After Giambologna (1529-1608), Italian, Florence, circa 1600

With David Peel & Co, London, 1973;

The Loyd Collection, United Kingdom

The model of the crucified Christ emerges relatively late in Giambologna’s career. Versions from the late 1570s are recorded, such as one sent in 1578 to Cardinal Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Rome, another of the same year for a ciborium on the high altar of Santissima Annunziata, and another given by the sculptor to the handsome soldier of the Ginori family who posed for the marble group of The Rape of the Sabine Woman, around 1579. In 1583, Simone Fortuna writes to the Duke of Urbino listing four crucifixes, each slightly less than two palmi high (c.44cm. 17¼in) in which he notes that these corpora were intended for the King of Spain, Pope Pius V (1566-72), the Grand Duke Cosimo I and the Grand Duchess Joanna of Austria. Filippo Baldinucci’s 1688 biography also mentions in the list of Giambologna’s recognised models for bronze statuettes ‘fra le figure semplici sono più bellissimi Crocifissi’ (among the simple figures there are even more beautiful Crucifixes’).  

Today, we can distinguish between two distinct models of Giambologna’s crucified Christ: his Cristo Morto, showing Christ dead with his head lowered, and his Cristo Vivo, showing Christ alive his heard raised towards heaven. In the 1978 landmark Giambologna exhibition (op. cit., pp. 140-142) Katharine Watson analysed five casts of the Cristo Vivo. The present fine gilt bronze can be most closely associated with cat. 100 in Watson’s selection, which is similarly about 7cm smaller than the other versions she discusses. The absence of extensive chasing on the present Cristo Vivo suggests that the cast might date to around 1600, before the refined finishing of Antonio Susini seems to have become more prevalent.

RELATED LITERATURE

K. Watson 'The Crucifixes of Giambologna', in Giambologna 1529-1608 Sculptor to the Medici, exh. cat., Edinburgh, London and Vienna, 1978-9, pp. 45-7 and 140-142, nos. 98-103; M. Hall in C. Avery, Giambologna: Sculpture by the Master and his followers from the Collection of Michael Hall, exh. cat., Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New York, 1998, pp. 61-91, nos. 20-30