The bronze, small yet with a compact and very solid formal weight to it, depicts the uneven struggle between a crab endeavouring with both claws to grasp the slippery roundness of a large shell, vainly seeking to reach the succulent prey concealed within it. The sculpture was modelled in the mid-1920s, when Tofanari's activity as an "animalier" sculptor had already attracted more than flattering praise at both the national and international levels. His creations are remarkable for their plastic solidity, indeed so much so that his contemporaries lauded their "monumentality" despite their small size. Showing immense descriptive skill in characterising his subjects, Tofanari produced over time a kind of surprising sampler of the most varied examples of animal fauna, modelled and finely chased with engaging decorative appeal: rabbits, baboons, crocodiles, elephants, owls, vultures, bears, tigers... "living nature" carefully observed in the zoo in order to imbue his models with the convincing expression, pose and movement of the originals. 

 

The small bronze under discussion here is highly likely to have been one of the examples shown at the 15th Venice Biennale in 1926, where Tofanari submitted not only his sculpture entitled The Ducks but also a pair of sculptures entitled Greed Punished (15. Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della città di Venezia: catalogue, 4. ed., Venice, 1926, nos. 41-42, p. 89), a pair which was subsequently to be shown also at the First National Exhibition of Marine Art (I Mostra Nazionale d'Arte Marinara) in Rome, organised by Arturo Lancellotti in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in via Nazionale from November to December 1926.

 

Thanks to the description provided by Filippo Càssola in a review of the Rome exhibition published in «Atlantica. Rivista d’Italia e d’America», we can identify the Crab and Shell as one of the two sculptures on a marine subject that Càssola calls "highly effective". The pair – of which we are showing only one of the two examples in this exhibition – entered the collection of Ugo Ojetti (see De Lorenzi 2010) who greatly admired the work of Tofanari, a Florentine artist who had spent his formative years as a member of the "Young Etruria" group under the direction of Galileo Chini. Ojetti appreciated the animalier activity of Tofanari who had developed a distinctive, personal style since first showing his work at the First Biennale of Decorative Art (Prima Biennale di Arte Decorativa) in Faenza in 1908 (see De Lorenzi, p. 184).

Despite their summary simplicity, however, Tofanari's sculptures allow his agile, muscular animals to maintain their vibrancy, even going as far, in some of his more perfectly successful works, as allowing him to translate into sculpture that profound expression of the psychology of free, wild beasts that Kipling conveyed in the jungle books which Tofanari so avidly devoured.

Tofanari developed his style by degrees, after years of work and of Impressionistic diversion. But even when he first showed his work in Faenza in 1908 aged only twenty-two, he had the makings of a virtual prodigy and the sculpture was purchased by the King. The following year in Venice another of his works was purchased for the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Florence, and in Barcelona in 1911 his prize-winning group was purchased for the museum there. His group entitled Baboons, shown at the 14th Venice Biennale, was remarkable for its stylisation and sophisticated decorative synthesis.