giorgio Giachetti, “Pubblica esposizione di belle arti nelle sale del palazzo di Brera in Milano”, Il Pirata. Giornale letterario-teatrale, year XVIII, no. 26, Sunday 26 September 1852, p. 101; Filippo Villani, “Pubblica mostra dell’I.R. Academia di Belle Arti in Milano nell’autunno 1852”, in Letture di famiglia. Opera illustrata con incisioni in acciaio che si pubblica dalla sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd Austriaco, A. I, Trieste 1852, p. 270.

A pupil at Pompeo Marchesi’s Brera Academy, an acclaimed representative of classicism in sculpture in romantic Milan and official artist of the Habsburgs, Carlo Romano was one of the artists who endeavoured to reform sculpture in the middle of the century. Overcoming the ancient ideal and the mythology prevailing in Rome, the religious purism and also the naturalism of Lorenzo Bartolini, inspired by the masters of the Florentine Quattrocento, protagonists such as Alessandro Puttinati, Vincenzo Vela and Pietro Magni were finally able to re-establish plastic art in Milan during that period, aligning themselves with the results of contemporary romantic painting, from the historical kind inspired by politics to modern genre art, inspired by the feelings of intimate, everyday life[1].

Not yet the subject of specific studies, in the meantime the story of Carlo Romano can be reconstructed through quotations from the flourishing periodical literature of Lombardy, which also testifies to the ongoing debate between classicists and romantics. Honorary member of the Brera Academy and successor to Giovanni Antonio Labus from 1857 onwards as part of the management of the school of drawing and plastic at the Istituto dei sordomuti in Milan[2], he was one of the numerous sculptors employed in the centuries-old construction site of the Duomo, to which the French administration had given a new impetus, continued by the artistic initiative of the Habsburg government. For the interiors, he used Carrara marble to create the statues of King Solomon and the Prophet Isaiah, placed on the sides of the Altar of the Virgin[3], the bas-relief figures for the pillars of the altar of Santa Caterina and the reliefs of the Carità and the Chiesa milanese. While for the exterior decoration, he was engaged, from 1856 to 1867, to produce the Candoglia marble statues of re Davide, Santa Radegonda, Santa Marcellina vergine e Santa Edvige[4]. He was then called upon to create the two colossal Telamons for the Palazzo Reale which, together with the Cariatidi by Luigi Cocchi, were added to the series created in the previous century by Gaetano Callani and Giuseppe Franchi[5].

The story of the statue of La convinzione dell’Unità d’Italia bears witness to the artist’s Risorgimento ideals, an allegorical personification that Romano had perhaps independently imagined and created in marble. In 1860, a group of Milanese citizens launched a public fund for the purchase of the work as a gift to Lord John Russell as a sign of gratitude for his support of the Italian cause[6]. The project was successful and, in 1862, the statue was delivered to London, as showed by the ample coverage in the periodical press, which reported the acceptance speech given by the British statesman[7].

The identification and restoration to studies of a fundamental work by Romano, which had lost its identity since it was not signed, now allows us to delve deeper into his role in Lombard sculpture during the sixth decade. It is the Sansone che sbrana il leone, presented here, from a private collection in Varese, which was probably its original location. Also due to this common provenance of the work and the artist, the group can be linked to the work of the same name exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Brera Academy in 1852[8].

While the Marquis Filippo Villani, an eccentric patriotic figure, lover of fine arts and collector, criticised the work due to the extensive smoothing of the marble, others appreciated it. After having lamented the absence at Brera that year of leading sculptors such as Vela, Puttinati, Abbondio Sangiorgio, Giovanni Strazza, Monti, as well as others, and after having praised the universal principles of Phidias’ classicism, which had inspired the magisterium considered still valid by Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, Villani praised a male portrait sculpted by Romano for Mrs Rossi. Regarding the Sansone, however, he rendered the following opinion: “We cannot give similar praise to his Sansone che sbrana il leone, a somewhat mean, miserable statue, poorly finished at its extremities, lacking strength of action, almost bereft of muscles, so much so that when looking at it some might say that it had just been retrieved from the bed of a river, which, running over it, had smoothed and corroded it. We do not say as much with the arrogance of someone judging, but with the affectionate words of a critic who ignores the panderers and stimulates high minds towards the truth and the mantle, of which he considers them capable”. He then went on to praise the Sansone in atto di vendicarsi de’ Filistei, a colossal plaster figure by Angelo Biella exhibited on the same occasion, capable of recalling Vela’s Spartaco in terms of the “power of the intellect combined with a judicious copy of reality”[9].

