RELATED LITERATURE

Nouvelles acquisitions du départment des Sculptures 1988-1991, Musée du Lo💫uvre, Paris, 1992, pp. 100-102,🌟 no. 34.

Pietro Stecchini, the nephew of Antonio Canova, died at the age of seventeen.  The tomb was ordered by Bishop G. Bat꧅tista Sartori-Canova, half brother and sole legatee of the sculptor, to honor the memory of his young nephew, a brilliant student at the University of Padua.  The Bishop inherited the entire contents of the workshop of Canova, his marbles, his models and his unfinished works, and therefore had access to his designs. 

The model chosen for the monument was that of Canova's Monument to Elisabetta Mellerio of 1812, the marble of which is in Palazzo Mirto, Palermo while the gesso  model is in the Gipsoteca in Possagno.  Obviously the memorial bust was altered and other small variations were introduced, the most notable being the garland of flowers hanging down the back of the column.  The marble version of the present lot from the chapel in Possagno, now generally accepted as being the work of Canova's pupil Rinaldi, is now in the Louvr🍷e.  The present gesso model remained in🍌 the Stecchini family until recently.

Canova's pupils executed a good deal of the unfinished marbles in the studio in the final years of the master's life.  Rinaldi came from a family of sculptors and became Canova's assistant in 1811.  He remained loyal to the artistic lexicon of his master although, as Gaborit (op.cit., p. 100) notes, Rin⛦aldi was less inclined to realism and promoted idealism, popular in sculpture in the first half of the 19thജ century.