• Author: Luigi Pampaloni
• Date: 1827
• Collection: SCULPTURE
• Technique: chalk model
• Dimensions: h. 58 cm.
• Inventory: Inv. Scult. 1237

According to his contemporaries, Luigi Pampaloni was the ideal sculptor for this type of charming, gracious statuette, earning him the nickname “the Anacreon of sculpture”. Indeed, Pampaloni, Lorenzo Bartolini’s most famous student, loved to devote himself to carving gentle statues on children’s themes in a category of artistic production marked by a carefree, graceful tone and characterised not so much by the specificity of the themes as the works’ small size, the literary correspondent of which were madrigals and epigrams. He indulged his personal inclination towards portraying children, their movements often still uncertain, as appropriate for their age, and comforted by obedient and protective animals. In about 1827, Luigi Pampaloni sculpted this Boy Playing with a Dog for an English collector, rejecting all mythological artifice to update the classical model (Cupid Petting a Faithful Dog or Eros and Loyalty) with a more modern sensibility: this is revealed in the description of natural details, such as the dog’s thick fur, the time spent on the round forms of the child’s body and the wise, smiling expression of the boy, framed by the curly ringlets of his hair. The plaster version of the work was displayed in the galleries of the Florentine Accademia, where it was met with the critics’ acclaim, praising its “gentleness, truth and expression”, which were held to be the almost natural merits of the sculptor’s works.