Dragon

At the time of acquisition, this creature was catalogued as a griffin, but later in the 1950s James Parker correctly identified it as a dragon. The dragon was a heraldic emblem of the Borghese family, and this one was probably cast during the reign of the Borghese pope Paul V (1605–21).

More recently, James David Draper compared the piece to the Fountain of the Dragons, in Loreto, by the brothers Pietro Paolo and Tarquinio Jacometti, dated between 1619 and 1622, after a design by Carlo Maderno and Giovanni Fontana.[1] The connection places this work in the industrious climate of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Rome, when skilled bronze founders flourished, often working from architects’ designs.[2] While the Jacometti dragons cast in Loreto evoke Mannerist fairy-tale monsters, with their stiff wings, horned noses, and menacing open jaws, our statuette—probably conceived as a chair finial—displays instead an ease of modeling close to the Baroque gilt-bronze handles and mountings of cupboards for the sacristy of the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore.[3] The handles share details such as the half-moon indentations in the feathered wings, the narrow, pointed yet furry ears, the rendering of scales and claws, and the humorous detail of the protruding tongue.

While the architect Flaminio Ponzio supervised the works in the Pauline Chapel, the bronze founder Giacomo Laurenziani was responsible for casting all the bronze sacristy ornaments, for which he received regular payments in 1612. In partnership with Gregorio de’ Rossi, Laurenziani also cast the grilles of the chapel. In receipts for the commission, Laurenziani is referred to not only as founder (tragittatore) but also as sculptor,[4] suggesting he may himself have modeled the works to be cast, as in the case of the heraldry he produced for the fountain at the base of the column in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore (1613–14).

Originally from Emilia, Laurenziani was a prominent founder in early Baroque Rome and produced a pattern book for goldsmiths in 1632.[5] His experiments with bronze casting were not confined to small-scale decorative objects: he was among the founders Bernini relied upon to cast the colossal columns for the Baldachin of Saint Peter’s.
-PD’A

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. ESDA/OF.
2. The metal is a quaternary copper alloy, with tin, lead, zinc, and the usual traces of iron, nickel, antimony, and silver. The casting is quite expert, with thin, even walls and virtually no porosity. R. Stone/TR, September 15. 2009.
3. González-Palacios 1984, p. 56, fig. 84.
4. Corbo and Pomponi 1995, pp. 128, 150, 156, 165, 192.
5. Montagu 1989, pp. 48–49, 52–54, 72.