• Author: Lorenzo Bartolini
• Date: 1816 - 1820
• Collection: SCULPTURE
• Technique: chalk model
• Dimensions: 128 x 43 x 41 cm
• Inventory: Inv. Scult.1914 n.1216

The sculpture shows a smiling boy, his feet sunk into a vat to press grapes. Bartolini made three different marble versions from this plaster cast: one in the early 1820s for Count James-Alexander de Pourtalès-Gorgier, probably now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; another is in a private collection and, finally, a later one, created between 1842 and 1844 for the Brescia collector Paolo Tosio (Brescia, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo), which was a great success and was considered exemplary of Bartolini’s artistic philosophy, centred on ‘natural beauty’, that is, the direct imitation of nature, as opposed to the neoclassical ‘ideal beauty’.

The “Grape Presser” reveals Bartolini’s great interest in Renaissance sculpture, particularly reminiscent of Verrocchio’s bronze David (Florence, Bargello Museum, 1465 c.) in the gesture of the hand resting on the hip and the unbalanced pose of the figure.