Giovanni Maria Benzoni

Giovanni Maria Benzoni (1809-1873) was one of the main exponents of Neoclassicism in Italy. Orphaned at an early age, he was invited by Count Luigi Tadini to become the very first pupil of the Tadini Academy, where he created his earliest works. Tadini advocated for Benzoni's admission to the Carrara Academy in Bergamo and the Brera Academy in Milan, both of which institutions refused to admit him. Undeterred, Tadini provided Benzoni with the financial support necessary for the young artist to travel to Rome and study drawing and sculpture. He arrived in Rome in 1828, becoming an apprentice to the sculptor Giuseppe Fabbris, a member of Canova's circle, and attended the Accademia di San Luca, where his model of Mars Sleeping earned the novice sculptor numerous academic accolades.

Following the death of Tadini in 1829, Benzoni opened his own workshop in 1832, working across sacred and profane subjects according to the desires of his patrons. Prolific in his commissions, he employed a large group of draftsmen, and his studio evolved into a kind of museum visited by pilgrims and patrons alike, gaining considerable fame within the city of Rome. Among the notable visitors were Popes Gregory XIV and Pius IX, the Emperor of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, and the royal houses of Italy and Holland.

In 1839, Benzoni was commissioned to create a sculpture dedicated to Count Tadini, which he completed in 1858. During the summer of 1844, he began work on a monument commissioned by the Municipal Congregation to commemorate the Vienna Peace signed by Francesco I of Austria in 1815. He completed a noteworthy portrait of Pius IX in 1860, and was charged by the Papal Government in 1861 to show his work at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts in Antwerp, an exhibition that furthered his international fame and secured his reputation as one of the most important masters of nineteenth-century Neoclassicism. He worked until the end of his life, dying suddenly of disease in 1873. In total he produced as many as 518 works, 212 of them being original productions.

“Giovanni Maria Benzoni, child of a rough land, born during the artistic renaissance, whose future would have been magnificent, turned his attention and his steps following the marks of the great masters and moulding his works with Canova and Bernini’s examples.”

–G. Rota, Bergamo, 1938