The Sculpture Collection

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Sculptures from the Zeri Collection

The Fantoni Sculpture Workshop

The Accademia Carrara houses a small but valuable collection of sculptures dating from the late fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. There are two main groups to the collection and both have very different features.

The group of works by the Fantonis is representative of the work of this famous family of carvers and sculptors originally from Rovetta, in Val Seriana. In eighteenthcentury Lombardy, the Fantoni family built one of the most modern and extensive workshops of the time. It was organized and equipped to produce a quantity of disparate objects, meeting the needs of a very diverse clientele. Apart from famous masterpieces with profane subjects, such as the group with Venus, Vulcan and Cupid or Ganymede’s Love Nest, which show Fantoni’s skill as a woodcarver, the museum owns a group of preparatory terracotta works for the altar relief of the Pietà in the Cathedral of Bergamo and for other confidently and freely executed sacred works.

The second important group of sculptures arrived at the Accademia Carrara with Federico Zeri’s bequest. An internationally renowned art historian and heir to an illustrious tradition of connoisseurs, Zeri was not only a champion in his discipline, but also a brilliant writer, a caustic polemicist, and eccentric collector. The scholar had a special collaborative and affectionate relationship with the Carrara, sealed by the decision to leave his collection of sculptures to the Museum in Bergamo. This composite and surprising collection was created without a specific project. The collection is a result of a voracious curiosity regarding works and artists worth learning more about and perhaps rediscovering, allowing for an unusual and original journey into the history of Italian and European sculpture, particularly Baroque sculpture.

1610 - 1615 marble 105 × 52.5 × 40 cm Federico Zeri Collection, 1998

Sesto Fiorentino, Florence, 1562 - Rome 1629

Pietro Bernini Andromeda

Pietro Bernini was one of the leading late Mannerist Roman sculptors, but he was overshadowed for a long time by the personality of his son Gian Lorenzo, sculptor, painter and architect, one of the best known artists of the Baroque era. The statue Andromeda came into Accademia Carrara thanks to the bequest of art historian Federico Zeri, one of the proponents of this artist’s rediscovery. The daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, rulers of Ethiopia, is represented in the moment in which she is still chained to the rock, looking towards Perseus, who is about to free her from the dragon, as Ovid recounts in his Metamorphoses. The marble comes from a fountain decoration, probably that of the garden of Cardinal Scipione Borghese on the Quirinal Hill, in the heart of Rome.

c. 1774 - 1775 wood 435 × 470 × 70 cm gift of Ferdinanda Sottocasa, 1996

Rovetta, Bergamo, 1713 - 1798

Grazioso Fantoni Il Giovane and workshop Ganymede’s Love Nest

The Fantoni were a family of carvers and sculptors who worked mainly in Lombardy from the mid-fifteenth century until the early nineteenth century. The workshop’s business was predominantly the crafting of sacred furnishings, but no less important was the secular work, as we can see by the Ganymede’s Love Nest. The work dates from the last stage of the Fantoni production, in the years when the workshop was run by Grazioso Il Giovane and his brother Francesco Donato, and celebrates the marriage between the commissioning party, Gerolamo Sottocasa, and a young woman from the Lupi family. The piece is presented like a stage setting and is structured on three levels that host statues and bas-reliefs with scenes from mythology. The sculpture with the eagle of Jupiter that grabs Ganymede soars above, to be interpreted as a celebration of marriage and its power to elevate the soul to heaven.

1714 wood 116 × 161.5 × 43 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Rovetta, Bergamo, 1659 - 1734

Andrea Fantoni Vulcan, Venus and Cupid (Fable of Venus)

Andrea is the most famous member of the Fantoni family and helped make the workshop, which he led for over half a century, one of the most renowned for the production of sculptures and wooden furnishings in the Lombard area. The sculptural group composed of the figure of Vulcan who is making lightning, the eagle that brings them to Jupiter and Venus who sits and plays with Cupid, was sculpted in 1714 for Ventura Carrara and used as a decoration above the fireplace in the Carrara house in Bergamo. The tale of Venus is narrated by Ovid in Metamorphoses and by several other writers, but Andrea Fantoni provides a refined and genteel version of the story, choosing to omit the scene of intercourse between Venus and Mars that unleashed the revenge of Vulcan, husband of the goddess.