Monument in Honour of Carlo Goldoni

Venetian sculpture in the 1880s cannot stand up to comparison with painting, confined as it was to dignified academic practice. Its greatest successes can be seen in the showy but unsuitable monuments springing up in the open spaces of the city. Antonio Dal Zotto, hailed in his youth as the great hope of sculpture, never went beyond superficially pleasing works. Even so, his monument to Goldoni in Campo San Bartolomeo managed to avoid the run-of-the-mill eulogy, and thanks to its freedom from rhetoric it has an aesthetic reason for being on public view in Venice.

The picture shows a small bronze version, the monument was erected in Campo San Bartolomeo in 1883.