Lorenzo Bartolini’s seated lady: identity, meaning and sculptural comparisons

This article concerns a portrait statue modelled by the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850) relatively soon after he established his practice in Florence in 1814, a work that is important for illustrating Bartolini’s developing style and his emphasis on naturalism when portraying the features, pose and attitude of his sitters. The author’s reading of archive material in Italy, England and Ireland, alongside published material not previously considered in studies of Bartolini, now challenges the identification of the sitter in the literature to date. It also facilitates a more reasoned and nuanced critical appreciation than hitherto of the sculpture and its comparison to similar contemporary works by Antonio Canova and Thomas Campbell. The context for the following discussion is one of Ireland’s greatest early nineteenth-century literary characters (until now erroneously identified as the subject of the statue) and her family, as too the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and the Irish Civil War (1922–23).