Sketch for the Monument to Cesare Beccaria

Symptoms of a true renewal of the sculptural modes, which had been dragging on wearily since the beginning of the century, were to appear within the socio-literary and somewhat velleitary movement that passed into the chronicles under the romantic name of “Scapigliatura”, whose ideal centre was the Milan of the powerful proto-industrial bourgeoisie. And this was not so much because the nebulous and uncertain poetics of the little group of aesthetes who met in the cafés could provide the premises for a radical rethinking of the ways of making sculpture, but only because among them there happened to be, almost by chance, a modeller of great resources who, while accepting the fundamental characteristics of their vision of reality, which tended to be realised entirely in a pictorial solution, understood as an equivalence of light, did not renounce the “constructive” requirements of the statue, even on a large scale, as precisely in the Beccaria and in the celebrated Monument to the Five Days of Milan in 1848.