Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Mauro Gandolfi
Bologna 1764 - 1834
31
A Wayfarer Seated on a Block of Stone with his Dog Looking up at Him
Point of the brush and black ink and watercolour, heightened with white gouache.
292 x 210 mm (11 ½ x 8 ¼ in.)
Provenance: Private Collection
This superb drawing of a young man, perhaps depicting
a shepherd but more probably a wayfarer caught in a
moment of repose with his attentive dog beside him, is
a welcome addition to the catalogue of works by this
truly excellent Bolognese artist. Mauro Gandolfi was
active during the 18 th and 19 th centuries in Italy, France
and America and showed himself to be thoroughly
conversant with the prevailing taste for Neoclassicism
as well as other diverse and fascinating artistic currents 1 .
He was the son and heir to the great and widely
celebrated artist, Gaetano Gandolfi, who encouraged
him to paint and with whom Mauro collaborated even
while he was studying at the Accademia Clementina di
Pittura, Scultura e Architettura in Bologna. This was an
extremely prestigious and pre-eminent institution at the
beginning of the Enlightenment, amongst the best in
Europe, and where it was possible to encounter many
of the painters who, in the next century, would come to
dominate the stage of European art.
Mauro’s was a complex and forthright personality; he
became almost vainglorious in telling of his own career 2
and though dominated by an ardent wish for success,
he chose a different path to those of his contemporaries,
Felice Giani, Pelagio Palagi and Bartolommeo Pinelli,
whose company he had kept in the halls of Palazzo
Poggi, seat of the Academy, and who all elected to move
to Rome. Paris and not Rome was Mauro’s choice, and
then America where, with his difficult and melancholic
character, he set himself in passionate pursuit of fortune
and a life of liberty and freedom of thought.
Mauro often measured himself against the creativity
and culture of his more famous father, Gaetano.
Commissioned by an unidentified donor believed to
be the composer Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), he
executed a number of watercolour portraits of scientists
of the past, which were inspired by those executed
by Gaetano for the famous botanist Ferdinando Bassi
(1710-1774), and now in the museum named after its
patron, the Pinacoteca Bassiana in Bologna. Amongst
these works by Mauro are the portrait of Giambattista
Della Porta, now in the collection of the University of
Bologna, and that of Joseph Pitton De Tournefort, now
in the Metropolitan Museum and recently shown in an
exhibition at the Pinacoteca Bassiana 4 . Both drawings
share the same fluid way in which the watercolour
is applied as well as the confident draughtsmanship
which characterises the highly refined style of the
present Traveller. These works are all datable to the 19 th
century part of Mauro’s career.
This magnificent drawing is almost like a response to the
work of Mauro’s former companion at the Accademia,
Bartolomeo Pinelli, who whilst in Bologna during
the years from 1792 to 1799 made a collection of
watercolour costume studies, which he later published
in 1809 under the title Raccolta di cinquanta costumi
pittoreschi … all’acquaforte, a masterwork in the field
of engraving in terms of invention and reproduction.
Here, Gandolfi, takes pleasure in depicting a humble
figure, bull-necked, wearing a shapeless hat and
simple clothes, a character of the people but shown
in a pose deriving from a canon learned through long
study of antique sculpture, a nobility of posture that
speaks strongly of his high culture. It is likely that the
block of stone on which the wayfarer sits, given the
fine perspective of the angles and its substance, itself
belonged to the Academy and was in use by the school
of life study which Mauro frequented first as a student
and then afterwards as a professor. What is striking in
this truly beautiful watercolour is the dignity of the pose
(quite different to the tone Pinelli set in his popular
images which show a more anthropological than
artistic sensibility): to depict his Wayfarer, Mauro chose
a moment and an emotion of calm, giving an almost
melancholic effect and underlining the sincerity of his
wish to understand the inner workings of the character
he portrays.
It should be said, that even in his more sensual depictions,
unlike Pinelli or Giani and their contemporary, Fuseli,
whose works are overtly erotic, Mauro is never explicit;
rather his sensibility depends above all on his culture
and learning which he reveals in an illusive manner,
with subtle representations. Works such as the present
one show him to be one of the most intriguing and
fascinating artists active at the time of the fall of the
Ancien Regime, the ideals of which were still important
to him although he looked beyond it to portray the new
world.
Translated from a text by Donatella Biagi Maino
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