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Lot Essay
This Baroque plaster, attributed to the Medici court Sculptor, is an incredibly rare survival from the 17th century. Riccardo Spinelli, the curator of the 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Medici in Florence, Giovan Battista Foggini (1652-1725). Grand Ducal Architect and Sculptor, has written extensively on this plaster (Spinelli, 2010). Spinelli describes it as a work of the early maturity of Foggini, and that it can be related both to his work in late-Medicean Florence as well as a recently published youthful work, a lovely relief of the Holy Family, datable to between 1676 and 1678 and modeled immediately upon his return to Rome (R. Spinelli, in Una gloria europea, 2010, pp. 158–159, cat. 39). His extremely successful exploitation of this material is further seen in his many works as a designer of decorative programs for architectural interiors such as the Galleria and Biblioteca of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardiana (Spinelli 2003).
Spinelli further describes Foggini’s attraction to this particular subject, the violent struggle between man and centaur, and how common it was in Foggini’s early work (Ibid.). Spinnelli mentions that Foggini treated the subject in drawing, in relief, in bronze and in porcelain. It appears in a group of youthful drawings in the drawings collection of the Farnesina in Rome, in the wax relief in the Museo della Manifattura Ginori di Doccia in Sesto Fiorentino, in a now-lost bronze panel and finally in the middle of the seventeenth century in white porcelain, perhaps executed by Gasparo Bruschi, known from a beautiful fragment of the left side in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Please contact the Sculpture Department to request a copy of Dr. Spinelli’s 2010 article on the present plaster.
Spinelli further describes Foggini’s attraction to this particular subject, the violent struggle between man and centaur, and how common it was in Foggini’s early work (Ibid.). Spinnelli mentions that Foggini treated the subject in drawing, in relief, in bronze and in porcelain. It appears in a group of youthful drawings in the drawings collection of the Farnesina in Rome, in the wax relief in the Museo della Manifattura Ginori di Doccia in Sesto Fiorentino, in a now-lost bronze panel and finally in the middle of the seventeenth century in white porcelain, perhaps executed by Gasparo Bruschi, known from a beautiful fragment of the left side in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Please contact the Sculpture Department to request a copy of Dr. Spinelli’s 2010 article on the present plaster.