Saint Peter Orseolo

While in Naples Sanmartino reacted to Corradini's hallmark by seeking out the most genuine popular sap, in the Veneto Marchiori interpreted his classicism with more watchful coherence and greater severity; all the more significant in that the work of the sculptor from Belluno refuses to fit a one-sided pattern of development. Sometimes vigorously dramatic, as in this statue for San Rocco, more often measured and composed, in the search for ideal cadences and proportions, Marchiori marks one of the most effective premises of Canova's Neoclassicism, precisely through the crystalline power and superior elegance of his statues; for all that, he did not renounce the tenderness of a suffused pictorialism, that linguistic constant of Venetian culture which at the same time, with Morlaiter and Antonio Bonazza, was reaching the height of its most effective expressiveness.