Height overall: 50cm (19.5in)
Patinated bronze. Standing figure of King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont, and first King of united Italy, depicted in Alpine hunting attire with his left hand in his pocket and holding a double rifle in his right. Raised on an integral square base inscribed ‘A. Pandiani Milano / Exposizione Ind. Italiana 1881’.
Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878) was King of Sardinia-Piedmont from 1849 to 1861 and King of Italy from 1861 to 1878. The King is credited with saving the Alpine ibex from extinction in Piedmont by creating the Royal Hunting Reserve of the Gran Paradiso in 1856. At that time there thought to be less than to be only 60 animals remaining. The ibex held near mythical status in the mountains and had been poached to near extinction. The King recruited poachers to be as gamekeepers and saw numbers climb to a 1,000 head by 1877, this in spite of shooting on average 50 head a year himself. Victor Emmanuel did nothing to hide the fact that his prime interest in the ibex was hunting, and moreover realized the uniqueness of the quarry as a valuable political asset in nurturing friendships with the heads of all the larger European powers during Risorgimento. In 1862 as the newly recognised King of a united Italy he gifted a ‘magnificent’ pair of chamois and ‘two Ibex-like animals’ to the Zoological Society of London.
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Antonio Pandiani (1838-1928) was the son of the neo-classical sculptor Giovanni Pandiani (1809-1879). He trained as a sculptor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, and later worked in the family run bronze foundry, Pandiani of Milan, producing reductions of Renaissance monumental works such as Andrea del Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni in Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, in Venice. Antonio’s original works include a gilt bronze bust Queen Victoria in the Fairhaven Collection (Anglesey Abbey, National Trust), busts of Victor Emmanuel III, Queen Margarita of Savoy and Umberto I, and a set of bronze cups decorated with mythological scenes in the Toscanini Museum, Parma. His standing figure King Victor Emmanuel II was exhibited at the Italian Industrial Exhibition in Milan in 1881.