Product Description

A rediscovery of the eighteenth-century sculptor Francesco Bertos by the eminent British art historian, Charles Avery, a specialist in European- and particularly Italian — sculpture. Bertos lived and died near Padua, Italy, and specialised in eye-catching, sometimes rather bizarre, mythological, allegorical and religious groups in marble or bronze. The art of Bertos strives to represent movement, in a similar vein to contemporary paintings by Tiepolo with their tumbling groups of figures in airy trompe l’oeil ceilings. Indeed, many of the figures in Bertos’s sculptural groups seem to fly and he was even summoned before the Inquisition to account for his preternatural skills. Richly illustrated with almost a 100 colour and 300 black and white photographs, the text reveals his noble patrons in the Veneto, along with the royal family in Turin and Peter the Great in Russia, delves into his sources of inspiration, attempts to clarify his sometimes obscur iconography, illustrates his daring techniques, introduces an artist who followed Bertos, and tracks the fortunes of Bertos in British and American collecting in the twentieth century. Four appendixes list, among other things, Bertos’s various signatures and the locations where his works can be found now. This scholarly, but lively, publication ends with a pioneering catalogue raisonné documenting all the sculptor’s known works, each illustrated with a black and white image.

Франческо Бертос (1678 — 1735) — итальянский скульптор, автор аллегорической бронзовой скульптуры.