The decade witnessed the formation and first affirmation of Medardo Rosso, Ernesto Bazzaro, Paolo Troubetzkoy and Eugenio Pellini: their early works, the plaster models here exhibited are confronted with a few examples of Giuseppe Grandi ‘s rare commissions executed during the time of his dedication to the Five Days Munument.
These plaster models have been chosen specifically to demonstrate Grandi’s influence on the new generation.
In regard to Paolo Troubetzkoy, the rediscovery of two plaster models is worthy of note : At the café – whose subject matter reflects the influence of the metropolitan themes of Naturalist literature and Standing woman, the first study for the allegory of Pallanza the Beautiful which is the central image of the monument to Carlo Cadorna, in Pallanza.
For Medardo Rosso, the problems inherent to of the dating of each single casting or realization in wax is extremely complex and therefore the date of the exhibited piece is often conjectural: only the date of the first realization [i.e. printed in italics in the catalog entry, next to the presumed one of the piece in the exhibition ] can be considered certain.
In fact, the sequences of the numerous versions of the same subjects - executed in Paris, as variant of works whose first idea can be traced before the artist’s departure for the French capital – is at the core of Medardo’s relationship to the Scapigliatura movement.
To underscore this point, the sculptures chosen – at the exception of Sick man at the Hospital – were created in Milan and represent Milanese human types, but they all were casted after 1889, that is already in Paris.
Only the plaster untitled Marguerite or the The Bawd is the initial work and there is no doubt that it was sculpted before his departure.
The selection is aimed to demonstrate that while in words Medardo Rosso was busy negating the importance of his Milanese past, in effects for almost two decades he continued to rethink and re-elaborate in a unique language, always more revolutionary, the iconography and the formal premises of this past.
Leonardo Bistolfi’s three plaster models demonstrate the artist’s brief but formative link to Grandi and the Scapigliatura aesthetics.
The study "The majesty of Death" shows the influence of Grandi’s compositional rhythm, but because in the end the final monument was to be closer to the Liberty [Art Nouveau] spirit, the exhibited plaster study can be viewed as a transitional piece, after which Bistolfi’s would be taking leave of the painterly research inspired by the Naturalist climate of Milan in the eighties.

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