Donato Barcaglia (1849 - 1930) Little girl with joined hands

Donato Barcaglia (Pavia, 10 January 1849 - Rome, 1930)

Little girl with joined hands
Sculpture in white marble statuary
Measures: height 55 cm, width 39 cm, depth 25 cm
Last quarter of the 19th century
Signed: "D.BARCAGLIA"
Opera known to us in a single specimen

Biography:
Born into a particularly large family, Donato Barcaglia undertook literary and then artistic studies thanks to the financial support of his father, a modest government employee. He attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, taking drawing and nude courses; his master of sculpture was Abbondio Sangiorgio.

Already in the sixties of the nineteenth century he managed to establish himself as a portraitist, devoting himself to sculpture only from the following decade, obtaining important awards. Barely seventeen years old he had already had a good success, when his first work, Il vendemmiatore, then located in Palazzo Reale in Milan, was purchased by the Società di Belle Arti in 1866 at the behest of Prince Umberto.

He reached full fame at the age of twenty-five, he was already rich at thirty, when he began to direct an important atelier from which many of his works were placed on the market, directed all over the world. He received important awards at the Universal Expositions in Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876).

He was particularly active in public and official monumental production, as well as funerary and celebratory monuments; several of his sculptures are also present at the Monumental Cemetery of Milan and the cemetery of Gravedona, on Lake Como.

He was appointed Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy and Knight of the Legion of Honour. He died in Rome in 1930 and was brought back to Milan for burial in the Monumental Cemetery.