The Dancing Faun
Italian (Florentine) School
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1820 - 1850
Materials
Bronze
Measurements
311 x 152 mm; 114 mm (L)
Place of origin
Italy
Collection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565223
Summary
Sculpture, bronze; The Dancing Faun; Italian, perhaps Florentine; c. 1820-50. A small bronze reduction of a Roman sculpture of a faun with cymbals in each hand and playing a type of castanet with his foot. The Dancing Faun has long been one of the highlights of the Tribuna in the Uffizi gallery in Florence.
Full description
A bronze statuette of the Dancing Faun, depicting a standing figure of a naked male faun, with small horns and a tail. He holds a cymbal in each hand and looks downwards towards his left, his right foot placed on a scabellum (a type of foot-operated castanet). To his left is a stylised tree trunk. The figure and the tree trunk are each separately cast and fixed with screws to the plain rectangular base. A reduction of a celebrated Hellenistic Greek marble statue of a faun dancing and playing instruments, in the Uffizi in Florence (Haskell and Penny, no. 34). The statue seems to have been conceived as one figure in a two-figure ‘Invitation to the Dance’ group, the original version of which was made by the sculptor Doidalas in the late third to early second century BC. The other statue shows a seated nymph with her left leg resting on her right knee, in the act of putting on her sandal. However, the connection between the two sculptures has only been recognised in more modern times, and was not known before the twentieth century. The Dancing Faun seems to have already been in the Medici collections by at least the mid-sixteenth century, but it is first certainly recorded only in 1665. Following its installation in 1688 in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, the Dancing Faun quickly became one of the most admired of all Antique sculptures. The Florentine sculptor Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi (1656-1740), who made small copies of the statue, described it in a letter to a patron as ‘the most beautiful statue to be found anywhere’ (Lankheit 1962, p. 329, doc. 645), whilst the British painters Jonathan Richardson the Elder and Younger thought it ‘the best in the Tribunal (…)’tis so light,‘tis leaping off its Pedestal’ (Richardson 1722, p. 57). During the eighteenth century the Dancing Faun was frequently copied, often as part of a pair with another famous statue in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, the Venus de’Medici, a small bronze version of which is also at the Argory (NT 565229). Whereas some copies in bronze, for example those by Soldani, dispense with the tree trunk which is an essential support in the marble original, this is retained in the more literal copy at the Argory, a reasonably good copy made for the tourist trade. A good small bronze version at Anglesey Abbey, probably made in the early eighteenth century (NT 515043), also retains the tree, but it is modelled in great naturalistic detail, with the surface of the trunk carefully worked. Unlike other famous classical sculptures, the Dancing Faun retained its popularity in the nineteenth century and thus continued to be much copied, including by the large commercial foundries such as Chiurazzi or Sabatino de Angelis, both based in Naples (a de Angelis cast is at Hatchlands Park, NT 1166747). There are numerous other copies in National Trust collections. The cast at the Argory is part of a collection of bronze reductions of famous antique sculptures at the house, which were no doubt bought by members of the McGeough Bond family during trips to Italy in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Jeremy Warren September 2022
Provenance
By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
Italian (Florentine) School, sculptor Unknown, founder
References
Richardson 1722: Jonathan Richardson the Elder and Jonathan Richardson the Younger, An Account of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy…, London 1722 Lankheit 1962: Klaus Lankheit, Florentinische Barockplastik. Die Kunst am Hof der letzten Medici 1670-1743, Munich 1962 Haskell and Penny 1981: Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500 - 1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 205-08, no. 34.