Sibyl

Although the Sibyl is inferior to the Chronos, there is no doubt that they are products of the same modeler and founder. Of the two, the Sibyl has been known longer, having circulated in the market as a work of Bertoldo di Giovanni, who certainly would have disowned it on grounds of quality.[1] Fashioned on semicircular self-bases as high reliefs with open backs, the figures have rather stubby proportions, with deep Vs excavated in their draperies. They are identical in function and facture to paired relief statuettes of Eternity and Minerva on Agostino Zoppo’s wall monument to the ancient historian Livy in the Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua (fig. 32a).[2] They are so alike that one can easily postulate their assuming similar positions on another Paduan monument, perhaps to one of the distinguished Renaissance humanists who abounded there. The meanings they transmitted would have been, for Chronos, the embodiment of Time in the form of a winged graybeard leaning on a crutch, and of Oracle in the person of a Sibyl looking up from her book.[3]

When the Chronos was sold in 1997, it was attributed to the circle of Francesco Segala on the basis of its resemblance to Segala’s large bronze statuette of Saint Catherine, documented to 1564, that crowns the holy-water basin in the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, Padua.[4] She shares with the Chronos insubstantial shoulders, huge hands, and gently meandering cloth folds. Both Zoppo and Segala were in the entourage of Jacopo Sansovino, the Florentine who revolutionized sculpture in Venice. These men, with Tiziano Minio and Danese Cattaneo, collaborated with Sansovino in Venice, notably on the well-documented bronze sacristy door with its relief of the Resurrection in the Basilica of San Marco (1546–72).[5] Zoppo’s role was that of founder of figural passages in the doorframe. The Sansovino team dispersed before his death in 1570, all of them landing in Padua and overlapping in their work there. Zoppo and Segala reappear together in documents with some regularity; indeed, their stylistic differences have not all been clearly delineated.

As undeniable as a general connection with Segala’s Saint Catherine may be, our relief statuettes are yet closer to those of Zoppo on the Livy monument of 1547. The hands are even bigger and the draperies even freer, revealing little of the anatomies beneath them. Moreover, the painterly surfaces exhibit plastic equivalents of impasto and even scumbling, creating an excitement of surface that is only augmented by a haphazard lost-wax technique. There seems to have been no chasing subsequent to the wax modeling. The top of the proper right wing of the Chronos is ragged and missing in places, which would not have been noticeable in the shadow of a niche. The backs of both are filled with remains of clay and plaster for mounting in said niche (fig. 32b).[6]

Zoppo’s bronzes, like Segala’s but to a lesser degree, show a wide range. Available evidence suggests that Zoppo improved within a few years between the Livy monument and exposure to Venice and Sansovino’s perfectionism. Two telamons or slaves in the Stift Klosterneuburg, reductions of stone ones on the monument to Alessandro Contarini in Sant’Antonio, are considerably firmer than The Met and Livy sets, as are the statuettes of Saints Peter and Paul, also in Klosterneuburg, reliably given to Zoppo.[7] The Met and Livy statuettes, as well as the reliefs of river gods still on the Livy monument,8 exhibiting gloomy expressions and shaggy, sprawling beards distinctly like those of the Chronos, are his loosest efforts, to the point of insouciance.
-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. For Bertoldo, see Draper 1992.
2. See Siracusano 2017a, pp. 185–91, cat. 15.
3. In a communication of June 8, 2001, Davide Banzato suggested Eloquence as a possible alternative.
4. Bacchi et al. 1999, cat. 87.
5. Boucher 1991, vol. 1, p. 147, pl. VII; vol. 2, pp. 331–32, figs. 151–56, 159–60.
6. XRF of both bronzes identified a quaternary alloy of copper, tin, relatively low zinc, and high lead. R. Stone/TR, January 30, 2012.
7. For the telamons and saints, see Leithe-Jasper 1975, pp. 109–16, 122–24, and Bacchi et al. 1999, cats. 16, 17. Manfred Leithe-Jasper’s most significant finding in his groundbreaking 1975 study was that two pairs of groups—one pair presently in the V&A, the other formerly in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin—famous among bronze fanciers as “Mountains of Hell,” with relatively miniaturist figural presentations, are by Zoppo, documented in the inventory of his possessions. See Leithe-Jasper 1975, figs. 51–59. For the inventory, see Rigoni 1970, pp. 301–17, and for further Zoppo documents, Sartori 1976, pp. 236–40.
8. Leithe-Jasper 1975, figs. 49, 50.