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Lot Essay
Orazio Marinali was the most celebrated member of a family of sculptors working in the Veneto in the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Having trained with Giusto Le Court, he was soon being patronised both by the Church, and by private patrons for whom he often executed series of garden statues or busts in stone and marble.
The series offered here reflects Marinali's fascination with theatrical facial types. Although described as eight philosophers when they were exhibited by the Heim Gallery in 1971 (loc. cit.), they appear, rather, to be a study of male heads: old and young, handsome and haggard, joyful and pained. Stylistically, they can be compared directly with known works by Marinali, including the Boy with a Hat from the Fondazione Scentifica Querini Stampalia in Venice (Martineau and Robinson, op. cit., no. 17, p. 87), which displays the same large blank eyes and softly curling hair evident here, particularly among the more youthful subjects. In his work on Venetian sculptors of the 17th and 18th centuries, Semenzato lists a number of series of busts formerly in private Italian collections (op. cit., pp. 96-100), but the descriptions of these busts are too limited to allow one to identify them categorically with the present series.
The series offered here reflects Marinali's fascination with theatrical facial types. Although described as eight philosophers when they were exhibited by the Heim Gallery in 1971 (loc. cit.), they appear, rather, to be a study of male heads: old and young, handsome and haggard, joyful and pained. Stylistically, they can be compared directly with known works by Marinali, including the Boy with a Hat from the Fondazione Scentifica Querini Stampalia in Venice (Martineau and Robinson, op. cit., no. 17, p. 87), which displays the same large blank eyes and softly curling hair evident here, particularly among the more youthful subjects. In his work on Venetian sculptors of the 17th and 18th centuries, Semenzato lists a number of series of busts formerly in private Italian collections (op. cit., pp. 96-100), but the descriptions of these busts are too limited to allow one to identify them categorically with the present series.