The auction of antique furnishings and paintings scheduled for 25 September will include the collection that was the property of Niccolò Paganini and his heirs. Among the items, two portraits of the violinist are particularly noteworthy: one in marble by Santo Varni and the other painted in oils by George Patten. Both artists were influenced by the Romanticism of their time. In both sculpture and painting, particularly in portraiture, this trend seemed almost to run counter to the pompous academism of neoclassical taste. Niccolò Paganini, the subject of the portraits, certainly contributed with the virtuosism of his technique, his creativity and a good level of modern self-marketing, to idealize and personify Romanticism in music.

The marble bust, in particular, was produced by Santo Varni between 1836 and 1844. But as early as the summer of 1834 the sculptor had received visits and sums of money from Niccolò Paganini, as noted in the diaries in possession of his heirs. We have no way of knowing whether Niccolò paid the sculptor this money to allow his son Achille to attend the course in drawing held at the artist’s studio. However we do know that none other than Achille commissioned the bust portraying his father: it was his plan to donate it to the City of Genoa (in: Santo Varni scultore (1807-1885), catalogue of the exhibition, Genoa 1985, pages 81-82). It is also documented in a bibliographic source written at the time, where we learn that the bust was present in Santo Varni’s studio, still in gypsum, in 1836 (see: ibidem). For about a year the sculptor worked at the atelier of Lorenzo Bartolini, who brought new ideas from France and the international community of Florence of the time. When he returned to Genoa in 1837, Varni became master of sculpture at the Ligustica Academy and was an ardent promoter in his own city of the naturalistic trends that were then so fashionable in the rest of Europe. The bust of Paganini, sculptured in marble by 1844, with the face in three-quarter profile, the hair falling in curls on his shoulders, is striking for the extraordinary rendering of the surfaces and the vitality of the expression.

This natural expressiveness is the same that we see in the painting by the British artist George Patten. A frequent guest of the Royal Academy of Art in London from 1828, when he had abandoned his career as a miniaturist, he painted the Paganini portrait in August 1832, in the midst of a grand tour in which he had been engaged for a year and a half already. Paganini appears seated in a leather armchair, holding his violin on the right, between his arm and his side, and the bow in his right hand. The chair and the attributes of the profession are very similar to the iconography of the portrait of Henry Halford (about 1825) by Thomas Lawrence, president of the Royal Academy (see: M. Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence 1769-1830, London 1979, page 79, no. 45). Patten is successful in representing the vibrant personality of the romantic artist, even while working with the tools of academism, as can be seen from the formal exercise of placing a dark suit on a black background. Delighted with the resemblance, a few months later Paganini asked Patten to paint a replica (in: E. Neill, Paganini epistolario, Genoa 1982, page 159, no. 183, 10/11/1832), which was already in Genoa in 1837 (in: ibidem, page 220, no. 278, 30/03/1837). Achille Paganini, probably aware of how much his father loved the portrait, indicated it expressly in his will as one of the works to be kept in a possible future museum. Both the bust and the oil portrait are mentioned in the document of the hereditary division after Achille’s death (as reported by M.R. Moretti: Parma, District Notarial Archive, 1899).

By Maria Ludovica Vertova