Italian, 18th/19th century

After a model attributed to Guglielmo della Porta (1515-1577)

Gilt bronze

18.8 cm. x 13 cm.

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, USA

The present gilt bronze relief is a version of a composition described by the art historian Ulrich Middeldorf as ‘perhaps the most famous sacred image in Europe around 1600’. The original composition is attributed to the Counter-Reformation sculptor and Roman follower of Michelangelo, Gulglielmo della Porta.

For a contemporary cast dated to the sixteenth-century, see the relief in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (acc. no. 1989.75.1), which has the same composition as the present relief, but is believed to be south German in origin. Another contemporary cast with a slightly different background landscape is illustrated in Warren, op. cit., p. 805, fig. 299. The facture of the present relief suggests a later date, in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century.

RELATED LITERATURE:

Jeremy Warren, Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Vol. 3. Oxford, 2014, pp. 803-06