Giovanni Giuseppe Fontana Biography
Giovanni Giuseppe Fontana (Carrara, 27 March 1821 – London, December 1893) was an Italian sculptor and ornamentalist. Giovanni Fontana was born in Carrara on 27 March 1820 to Antonio Fontana and Maria Teresa Passani: it is not certain that his father was also a sculptor, unlike his uncles Pietro and Ferdinando who, almost certainly, gave a direction in art to his nephew Giovanni . In 1834-35, Giovanni Fontana was awarded at the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara in the annual Encouragement Competitions: in 1834 for the drawing copy of the head of Achilles and in 1835 for a drawing copy of the head of a putto. In 1839, Giovanni Fontana (still in the drawing) won first prize in the coveted Invention Competition but received it only the following year, when he obtained the Prize for the Pension and the related stay in Rome which began in April 1841 Fontana's stay in Rome was disturbed by many inefficiencies in the collection of periodic remittances and by an illness which, at the beginning of 1842, forced him to remain forcibly in Carrara. In the following two years he performed two essays for the Academy of which only the second, a David, has survived. It is not clear whether he later decided to move to London by his own will or whether he was forced into exile due to the liberal faith that made him participate in the 1848 riots: in any case, his stay in London is documented from 1853, the year in which he commissioned his uncle Pietro Fontana to translate his David of 1844 into marble, which he also did subsequently by ordering a copy from the sculptor Camigi in 1862 and again in 1863. Fontana was appreciated on English soil "although foreign" for his work Love, Prisoner of Venus, highly praised by four critics of the Royal Academy in London, which won a prize at the Royal Academy (1859). The work was then exhibited at a major exhibition in Liverpool in 1860 (Carozzi, 1993) and in 1862 it was sold at the International Exhibition in London. Subsequently, until 1886, Fontana participated in public exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy, at the Suffolk Street Gallery and at the New Gallery in London, and at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool: the Carrara Academy also preserves other of his works such as the Girl with garland, the Sonnambula (sent from London in 1875), a statue of Eros, Patroclus and Achilles, Jephte and his daughter and a Juliette. Fontana achieved fame with two sculptures: The Slave of Love from 1856 and the Innocence from 1857. The sculptor also made some portraits: one of Queen Victoria of England and one of Charles Dickens, in addition to the busts of Joseph Clarke, Miss Peggy, Joseph Mayer, Thomas Wright, Thomas Reay, General Cucchiari and Sir Cunliffle Owen. The Carrara Academy made him an honorary member in 1860. Giovanni Fontana died in London in 1893.
