3-008-549 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition: marble statue - "A Girl Reading" by Pietro Magni, 1862. 'We have engraved this marble statue by the eminent Milanese sculptor Pietro Magni as a notable example of how far the foreign sculptures of the naturalistic school have freed themselves from the conventional restrictions formerly imposed upon plastic art. None of the sculptors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and few even of living British sculptors, would have ever dreamed of representing a girl of no decidedly idealised type either of head or extremities, seated in such an odd fashion upon a common rush-bottomed chair. The classical school, however, certainly imposed rules and restrictions which frequently led to vagueness and mannerism; the romantic, also, too often betrays the artist into idle conceits and the false picturesque. Nature alone, if tastefully selected, can never mislead'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.