From November 4, 2025 to February 1, 2026, the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence will host the exhibition Venus Entering the Sea Bath by Luigi Pampaloni in the temporary exhibition hall. A New Acquisition for the Florence Academy Gallery and Bargello Museums. The exhibition, conceived by Giulia Coco, art history official and curator of the Accademia Gallery and Bargello Museums’ Gipsoteca, was created to celebrate the museum’s acquisition of the preparatory terracotta sketch for the marble work Venus Entering the Sea Bath by Luigi Pampaloni (1791-1847). Found on the antiques market, the terracotta became part of the collections of the new museum system uniting the Accademia Gallery and the Bargello Museums this year.
According to the curator, “the acquisition of the sketch creates an opportunity to recount a theme that is dear and deeply ingrained in the Accademia Gallery: art making. The comparison that the exhibition proposes between preparatory sketch, plaster model and a marble replica of the work by Pampaloni himself intends, in fact, to illustrate in an illustrative way the creative process of nineteenth-century sculpture.” The curator also emphasizes the symbolic value of the acquisition, “which recalls the Accademia’s didactic vocation, mainly expressed in the collection of plaster casts that, in the works of Lorenzo Bartolini and Luigi Pampaloni, recalls the themes of training, creation and artistic practice.”
A Florentine by birth, Pampaloni trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and later in Carrara under the tutelage of Elisa Baciocchi. A pupil of Lorenzo Bartolini, he perfected his training with Francesco Carradori and Stefano Ricci, developing a style in which classical idealism blends with a more natural and intimate sensibility. In his Venus Entering the Sea Bath-executed in marble between 1836 and 1838 for the American Meredith Calhoun and now lost-the artist reinterprets the Canova tradition with grace and measure, creating a scene of spontaneous everyday delicacy.
Alongside the terracotta and plaster model, from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, the exhibition presents a marble replica belonging to a private English collection and an epoxy resin tactile model of the sketch, made for inclusive purposes in collaboration with the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired of Florence. The latter is the result of a 3D scan conducted by the new XR|Lab at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, led by professors Juri Ciani and Gerardo de Simone, with the participation of doctoral students Giulia Vaccari and Federico Niccolai.
In Venus Entering the Sea Bath, Pampaloni manifests his adherence to the sentimental naturalism of the master Bartolini, reinterpreting it with a more lyrical and personal tone, capable of blending classical harmony with a delicate humanity. As Giulia Coco notes, “Pampaloni worked with sober truth, the result of studies and meditations on the antique and Canova, reinterpreted in a purist and romantic key, and updated through Bartolini’s revolutionary magisterium.”
“The exhibition allows us to grasp the genesis of Luigi Pampaloni’s creative process, in an ideal continuity between the atelier and the school, offering the public an opportunity for close encounters with the material and techniques of sculpture and, thanks to the presence of the tactile model, a more inclusive visit,” says Andreina Contessa, director of the newly formed museum system Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze e Musei del Bargello, in office since October 2025. “The exhibition proposes an itinerary that interweaves formal research, theoretical reflection and the application of new technologies to the teaching and fruition of art, thus enhancing the figure of the sculptor in the artistic panorama of his time and showing, at the same time, how the academic tradition is capable of continually renewing itself and communicating to ever new audiences.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalog published by Sillabe, which includes essays by art historians Giulia Coco, Elena Marconi and Carlo Sisi and restorer Eleonora Pucci. The contributions delve into Pampaloni’s poetics, art-historical context and the technical process leading “from clay to marble.”
During the opening of the exhibition there will be tours in Italian and English, curated by the staff of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence and Musei del Bargello, and tours in LIS, in collaboration with Ente Nazionale Sordi di Firenze. At the end of the exhibition, the terracotta sketch will be set up in the Gipsoteca of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, thus entering the museum’s permanent exhibition itinerary.
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| Luigi Pampaloni's terracotta Venus acquired by the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. An exhibition for the occasion |
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