THIRTY YEARS AFTER the clamorous rediscovery of the manuscript of Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography in 1805, the Milanese painter Giuseppe Mazza (1817–84) produced his celebrated canvas depicting Cellini in his workshop dictating his Autobiography (Fig.1). In Mazza’s imagination the sculptor’s studio appeared as a sparsely furnished space, and the few objects present appear to have been chosen specifically for their power to evoke aspects of the sculptor’s colourful biography. In the shadows behind the artist, a glint of light reveals the artist’s sword, helmet and gorget – the tools of Cellini’s other ‘career’ as a duellist. At his feet a gorgon’s head – apparently a study for his masterwork, the Perseus – lies abjectly on the floor together with an overturned metal vase and a stone-cutter’s mallet. Benvenuto appears in the act of simultaneously dictating his Autobiography and carving the marble Crucifix originally destined for his tomb (now in the Escorial); the nineteenth-century painter was well aware that the carving of the Crucifix and the start of work on the Autobiography took place contemporaneously during the second half of the 1550s. On the right side of the scene, behind the young amanuensis, is a large white rectangular marble relief. Although its outlines are deliberately ambiguous and sketchy, it seems likely that Mazza intended the relief in the corner of Cellini’s studio to be understood as a work by the master himself; its size and vertical format suggest a portrait.

VERY RARELY CAN surviving smaller-scale sculptures from the Italian Renaissance be directly related to the individuals who owned them, especially when those individuals are neither princes nor prelates. One such exception is the moralist Fra Sabba di Castiglione (1480–1554), among whose possessions, lovingly described in the celebrated description in his Ricordi of his study in the Commenda in Faenza, was a fine terracotta relief of St Jerome, made by Sabba’s friend Alfonso Lombardi, which survives today in the Pinacoteca in Faenza, along with other works of art from Sabba’s modest collection. It is intriguing that Bologna, just a little further along the via Emilia, should have produced another of these rare collectors whose possessions can be identified. No fewer than three sculptures commissioned by the nobleman Gaspare Fantuzzi can be identified because he had a highly personal inscription added to each work in a place normally hidden from view. The group comprises two marble reliefs and one bronze figure, to which should be added a remarkable medal of Fantuzzi and his wife, the only known portraits of both sitters. Although the two marble reliefs have often been published and discussed, mainly in the context of their attribution, the group of sculptures has never until now been considered together in the context of what we know about Fantuzzi’s life, character and interests.

THE SCULPTOR HARRY BATES (1850–99) died of heart disease on 30th January 1899. He was not quite forty-nine, but his career as an artist had been even briefer than his relatively early death might suggest. Until the age of twenty-nine, when he entered the Lambeth School of Art, London, he had been a stonecarver with the architectural sculptors Farmer & Brindley. In December 1881 he enrolled in the Royal Academy schools, and attended classes there for the next two years, winning a gold medal and a travelling studentship which took him to Paris in 1883. All the works by which he is known today were produced in the seventeen years between 1882 and his death.