Love and Fidelity

A short life that of the sculptor Pietro Freccia (1814-1856), a life dedicated to marble from the early years, a life that was opening to fame and success, but which was tragically interrupted at the age of thirty-two, later an accidental fall from a scaffolding on which he was working to complete the well-known Monument to Christopher Columbus, place in Piazza Acquaverde in Genoa. We were in 1854; after two years, due to the serious injuries suffered, he died. The cruelty of destiny did not allow him to continue on a promising path, with his marvelous works, born in the wake of Lorenzo Bartolini’s masterly vocabulary, in which, however, the careful and meticulous analysis of the truth, even with a matrix implantation classic, it would have led to different stylistic outcomes. And it is precisely in the presence of one of his works, Love and Fidelity , of 1840, currently preserved in the Modern Art Gallery of Palazzo Pitti in Florence that the artist’s language can be comprehensively understood. A child, personification of Love, appears seated on an ideal trunk while looking back, veiled with tears restrained, towards the loyalty, represented by a lifeless dog at his feet. The quiver with all the arrows is abandoned. Love can no longer hit with its unpredictable arrows.