The Grape Presser (plaster model)

A smiling boy stands with his feet sunk in a vat, treading grapes, one hand resting on his hip. Bartolini modelled him around 1816 to 1820, and this plaster then served as the master for three marbles over more than 20 years. The first was carved in the 1820s for the collector James-Alexander de Pourtalès-Gorgier and is probably the one now in the Hermitage. Another is in a private collection. The last, made between 1842 and 1844 for the Brescia collector Paolo Tosio, was a great success and was held up as a model of the sculptor's natural beauty, copied straight from life, against the ideal beauty of neoclassical taste. The small dark dots scattered over this plaster are how one model became three statues. They are pointing marks. A carver measured each one from fixed reference points and drilled to the same depth in the block, so the marble followed the plaster point by point. The hand on the hip and the slightly off-balance stance come from a much older Florentine figure, Verrocchio's bronze David of around 1465, now in the Bargello.