Italian, Probably Rome, 17th century

With Daniel Katz., Ltd., London;

From whom acquired by the late collector.

A woman is shown here in the midst of movement - her head is down, looking towards the ground, while her arm is raised up, at the zenith of a swing. In its original conception, the present model represented Virtue and would have been depicted triumphantly standing atop a writhing figure of Vice. Several variants of the composition exist, with the most elaborate example surmounting a beautifully adorned inkwell. Only two complete versions, with both the figural group as the lid and the inkstand intact, are known today, one in a private collection, New York and the other in the Speed Art Museum, Louisville (accession number: 1949.30.55).

Because of the quality of the group, Bode believed it to be the work of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Ceillini (1550 - 1561),¹ but other scholars began disputing this attribution, with Pope-Hennessy positing that the model came from Rome and was made in the late 16th century.² Over the course of the last century other names such as Dominco Poggini, Guglielmo della Porta, Pierino da Vinci, Ferdinando Tacca, and Taddeo Landini have been put forth as the artist behind this model, but the authorship has remained elusive. Today models, some depicting only Virtue and others both Vice and Virtue, are in the collections of the Louvre, Paris (accession number: TH 107), the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (accession number: 1942.9.107), the Frick Collection, New York (accession number: 1916.2.43) and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (accession number: BK-15333), most of which are given to Rome, circa 16th/17th century.

¹ W. Bode, Die italienischen Bronzestatuetten der Renaissance, Berlin 1906, vol. i, p. 28, vol. 2, p. 20, pl. 145, vol. iii, p. 23.

² J. Pope-Hennessy, The Frick Collection, An Illustrated Catalogue, New York 1970, vol. III, p. 236.

RELATED LITERATURE

L. Planiscig, Piccoli bronzi italiani del Rinascimento, Milan 1930, p. 44;

A. Radcliffe, 'Ferdinando Tacca, the missing link in Florentine baroque bronzes', in Kunst des Barock in der Toskana: Studien zur Kunst unter der letzen Medici, H. Keutner ed., Munich 1976, p. 20;

W. Bode, The Italian Bronze Statuettes of the Renaissance, J. Draper (ed.), New York 1980, pp. 54, 101.