AFTER A MODEL BY GIAMBOLOGNA (1529-1608)ITALIAN, FLORENCE, LATE 18TH/ 19TH CENTURY | Fiorenza (Personification of Florence)

The bronze has been placed outside, and as a result the patina is weathered. There is verdigris to the bronze at the proper right foot and base. There is greening and staining from moisture to the bronze throughout. Otherwise the condition is good, consistent with the bronze being an outdoor sculpture. There are a few stable original casting fissures, including at both lower arms, to the urn and to the edge of the base. The fissure to the urn is open, and it may in the future have to be consolidated. There is an original casting plug around the proper right knee. There are some slight abrasions to the proper right hip and a minor area of scratching on the proper right shoulder blade. There appears to be some lead piping to the interior, visible from the underside.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The model upon which the present bronze is based surmounted the Fiorenza Fountain in the gardens of the Villa di Castello. Commissioned by Cosimo de Medici, the fountain was designed by Niccolò Tribolo but left unfinished at the time of the artist’s death in 1550. The exact date of the bronze's later execution by Giambologna is contested in the scholarship – it may have been as early as 1560, or in the 1570s, when the sculptor was portrayed with the model by Hans van Aachen. It is generally accepted, however, that the Fiorenza largely follows Tribolo’s original model, with Giambologna’s stylistic signature confined to the woman’s features. According to Vasari, the motif of a woman wringing water from her hair was chosen to present Florence as a flourishing city at the confluence of two rivers, the Arno and the Mugnone. It is clearly also an allusion to the Venus Anadyomene type, famously conceived by Apelles and eagerly adopted by Italian Renaissance artists. Tribolo and Giambologna’s Fiorenza thus follows in the footsteps Lorenzo de' Medici's Birth of Venus ideology, which celebrated Florence as a rising, fertile and nourishing city.

The Fiorenza Fountain was transferred to the Villa Petraia in 1788, and it may have been at this time that the present cast was made. 

RELATED LITERATURE
C. Avery and A. Radcliffe, Giambologna 1529-1608, Sculptor to the Medici, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1978, p. 80, no. 29; C. Avery, Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture, Oxford, 1987, pp. 130-131; W. Seipel (ed.), Giambologna: Triumph des Körpers, exh. cat. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2006, pp. 192-195, no. 2