Mauro Tajocchi
Sculpture, as we know, is one of the arts where perfection of form and harmony of parts become a measure, we might say an absolute one, of balance. A balance that is found in this intense virile portrait of a mannerist magistrate, as well as in the expressive head of a faun, made between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Finally, in the pair of hunting dogs in sculpted, carved and patinated wood of German manufacture from the first quarter of the 18th century, from the famous Ariane Dandois gallery in Paris. These works convey the infinite possibilities of sculptural art: interpreted in the late Mannerist manner in our celebratory bust, where the artist glorifies the moral virtues of the magistrate thanks to the same plastic essentiality, or in the case of the faun (or the Roman satyr) where the artist tries to recapture the charm of a mythological subject, without renouncing a vibrant and nervous approach. Or, finally, an art capable of rendering almost real the ferocious intensity of the two dogs caught in the excitement of the hunt. Here, the vital predatory force gives the sculptor the opportunity to display a mastery that becomes a theatre of life.
