Giacomo Zoffoli Italian, 1731-1785 after the antique

signed: G. ZOFFOLI. F  with rich dark brown patina, the light and crisply chased cast with casting joint opened slightly to right shoulder and with mild verdigris where a cache-sexe had previously been mounted

Discovered on 15^th January 1506, the Laocoon group soon eclipsed even the Apollo Belvedere in fame and for several centuries the two were ranked together as the pre-eminent works of antiquity. They appear side by side at the top of the printed catalogue provided by Charles Heathcote Tatham to Henry Holland in 1795, of cast reductions offered by the Studio di Scultura di Bronzi, di Giovanni Zoffoli Romano. The Laocoon, at 50 zecchins, was the second most expensive item on the list after the Papirius (now called Orestes and Electra), priced at 80 zecchins and probably a result of the Ludovisi’s refusal to allow plaster casts of the original to be taken. The Apollo was priced at 16 zecchins.

Yet surprisingly, and as already noted by Dr. Ingo Pfeifer, Zoffoli casts of these, the most famous of antique sculptures, are very rare. Indeed, the present cast is probably the first example of a Zoffoli Laocoon group to be brought to international attention: not a single cast was known to Honour in his seminal 1961 article and no others had surfaced before Pfeifer contributed his in 1996. It does not appear in any of the larger groupings of Zoffoli bronzes, such as at Saltram Park, Devon, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm and Schloss Wörlitz, Dessau; nor is it visible as part of the garniture de cheminée in the background of Zoffany’s famous painting of Sir Lawrence Dundas with his Grandson.

The bronze nonetheless bears all the hallmarks of the high quality achieved by the Zoffoli workshop that so impressed Tatham in his letter to Holland: ‘the bronze used by the Italians [in comparison to French foundries] is of the best metal, with what they call a patina, meaning the outward colour, of a good nature… and above all their execution is superlatively good, having artists employed who study the antique with Attention and model with great ingenuity and taste.’ The chasing to Laocoon's head and those of the serpents, the carefully rendered finger and toe nails, the typically incised signature and thin walled casting combined from perhaps 6-7 moulds, all point to it being a superlative example of its œuvre. One final interesting aspect of this bronze is the outline of an old, perhaps even contemporary cache-sexe.

RELATED LITERATURE
I. Pfeiffer, ‘Giacomo Zoffoli. Kleinbronzen aus Schloss Wörlitz’, Weltkunst 24, December 1996, pp.3232-3234
H. Honour, ‘Bronze statuettes by Giacomo and Giovanni Zoffoli’, The Connoisseur, November 1961, pp.198-205
H. Honour, ‘After the Antique: Some Italian Bronzes of the Eighteenth Century’, Apollo, March 1963, pp.194-200
F. Haskell & N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, Newhaven & London 1981, p.243-47, no.52 & Appendix pp.342-43