Carlo Pittaluga

CARLO PITTALUGA (active in the early twentieth century).
"Female nude", c. 1900.
White Carrara marble; "rosso Verona" marble.
Signed.
Measurements: 28 x 54 x 33 cm.

Sculpture representing a nude young woman reclining on a mound of organic forms, in an attitude of rest. The body is abandoned gracefully on the surface, while the arms are folded forward and the hands are intertwined forming a natural bed on which the face rests; the posture is resolved with an anatomical ease that reveals the maturity of the sculptor even at this early stage of his career. The skin is worked with a fine polish that evokes the warmth of flesh, contrasting with the rougher and more natural textures of the mound that supports the figure. Pittaluga frequently returned to the motif of the nude female figure in repose, of which this work is one of his earliest and most successful examples.

The piece rests on a base of "rosso Verona" marble, whose characteristic wine-red color with clear veining offers a chromatic counterpoint to the whiteness of the figure.

Dating from around 1900, the work is part of the current of Italianate academicism at the end of the century, indebted to the classical tradition and the bourgeois taste for the idealized female nude, which would find in Pittaluga one of its most delicate interpreters of the first decades of the twentieth century.