Statuette of a leaping dog
Italian School
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1800 - 1850
Materials
Bronze, Marble
Place of origin
Rome
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565248
Summary
Sculpture, bronze; a leaping dog; Italian, probably Rome, after the antique; c. 1800-50. Probably a modern copy after a small Roman bronze.
Full description
A small statuette of a hunting dog, leaping forward on its hindfeet, its forefeet in the air, head turned slightly to its right. Mounted on a hemi-spherical onyx marble base. This little statuette may be a reduction of a Roman marble or a copy of a small bronze, although the model has not yet been identified. The dog appears to be a type of hunting dog popular in Roman art. The Sala degli Animali in the Museo Pio Clementino in the Vatican includes a marble sculpture of a leaping greyhound (Gonzalez-Palacios 2013, no. 157), which is very similar in pose to the small bronze, although the greyhound’s tail is not curved. The bronze may well be part of the group of small copies in bronze at the Argory of antiquities to be seen in Rome, especially in the Vatican collections, which were presumably acquired on a visit to Italy by members of the McGeough Bond family. Jeremy Warren November 2022
Provenance
By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
Italian School, sculptor
References
Gonzalez-Palacios 2013: Alvar González-Palacios, Il Serraglio di Pietra. La Sala degli Animali in Vaticano, Città del Vaticano 2013