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Jupiter with the Infant Bacchus

circle of François Duquesnoy (Brussels 1594 - Livorno 1643)

Category

Art / Sculpture

Date

c. 1620 - 1720

Materials

Bronze

Measurements

360 x 120 mm

Place of origin

Rome

Order this image

Collection

Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire

NT 515030

Summary

Bronze, Jupiter with the Infant Bacchus, circle of François Duquesnoy (1597-1643), Italy, probably Rome, c. 1620-1720. A bronze statuette of Jupiter, king of the gods, naked and striding forwards, in his left hand a thunderbolt, and holding cradled in his right arm a naked baby. The baby and the thunderbolt are gilded. The hair is very carefully modelled and delicately afterworked. Mounted on a rectangular yellow Siena marble base. Probably made in Rome in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

Full description

The statuette depicts Jupiter, king of the gods, after he had rescued his infant son Bacchus, the god of wine. Bacchus was born from the union of Jupiter with Semele, the Theban daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia. Jupiter’s jealous consort Juno appeared to the pregnant Semele in the guise of her nursemaid, persuading her to ask Jupiter to appear to her in the same splendour with which he would visit his wife. Jupiter warned Semele of the danger but , having promised to grant Semele her every desire, he was forced to comply with her wish and thus appeared to his lover in the form of the god of thunder, alluded to in the statuette by the thunderbolt he carries in his left hand. The unfortunate Semele was consumed by the lightning, but Jupiter rescued his unborn child. Mercury sewed the child into Jupiter’s thigh, from which Bacchus was duly born. When grown, Bacchus carried his mother out of the Underworld and to Olympus, where she became immortal with the Greek name Thyone. The statuette therefore shows Jupiter in the act of rescuing his baby son who technically is yet to be born. The use of gilding for the child is no doubt a reference to the blinding flash with which Jupiter appeared to the hapless Semele. The bronze is known in a number of versions, of which the example at Anglesey Abbey is one of the finest, the surfaces of the bronze carefully and sensitively worked with tools after casting. The best-known version is one in the Skulpturensammlung of the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, in which the figure of the infant Bacchus is gilded, as in the Anglesey Abbey version (inv. 25/64. Height 25.7 cm. Ursula Schlegel, ‘Die Madonna del Silenzio von François Duquesnoy’, Pantheon, XXVII (1969), pp. 390-94, pp. 392-93, Abb. 4, note 10; Ursula Schlegel, Staatliche Museen preussischer Kulturbesitz: Die Bildwerke der Skulpturengalerie Berlin. Band I. Die italienischen Bildwerke des 17. Und 18, Jahrhunderts in Stein, Holz, Ton, Wachs und Bronze mit Ausnahme der Plaketten und Medaillen, Berlin 1978, pp. 167-68, no. 56, Abb. 88-91; Claudia Freytag‚ Neuentdeckte Werke des François du Quesnoy‘, Pantheon, XXXIV (1976), pp. 199-211, pp. 199 and 205). Ursula Schlegel was the first, in her discussions of the Berlin versions, to attribute the model to the Italo-Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy. Her attribution was on stylistic grounds, notably the gracious figure of Jupiter, the modelling of the hair and the figure of the infant Bacchus which, in her opinion, could be directly related to the numerous figures of small infant children for which Duquesnoy was so famous. The sculptor was nicknamed ‘il fattore di putti’ (‘the maker of small boys’) for his facility in such figures, remarkable for their variety and individuality. Schlegel suggested that the figure was made around the time that Duquesnoy completed his two major restorations of antique sculptures, the Rondanini Faun, now in the British Museum, and the Girardon Bacchus, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. She also explicitly compared the infant Bacchus to the putti on Duquesnoy’s monument to the Flemish merchant Adrian Vryburch (died 1628) in the Roman church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, and for all these reasons dated the bronze to the 1620s. The attribution was at first widely accepted, for a very similar example in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (Inv. ROM 975.354. K. Corey Keeble, European Bronzes in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto 1982, pp. 142-43, no. 65), and for a gilt-bronze version formerly in the collection of Michael Inchbald, sold at Christie’s in 1993 (Important European Sculpture and Works of Art, Christie’s London, 6 July 1993, lot 122). This version was paired with another bronze figure of a naked young man with a young child, identified as Mercury and Cupid. Both were attributed to François Duquesnoy at the time of the sale (David Ekserdjian, ‘A pair of bronzes by Duquesnoy’, Christie’s Review of the Season, London 1993, pp. 134-35). In her comprehensive recent monograph on the sculptor, Marion Boudon-Machuel acknowledged that the pose of Jupiter had parallels in Duquesnoy’s statues. However, she opted to reject the attribution on balance, suggesting that the figure of the infant Bacchus was stiffer than might be expected of him and that the group lacked the sense of introspection characteristic of Duquesnoy’s work. Accordingly, the most recent example of the model to be sold at auction, formerly in the collection of Michael Jaffe, was catalogued simply as Italo-Flemish, 17th or 18th century (Old Master Sculpture and Works of Art, Sotheby’s London, 3 July 2018, lot 85). Unlike other models associated with François Duquesnoy, who was immensely popular in the eighteenth century, especially in France, this particular model does not seem to appear in eighteenth-century sales, which may be a further argument against Schlegel’s attribution. Duquesnoy, often known simply as Il Fiammingo (‘the Fleming’), was immensely popular and thus was much imitated, especially his small figures of putti. Nevertheless, in its elegance and subtle torsion, the statuette certainly seems to show awareness of Duquesnoy and, if not by him, may well be the work of one of his followers. Jeremy Warren 2020

Provenance

Purchased by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) from David Black, 13 September 1960, for £85; bequeathed to the National Trust by Lord Fairhaven in 1966 with the house and the rest of its contents.

Credit line

Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (National Trust)

Makers and roles

circle of François Duquesnoy (Brussels 1594 - Livorno 1643), sculptor

References

Christie, Manson & Woods 1971: The National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge. Inventory: Furniture, Textiles, Porcelain, Bronzes, Sculpture and Garden Ornaments’, 1971, p. 138. Boudon-Machuel 2005: Marion Boudon-Machuel, François du Quesnoy 1597-1643, Paris 2005, pp. 346-47, no. R.31.

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