Boy on a shell, holding a candlestick

The naked boy stands on a scallop shell, clutching an unknown object or objects in his left hand and steadying the drip pan of a quatrefoil-shaped candlestick with his upraised right. A pad with a ropelike band cushions his head from the pan’s weight. The statuette is a heavy direct cast with a small ovoid core still in place supported by two thin slit iron wires running front to back through the torso.[1] A blunt punch was used on the rim of the drip pan and a smaller ring punch in irregular abstract undulations on its underside. The shell’s underside shows vigorous, squarish blows of the chisel. Close inspection reveals many traces of oil gilding, not easily detected at a glance, on both boy and shell.

This unique cast has not been studied in any depth.[2] In 1979, the present writer noted a general derivation of the putto on a shell from those made by Donatello and his Sienese colleagues, Giovanni di Turino and, possibly, Lorenzo Vecchietta, for the font in the Baptistery of Siena (1429–31).[3] The way in which the boy’s toes grip the sloping shell is particularly reminiscent. Another Renaissance nude on a shell generically derived from Donatello is the winged girl holding a cornucopia, serving as a sconcelike fixture for a torch, in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., often assigned, untenably, to Vecchietta.[4] Wilhelm von Bode claimed that a nude winged male supporting a pricket candlestand, then in a private collection, Paris, was a counterpart, but the functions and movements do not really complement each other.[5]

The pose, one arm up, one down, is ultimately adapted from that of architectural telamons. For all its charming stodginess, the figure evinces fair knowledge of classical contrapposto and a more literal approach than that of Donatello and the Florentines. It lacks, for example, the lithe naturalism of the children scrambling about the bronze grille of the Cappella della Sacra Cintola in Prato Cathedral by Maso di Bartolommeo, assisted by Pasquino da Montepulciano (ca. 1465).[6]

The artist could have been familiar with any number of ancient bronze models, among them a boy in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, that John Paoletti mentions as a type of source Donatello might have had in mind for the putti in Siena.[7] Our sculptor seems to refer to bronzes with adult subjects that endow the nude figure with the telamonic function of support. H. W. Janson posited the figural handles of Etruscan pateras as sources for the Siena putti, although our sculptor may not always have known how to interpret the evidence before him.[8] In a patera with a Venus for a handle, for instance, the goddess holds a strigil in her lowered hand; another with a nude girl for a handle grasps an ampulla.[9] The lowered hand of our lad clasps something less defined, perhaps clothlike.[10] Parallels for his overall stance occur in a celebrated little ancient nude athlete scraping himself in the Glyptothek, Munich, and a Silenus in the British Museum.[11] Our man cannot have seen the latter, discovered only in the nineteenth century, but the pose in contrapposto, one hand lowered, the other raised to hold a cist, is suggestive, as is the padlike form atop the head. The quatrelobe stem of The Met’s candlestick, on the other hand, is generically Gothic.

The boy’s relatively rude stylistic bearings may trace to Antonio di Pietro Averlino, known as Filarete (from the Greek Philarete, he who loves virtue). Filarete made the central bronze doors for Saint Peter’s Basilica (1433–45), the reliefs of which exhibit a highly experimental classicism and a hardy expressivity of design and chasing. As such, he must be ruled out as a collaborator of Lorenzo Ghiberti on the doors of the Baptistery in Florence (a role frequently claimed for Filarete), although he obviously brought some basic awareness of its north doors with him to the Vatican. A relief on the inside of the left door shows the master and six assistants dancing while wielding their sculpture tools. Their inscribed names include “Passquinus,” presumably the same Pasquino da Montepulciano mentioned above.[12] The collaborative nature of the work on the doors makes it difficult to assign lesser projects to Filarete, apart from plaquettes, but happily the master signed two equestrian bronze statuettes. The first, the constantly discussed, firmly modeled reduction of the Capitoline Marcus Aurelius (Skulpturensammlung, Dresden) was dedicated by Filarete to Piero de’ Medici in 1465 but dates from the Roman years of the doors. The second, a free-form, less successful Hector on Horseback (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid), is signed and dated 1456.[13] They are the earliest firmly datable independent bronzes of the Italian Renaissance.

The Hector belongs to Filarete’s Milanese period, when he worked as architect for Francesco Sforza. In his famous Trattato di architettura (1461–64), Filarete professed considerable pride in his calling, and it is perhaps unlikely that he would have given his attention to a mere candlestick (although he did draw an older candlestick-bearing boy in the margin of the Trattato).[14] But this one has several aspects in common with his oeuvre. Most of the figures on the doors are also paunchy, and all have emphatically rimmed eyelids. Above all, marks of the ring punch proliferate throughout the doors and recur on the helmet under the horse of the Marcus Aurelius and, more broadly, along the saddle and bridle of the Hector’s mount.[15] Punchwork in itself is not proof of authorship. Donatello, for example, used it lavishly to articulate the saints’ garments on the old sacristy doors of San Lorenzo in Florence, as well as the belt of the “Amor-Atys” in the Bargello.[16] The present bronze’s punch patterns meander more randomly under the drip pan. If there are not enough similarities to warrant an attribution to Filarete, the bronze’s sturdy character may yet result from the spread of Florentine influence to Rome at midcentury.
-JDD

Footnotes
(For key to shortened references see bibliography in Allen, Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022.)


1. The candlestick was cast in one piece from a quaternary alloy of copper, tin, zinc, and lead with traces of iron, nickel, arsenic, silver, and antimony. The quatrefoil shape of the candle socket may indicate it was intended for a twisted bundle of wax tapers, rather than a conventional single-wick light. R. Stone/TR, March 31, 2009.
2. Besides the ideas advanced above, it was catalogued by The Met in the 1950s as “attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano.”
3. For Turino and Vecchietta, see Janson 1957, vol. 1, pls. 105–8, vol. 2, pp. 65–75; Paoletti 1979, pp. 110–14, 129–36, figs. 26–34.
4. See Luchs 2001.
5. Bode 1908–12, vol. 1, p. 10, fig. 5.
6. Martini 1995, figs. 195–215.
7. Paoletti 1979, p. 130, fig. 49e.
8. Janson 1968, pp. 92–93.
9. For the first, see S. Haynes 1985, no. 179, and for the second, Luchs 2001, p. 25, fig. 23.
10. Richard Stone has suggested that he holds a bundle of replacement tapers, similar to what may have been used for the quatrefoil candlestick (see note 1).
11. See Kotera-Feyer 1993, figs. 13a–b; Walters 1915, pl. 30.
12. See King 1990.
13. For both, see Krahn 1995, cats. 2, 3.
14. Filarete 1965, vol. 1, p. 121, vol. 2, fols. 69v–70r, fig. F.
15. For the doors, see Spencer 1978, pls. 3.1–15.
16. Janson 1957, vol. 1, pls. 217–31; Paolozzi Strozzi 2005, pl. 21.