FERRARI, Giovanni

Italian sculptor, the last of the Torretti family of sculptors including his great-uncle Giuseppe Torretti and his uncle Giuseppe Bernardi. He is also called Il Torretto.

In 1755 he moved to Venice to joint the studio of the latter, and at Bernardi’s death in 1773, he inherited his studio. In about 1768 Antonio Canova joined Bernardi’s workshop to work as an assistant, even after Bernardi’s death. In 1777 Giovanni Ferrari closed the studio in Venice, but he returned to the city in 1784 after a series of journeys to other Italian towns (Mantua, Modena, Padua), spreading his work along the way. One commission that tied him down longer than the others was for a large group of statues for Prato della Valle in Padua. The most interesting of his Venetian works is the monument for Angelo Emo (San Biago).

Ferrari did not possess the kind of talent needed to open up new avenues of expression. He had just enough to enable him to rework old models inherited from family tradition (Giuseppe Torretti and Giuseppe Bernardi), as in the statues, signed and dated 1798, of St Peter and Jeremiah on the high altar in the church of San Geremia. The results are dignified and professional, but the execution is cold, impeccable to the point of virtuosity. With Giovanni Ferrari, the chapter of eighteenth-century Venetian sculpture closes.