Sculpture by Luigi Pagani, "The Mask's Toilette", white marble with painted wooden base, cm 73.5 x 44 x 27. The sculpture is credibly identifiable with the marble "The Mask's Toilette" sent to Brera in 1870, even if the work bears the date 1871 probably affixed at a later stage. The marble reflects the tendencies of Lombard sculpture, oriented towards a research in which the author tends to combine beauty and truth. Which are nothing more than those values in which the emerging Milanese bourgeoisie loved to recognize themselves, appreciating a product that had to be first and foremost functional to the new political-economic establishment and responsive, therefore, more than to an interest and a cultural commitment, to the most reassuring criterion of taste; a taste neither rhetorical nor high-flown and, as such congenial to the request of the bourgeois client and therefore suitable for its salons to which it was precisely intended. Decisive in this sense were to be the excellent formal qualities, entrusted to a plastic execution in which the stylistic preciousness was accompanied by a refined refinement, an elaborate smoothness and masterful finishes, expertly enhanced by the value given by the light.