Giacomo and Giovanni Zoffoli Italian, active mid to late 18th century After the antique

Giacomo Zoffoli (c.1731-1785) and his younger brother Giovanni (c.1745-1805) ran a highly succesful workshop in Rome specialising in the casting of reproductions of antique originals that were prized by collectors and travellers on the Grand Tour. Their foundry in the via degli Avignonesi, off the strada Felice, was extensively visited by the English. The Borghese Vase, now in the Louvre, was first recorded in Rome in 1594 on the site of what had been the garden of the classical historian Sallust. From 1645 until 1807 (when it was purchased by Napoleon), it was in the Villa Borghese.  The pendant vase is not the more typical Medici Vase, but arguably a more relevant pairing. It depicts the feast of Bacchus, which ties it iconographically closer to the Borghese Vase with its depiction of bacchic figures escorting the drunken Silenus. The Medici Vase by contrast represents the Sacrifice of Iphigenia with Ulysses and Agamemnon. By process of elimination, it might be identified from the Zoffoli catalogue as either the Vaso di Villa Albani or the Vaso di Villa Giustiniani.

RELATED LITERATURE  Taste and the Antique pp.315-6, nos.81-82; H.Honour, pp.190-205