Francesco Fanelli (1577- after 1641), Anglo-Italian, second quarter 17th century | Relief with Christ Carrying the Cross

Sotheby's London, 21 April 1988, lot 206;
Sotheby's London, 8 July 2005, lot 65

Formerly believed to be a model by Ferdinando Tacca, Radcliffe's research into the cabinet made for John Evelyn at the V&A, with its inset reliefs of Orpheus Charming the Animals, allowed him to link a corpus of reliefs and identify them as being by the Italian sculptor Francesco Fanelli. Aside from the Orpheus relief and associated animal plaques, the present relief of Christ Carrying the Cross as well as the reliefs of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Marcus Curtius Leaping into the Gulf and Adam and Eve were subsequently attributed to his hand.

The relief of Christ Carrying the Cross is often paired with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, despite their incongruous subject matter. Examples of the pairing can be found in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (inv. nos. 66.43.1-1) and the University of Kansas Museum of Art, Lawrence. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York has another cast of the present relief, formerly in the Linsky collection (inv. no. 1982.60.109) and which is of octagonal rather than rectangular format. The Kansas version mentioned above shares this format, as do some casts of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, such as the one in the V&A (inv. no. A67-1951).

RELATED LITERATURE
A. Radcliffe and P. Thornton, 'John Evelyn's Cabinet', in Connoisseur, April 1978, pp. 254-62; L. Camins, Renaissance & Baroque Bronzes from the Abbott Guggenheim Collection, San Francisco, 1988, pp. 98-101, no. 34; V. Avery, Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, exh. cat. Daniel Katz Ltd, London, 2002, pp. 172-75, no. 24