Italian school, first quarter of the 20th century.

Italian school, first quarter of the twentieth century.
Young woman combing her hair.
Carved white marble and rouge griotte marble base.
Presents restorations in the fingers.
Measurements: 65 x 33 x 33 cm (total).

Italian sculpture of the first quarter of the XX century, carved in white marble, representing a young nude woman sitting on a cushion while she gathers her hair, in an intimate and recollected attitude. The work is part of the neoclassical-naturalist trend that, in Italy, maintained its vitality until the first decades of the twentieth century, prolonging the academic tradition of the Ottocento with a more sensual and everyday language.

The theme of the female figure in moments of introspection or toilette was a favorite of Italian sculpture of this period, cultivated in the workshops of Rome, Florence and Carrara, where technical expertise in marble carving was combined with a refined taste inherited from nineteenth-century statuary. Artists such as Giovanni De Martino, Ettore Ximenes or Pietro Canonica developed this type of compositions that, without abandoning the classical ideal, introduced a more intimate and modern sensibility.

The purity of the modeling, the compositional balance and the polished finish of the surface reveal the influence of late academicism and European figurative symbolism, in dialogue with the realist tendencies of the time. The rouge griotte marble base reinforces the elegance of the whole and provides the chromatic contrast characteristic of works destined for bourgeois interiors, where decorative sculpture reached a remarkable peak during the first decades of the 20th century.