Master Art

The sculptor Giovan Battista Piamontini, son of Giuseppe Piamontini, and a representative of the Marchese Andrea Gerini and his nephew Carlo Francesco signed an agreement in Florence on New Year’s Day 1761. According to this agreement Giovan Battista Piamontini would sell the Gerini family a marble statue by his late father, the better-known Giuseppe Piamontini, and he himself would carve a marble companion piece for it. Giuseppe’s statue was described simply as ‘depicting a Milo’– who Strabo tells us was ‘the most renowned of wrestlers’ in the ancient world. His son’s sculpture was to depict a Faun ‘with a kid on his shoulders’.