Lot 1: CAMILLO PISTRUCCI

PORTRAIT OF MARY SHELLEY
signed and dated: C. Pistrucci. f. Roma.1843

64.5cm., 25 3/8 in.

white marble

This bust of Mary Shelley by Camillo Pistrucci is an extremely rare sculpted portrait of the early nineteenth century novelist, best-known for the enduring classic Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of the liberal political theorist William Godwin and the unconventional Mary Wollstoncraft, a philosopher and feminist who famously penned A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Mary's life was destined to be as dramatic and extraordinary as her background. In 1814, at the age of 17, she fled from an unhappy home-life to France with one of her father's followers, the married Romantic poet, Percy Byssche Shelley. The couple married in 1816 after the suicide of Shelley's first wife, Harriet. That same year the Shelleys spent the summer near Lake Geneva with literary friends. One evening the company were entertaining each other with German ghost stories when Lord Byron suggested that they each write a supernatural tale. Mary Shelley conceived the idea for Frankenstein and published it two years later. This portrait dates to her later years. Whilst no sitting with Camillo Pistrucci is recorded in her diaries, she is known to have been in Rome in 1843.

Camillo Pistrucci was the son of Benedetto Pistrucci, a renowned medallist and sculptor who settled in England in 1815. He sent his son to Rome to learn sculpture under the great neo-classicist Bertel Thorvaldsen. Building on his father's London connections Camillo completed a series of British portrait commissions from Rome. This portrait may have been based on painted likenesses, in particular the portrait of Mary Shelley which Richard Rothwell exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840. The tall forehead, long nose and small sensitive lips are described together with the firm, rounded cheekbones and jaw-line also seen in the Rothwell portrait. Whilst Pistrucci favoured a rather solemn neo-classicism, inherited from his teacher Thorvaldsen, the smooth marble planes are full of particularity of character. Camillo moves beyond his devotion to neo-classicism in the present portrait as the exactness of the carving becomes highly personalised in stylised passages such as the hair where the twisting, linear strands curve around the ears to spiral into a precise bun at the back of the head. The result is a distinctive, beautifully carved, likeness of one of the most important writers in literary history.

RELATED LITERATURE
C. Milano, 'Pistrucci's Sculpture' in Pistrucci's Capriccio: A Rediscovered Masterpiece of Regency Sculpture, ex. cat. Sir John Soane's Museum, London 2006, pp. 8-10; A. Panzetta, Nuovo Dizionario degli scultori italiana dell'ottocento e del primo novecento, vol. 2, Turin, 2003, p. 697