Terracotta busts from the Napoleonic era (Display Cabinet B)
Napoleonic-era sculptors
18th - 19th century, Terracotta
In Display Cabinet B, containing small terracotta busts, the Portrait of George-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon (1), by an anonymous French sculptor active in the 18th century, can be seen in the first row from the left. Naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, Buffon was one of the most famous representatives of the scientific current of the Enlightenment and dedicated his life to research in zoology and botany. His Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particuliére was and remains among the fundamental works in the history of science. Continuing on we come to a Portrait of a Young Woman (2) dated 1765, modelled in an incisive and pointed handwriting, signed by the author Marie Anne Collot, an established portrait painter active above all in France, Holland and at the court of Catherine II of Russia in the years from 1766 to 1778, where she executed portraits of the French personalities she most admired or members of her family for the sovereign. Closing the first row is a bust by an anonymous sculptor depicting Claude Adrien Helvétius (3), philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, follower of sensism and author of De l'esprit (1758). In the second row from the left is the Portrait of J. E. Estival at the age of twenty-eight (4), executed in 1733 by Jean-Baptiste Boudard and bearing on the verso an inscription indicating the identity of the author, the year of execution and the name of the sitter; a Portrait of a Young Woman (5) attributed to Antoine-Denis Chaudet, who signs on the verso and recalls the date of execution of the work (1788); a Portrait of a Man (6) attributed to François-Joseph Martin, the second work in the Franco Maria Ricci collection, which testifies to Martin's felicitous attitude in the rendering of the natural and in the definition of the face of the mysterious character.
- Portrait of George-Louis Leclerc - Count of Buffon, Anonymous sculptor
- Portrait of a Young Woman - Collot, Marie Anne
- Portrait of Claude Adrien Helvétius - anonymous
- Portrait of J. E. Estival at the age of twenty-eight - Boudard, Jean -Baptiste
- Portrait of a young woman - Chaudet, Antoine-Denis
- Portrait of a Man - Martin François-Joseph, called Martin of Grenoble