Allegory of Sculpture

Sculpture is the harder art to praise in paint. A painter showing off usually reaches for sky, distance, the far horizon, the things a chisel cannot do. Here the Venetian Pellegrini takes the opposite subject and personifies Sculpture herself, the figure who in the old iconography holds a mallet and a small modelled figure, the tools that make solid form. He painted her around 1725 to 1730, in the loose, luminous touch of his maturity, so that the most physical of the arts arrives in the lightest possible handling of oil. The canvas is large, close to 144 by 133 centimetres, and it is the companion piece to his Allegory of Painting. Of the two, this Sculpture is the one usually kept in the museum's stores rather than on the walls.