Adonis (or Meleager?) seated on a boar

Anthony Radcliffe first proposed Francesco Fanelli as the author of this composition, which shows a young man asleep, leaning on his left hand, resting on a dead boar and accompanied by a canine companion.[1] The attribution has been largely accepted since, though this seventeenth-century dating was a far cry from those of early twentieth-century writers like Wilhelm von Bode or Leo Planiscig, who suggested quattrocento, even Paduan origins.[2] An intermediary attribution to Giovanni Bandini, first expressed by Eric Maclagan and upheld by John Pope-Hennessy, proved appealing based on Borghini’s 1584 description of lost statues of Venus and Adonis.[3] However, stylistic comparisons and the subsequent emergence of Bandini’s signed Adonis marble showing an entirely different composition moved the discussion from the master to his pupil Fanelli.[4] Though the latter’s artistic personality has only come into view in the last few decades, similarities like those between the sensitively described face of this youth and Fanelli’s Mercury and Cupid (cat. 92) have helped solidify his oeuvre.[5]

Fanelli’s composition was clearly popular, with related casts in the V&A, the Frick, the Walters Art Museum, the Smart Art Museum, and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, among others.[6] Pope-Hennessy called The Met’s bronze the finest of this group. Indeed, its casting is lively, with visible sprues unfiled and vigorous, hands-on modeling apparent. The interior shows uneven walls and a messy casting, distinguishing it from the David and Goliath in terms of facture (cat. 93). Lacking the finesse of Fanelli’s best casts, our bronze should be dated closer to the mid-seventeenth century, after the sculptor had departed England.

Whether the figure is Meleager or Adonis has also been debated, as both were frequently shown with their boar and dog, and neither typically depicted in repose. For much of the twentieth century, these works were identified as representing Adonis and thought of as reductions of Bandini’s then-lost marble. A small statuette of Venus, a version of which is in The Met (fig. 94a), has frequently been considered a pendant to this composition. With the rediscovery of Bandini’s Adonis, so unalike in appearance to the bronzes, the proposal of Meleager as subject gained steam.[7]

In conjunction with the attribution to Fanelli and the seicento dating, it seems to me Adonis is indeed the likely subject. In 1623, Giambattista Marino published the influential Adone, an epic poem composed of more than 40,000 verses; the title page of the first edition shows Adonis in a similar pose (albeit awake), accompanied by his boar and dog (fig. 94b). Denise Allen has suggested a link between Fanelli’s Mercury and Cupid and Anthony van Dyck’s Cupid and Psyche for Charles I, the only extant painting for a cycle based on stories from Apuleius’s Golden Ass (see cat. 92). The biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori records an Adonis and Venus Asleep that Van Dyck painted for Charles I, and it is tempting to think Fanelli’s statuette may have been in dialogue with this lost work.[8] One can note the correspondence between our figure’s garments, including his boots, and those in other paintings of Adonis by Van Dyck.[9] The mystery of the figure’s identity, however, may never be fully solved, and its ambiguity was not lost on contemporary viewers. A previously unknown description from the 1703 inventory of the marchese Ottavio Maria Lancellotti, probably the earliest extant mention of this composition, records “a bronze statuette, representing Adonis or Meleager with his dog and a boar, above a tree trunk also of bronze.”[10]
-JF

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. As conveyed by oral communication recorded in Larsson 1992, p. 38, who further substantiated the attribution.
2. Bode 1908–12, vol. 1, p. xxxvi, vol. 2, p. 9; Planiscig 1927, pp. 109–10.
3. Maclagan 1920, pp. 234, 239.
4. For Bandini’s Adonis, see C. Avery 1994, p. 22.
5. See Patricia Wengraf in Leithe-Jasper and Wengraf 2004, p. 202.
6. V&A, A.117-1910; Frick, 1916.2.29; Walters Art Museum, 54.444; Smart Art Museum, 2008.27; Nationalmuseum, NMSk 305. A finely modeled cast was with Sotheby’s, London, July 4, 1991, lot 132.
7. See, for example, C. Avery 1994, pp. 22–23.
8. Bellori 1976 (1672), p. 281.
9. Jaffé 1990.
10. “. . . una statuetta di bronzo, rappresenta Adone, o meleagro con il cane e il Porco sopra il tronco parimente di bronzo.” Getty Provenance Index, Archival Inventory I-769, Item 0025b (Lancellotti).