In “Il Pirata” however, the literary and opera librettist Giorgio Giachetti expressed the exact opposite opinion, strongly praising Romano’s Sansone for the vigorous expression harmoniously infused in the anatomy: “Head, arms, back, thighs, legs, everything there is harmony, everything contributes to demonstrating the Herculean strength of the terrible Philistine”[10].

This disparity in opinion is explained by Romano’s innovative formal choices, which perhaps might have displeased Villani’s classicist front. The plastic effects are, indeed, different from the traditional chiaroscuro obtained by soft transitions. Here, they are rather pictorial, the result of contrasts accentuated by the sculptural technique, sometimes frank and harsh through the decisive blows of the chisel, also struck on deliberately unfinished parts, as in the animal’s fleece and the hero’s hair. Even the polished surfaces of the anatomy are capable of pictorially showing muscle tension. The naturalism of the nudity and face of Samson’s, far removed from the models of ideal beauty, refer, as in Vela, to the individual character of the living model. The tension of the action then reaches aspects of crude realism in the ferocious details of the fight against the lion. The age-old comparison with the Laocoonte, a group in dramatic action traditionally admired for its continence of pain, capable of not damaging the classical ideal of beauty, is here definitively overcome in the name of an expressive paroxysm that is functional to political reflection, an aspect undoubtedly appreciated by the more authoritative exponents of romantic criticism, such as Giuseppe Rovani[11].

The Sansone, as a symbol of the fight against the foreign yoke of the Philistines, could therefore embody precisely in these formal forcings the civil demands underlying the historical subject, on a par with illustrious works that had constituted a sort of Risorgimento call to arms challenging Austrian censorship. Therefore, it can undoubtedly be added to an extraordinary series of statues all exhibited at Brera, from the Masaniello by Puttinati (1846, Milan, Gallery of Modern Art), to the Spartaco by Vela (1846-50, Lugano, City Hall), to the David by Magni (1852, Milan, Gallery of Modern Art).

Stefano Grandesso

[1] See Stefano Grandesso, Dal classicismo more romano alla scultura romantica come natura, sentimento religioso e impegno civile, in L’Ottocento in Italia. Le arti sorelle. Il Romanticismo 1815-1848, edited by Carlo Sisi, Milan 2006, pp. 187-190.

[2] Antonio Caimi, Delle arti e del disegno e degli artisti nelle provincie di Lombardia dal 1777 al 1862, memoria dettata in occasione della Esposizione universale di Londra del 1862, Milan, Pirola, 1862, p. 174.

[3] “L’amico cattolico”, series II, t. XIV, Milano Boniardi-Pogliani, 1855, p. 527.

[4] Annali della Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano dall’origine fino al presente, pubblicati a cura della sua amministrazione, vol. V, Milan, Brigola, 1883, pp. 379, 380, 381, 385, 391, 398.

[5] Illustrazione storico-artistica dei Reali Palazzi di Milano, Milan, Alberti, 1863, p. 85.

[6] “Il mondo illustrato. Giornale universale”, a. III, 1860, no. 23, pp. 395-396.

[7] “Il Pungolo”, Giornale politico popolare della sera”, A. III, Naples, Milan, 16 October 1862, no. 283, p. 1130.

[8] Esposizione delle opere di belle arti per l’anno 1852, corrected and enhanced edition, Milan with the examples of Luigi di Giacomo Pirola, Milan 1852, p. 47, cat. 335: “Romano Carlo / Borgo di Monforte n. 263 / 335. Gruppo in marmo, rapp. Sansone col leone, di commissione.”

[9] Filippo Villani, Pubblica mostra dell’I.R. Academia di Belle Arti in Milano nell’autunno 1852, in Letture di famiglia. Opera illustrata con incisioni in acciaio che si pubblica dalla sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd Austriaco, A. I, Trieste 1852, p. 270.

[10] Giorgio Giachetti, Pubblica esposizione di belle arti nelle sale del palazzo di Brera in Milano, in “Il Pirata. Giornale letterario-teatrale”, anno XVIII, no. 26, Sunday, 26 September 1852, p. 101.

[11] According to the testimony of “L’amico cattolico”, op. cit.