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.

IN HIS OWN day the sculptor Cristoforo Solari, also known as il Gobbo (1468/70–1524), was so famous that Milanese compatriots in Rome gave him credit for carving Michelangelo’s Pietà. Today his reputation, as elucidated by Giovanni Agosti, is based on citations in documents and on devotional and funerary works, mostly in Milan and its environs. His sculptures of antique subjects that earned him such high praise, including statuettes of Venus and Apollo made by 1494, previously have been thought to survive only in records and a few tentatively attributed works. But an unpublished statuette, recently brought to light, permits the identification of not one, but two Hercules sculptures that can be convincingly attributed to Solari.

WHEN HENRY COLE and J.C. Robinson established the museum of the Department of Practical Art at Marlborough House in London in 1852, a significant number of the works of art on view were on loan from the Royal Collection. These included furniture, vases of Delft earthenware and Sèvres porcelain, a relief bust of Henry VIII and two pairs of imposing bronze firedogs (Figs.47 and 52), sent from Windsor Castle. Something of the eclectic quality of the displays at Marlborough House can be judged from a watercolour of one of the galleries in 1857 (Fig.49) in which one pair of firedogs (those in Fig.52) can be seen lurking in the foreground. The royal loans were gradually recalled as the Marlborough House museum was translated to South Kensington, but the firedogs were still on deposit by 1876 when C. Drury Fortnum wrote his catalogue of bronzes in the Museum, and they were published as an appendix to the catalogue. In 1882 both pairs were sent to Hampton Court Palace, to join a third pair (Fig.48), and all three have remained there since that time. The inclusion of two pairs (Figs.47 and 48) in the current exhibition The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque at the Queen’s Gallery, London, has prompted a reassessment of these impressive yet little-studied objects.

SIR JOHN FINCH (1626–82), anatomist and diplomat, was a junior member of a family that produced many public servants. His father, Heneage Finch, was Recorder of the City of London and Speaker of the House of Commons; his elder brother, also Heneage, was created Earl of Nottingham in 1681, and successively Attorney General, keeper of the Great Seal and Lord High Chancellor after the Restoration. Sir John himself studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, under the philosopher Henry More, to whom he introduced his younger sister Anne (Anne Finch, Lady Conway, 1631–79), herself an important philosopher, with whom More maintained a lifelong correspondence. Finch became an anatomist, studying at Padua, and subsequently holding appointments there and at Pisa, as Professor of Anatomy and member of the Accademia del Cimento at Florence. He was reluctantly persuaded to serve as an ambassador, first to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and then to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman court. He is now best known for his lifelong mutual attachment to Sir Thomas Baines, himself an anatomist of distinction, whom he met when they were fellow-undergraduates at Christ’s, and from whom he was parted only by death. They were early Fellows of the Royal Society, generous benefactors of Christ’s College and are buried together in the chapel there, the site being marked by a joint ledger-stone and a monument by Joseph Catterns. Finch is the subject of portraits by Peter Lely (at Christ’s College) and Carlo Dolci (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, together with its pendant of Sir Thomas Baines).

THE RIJKSMUSEUM RECENTLY acquired a marble portrait of an unidentified woman (Fig.61). Elegant, with delicate features and a graceful pose, it is executed with great care for detail and a gentle softness in the treatment of the marble. It was offered to the Museum without an attribution, and although it is unsigned, its strong stylistic resemblance to a number of portrait busts by Lorenzo Bartolini in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence was at once apparent. The depth of the half-length figure, the inclusion of the arms, the slightly turned position of the head, the small buttons on the right shoulder, the drapery folds and the shawl pulled around the left arm are all recurrent features in Bartolini’s œuvre. Indeed, the Accademia, which holds the plasters from his studio, possesses the full-size plaster model of this bust, which clinches the attribution (Fig.62).

ERIC GILL’S COLOSSAL Mankind (Fig.70) now greets visitors as they enter from the west end of the galleries devoted to sculpture in Britain at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This monumental work is placed in the context of other twentieth-century sculpture in these newly renovated galleries, thanks in large part to generous long-term loans from the Tate. The human figure was a subject to which Gill continually returned throughout his career and, arguably, Mankind, carved in Hoptonwood stone in 1927–28, is the most striking and powerful of these works. It can be contrasted in the galleries with earlier monumental figures, such as Rodin’s bronze Cybele (c.1890) and Ivan Mestrovi´c’s marble Torso of Banovi´c Strahinja (1908). Both of these, like the Gill, epitomise ideals of beauty in truncated form, perhaps ultimately inspired by fragmented classical sculpture, such as the Venus de Milo. In fact Gill had ambiguous feelings about consciously imitating classical fragments; Robert Gibbings (1889–1958), his friend and working associate, recalled the sculptor’s view that ‘whereas such abruptness in a classical torso, mutilated by time, was entirely reasonable, the same carved deliberately would be lacking in design and less acceptable’.