The tondo comes from the gallery of plaster casts of the Bottoli School of Drawing, born from the dispersion of the collections of plaster casts present in the city's buildings and integrated in the 1920s and 1930s with targeted purchases, aimed at making the gallery a sample collection of models permeated by the myth of the Renaissance.
In this case, however, we are dealing with a small masterpiece of contemporary sculpture, which probably came into the collection as a gift. It is a large medallion with the profile of the intellectual and patriot of the Risorgimento, Carlo Cattaneo (1895), realized, on a plaster core, through the deposit of a thin sheet of copper by means of the galvanoplastic technique, with the final application of a green patina to imitate bronze.
The procedure, partially mechanical, was aimed at producing several copies of the same medallion to promote, through the Milanese newspaper "L'Italia del Popolo", a subscription for the erection of a monument dedicated to Cattaneo in Milan.
The author is the sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy who, overcoming the flattening of forms typical of portraits on coins and medals, shaped the head with enthusiasm and obtained a result of great expressive power. The work belongs to the early period of activity of the artist (son of a Russian prince and born on Lake Maggiore in 1866) and is influenced by his training in contact with the greatest exponents of the Lombard Scapigliatura. He was defined by contemporary critics as an "impressionist sculptor" for his breaking up of the form that recalled the effect of indeterminacy reached on the canvas by the Scapigliati painters through the interpenetration between the subject and the surrounding atmosphere. In the 1890s Troubetzkoy participated in numerous competitions for monuments to national glories, before moving to Russia and then to Paris and America.
Scuola di disegno "Bottoli" Fund
