ITALIAN, 17TH CENTURY, FEMALE SAINT, POSSIBLY SAINT CECILIA | Female saint, possibly Saint Cecilia

RELATED LITERATURE
R. Casciaro (ed.), La scultura in cartapesta. Sansovino, Bernini e I maestri leccesi tra tecnica e artificio, exh. cat. Museo Diocesano, Milan, 2008; S. Castri, 'Il Vesperbild in cartapesta della collezione Forese: una variante povera della Pietà eroiche altorenane', R. Casciaro (ed), Cartapesta e scultura polimaterica. Atti del convegno 9-10 Maggio 2008, Galatina, 2012.

The present female saint is a rare survival of larger-scale religious statuary in the ephemeral material cartapesta. Whilst the dress, with its finely gilt decoration and gessoed lace hems, is typical of the first half of the 17th century, the pretty doll-like features of the female saint's face are part of a tradition of cartapesta sculpture starting in the middle of the 16th century in Southern Italy of which Romano Alberti, known as Il Nero, was among the foremost artists (see Casciaro 2008, op.cit., no. 18). 
The earliest published description of the Italian technique of creating works of art in cartapesta (papier mâché) appears in Baldinucci's Vocabulario Toscana dell'Arte del Disegno of 1681, but it was already in practice in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest surviving examples of a cartapesta statue in Italy is an enthroned Virgin dated to circa 1360-1370 illustrated by Castri (op.cit., 2012, fig. 1). By the 15^th century the malleable material was widely used for sculpture and decoration. Florentine Renaissance sculptors such as Verrocchio, the Della Robbias and Donatello used the material to make their designs for religious reliefs available to a wider public. The large reliefs of the Virgin and Child by Jacopo Sansovino, of which a version was sold by Sotheby's London on 8 July 2015 (lot 17) and another is in the Museo del Cenedese are the epitome of this practice. In the 17^th century cartapesta was still an important medium: Bernini produced cartapesta models for his larger-scale works in bronze and marble, and the baroque Neapolitan artist and architect Ferdinando Sanfelice (1675-1748) regularly designed and executed temporary décors for religious and secular festivals using this material.  RELATED LITERATURE
M. T. Cuomo and C. Ragusa, Splendore dell'arte della cartapesta dal XVIII al XX secolo, exh. cat. Fondazione Memmo, Lecce, 2001; R. Casciaro (ed.), La scultura in cartapesta. Sansovino, Bernini e I maestri leccesi tra tecnica e artificio, exh. cat. Museo Diocesano, Milan and Museo Provinciale, Lecce, Milan, 2008; S. Castri, 'Il Vesperbild in cartapesta della collezione Forese: una variante povera della Pietà eroiche altorenane', R. Casciaro (ed), Cartapesta e scultura polimaterica. Atti del convegno 9-10 Maggio 2008, Galatina, 2012.