An alert visitor to Florence who stands in the Piazza della Signoria and inspects the sculpture in the famous Loggia dei Lanzi, will be struck by an ambitious nineteenth-century marble group of the Rape of Polyxena positioned between two seminal works from the Renaissance: Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Giambologna's Rape of the Sabines. Few people today, however, are familiar with the sculptor of this dramatic marble group. Modelled by Pio Fedi in 1855, it captured the political spirit of the t.mes . The group was interpreted as the personification of the Risorgimento and resistance to domination by foreign powers: here Pyrrhus symbolizes Austrian rule of the terra irredenta (unredeemed land), as he tears Polyxena away from her mother Hecuba and tramples on her hapless brother Polites.

To have the group carved in marble became a cause celèbre, so that by the t.mes it was inaugurated in 1866 it was the most talked of sculpture in Italy, thus propelling the previously little known Fedi to fame and rendering him the leading Florentine sculptor of the 1860s.

Fedi's training had been with two of Italy's great marble masters, first Lorenzo Bartolini in Florence, and subsequently Pietro Tenerani in Rome. The influences of both can be seen in Fedi's combination of robust naturalism, which stemmed from Bartolini, suffused with the neo-classical vocabulary of Tenerani. His earlier work included various civic commissions, for instance Nicola Pisano for the exterior of the Uffizi. Through the 1850s he was court sculptor to the Grand Duke Leopold II until the duke's exile in 1859.

It was, however, as a marble carver that Fedi excelled, and his technical excellence is superbly demonstrated in this lot. Il Genio della Pesca depicts a boy effortlessly standing on the back of a dolphin, skimming along a wave as he casts his finely meshed net into the deep. His luxuriant hair is adorned with seashells and reeds, a serene half-smile on his face as he focuses on his fishing, his body sculpted to perfection. The model of Il Genio must have been conceived prior to 1864, since a version with this date was sold at Replica Shoes 's London on 9 April 2003, while a life-size marble of the subject is illustrated in Panzetta (op. cit.). A beguiling and exuberant rococo figure, Fedi's 'Genie of the Deep' is undoubtedly among the sculptor's most successful compositions.

RELATED LITERATURE
A. Panzetta, Nuovo Dizionario degli scultori Italiani dell'ottocento e del primo novecento, Borgaro, 2003, p. 389, pl. 719