Oil lamp in the form of a bearded athlete balanced on his knees

Small desk lamps of this type, in which the figure on top would seem, naughtily, to blow flames from his backside when the wick was lit, were fairly common in Renaissance households, to judge by the large numbers that survive. The earliest published examples of our model were considered ancient. That in Bologna’s Museo Civico Archeologico was engraved when it belonged to the Bolognese nobleman Ferdinando Cospi in 1677.[1] Another, in the Louvre, inventoried in 1684, was called a “très bel antique romain.”[2] A third was illustrated in 1722 when owned by Dom Emmanuel Martí, an antiquarian of Alicante.[3] The closest in composition to The Met’s, in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia, Rome, has an almost identical foliate stem flanked by animals’ paws, but its hair and beard are rendered somewhat more crudely.[4] The stem served to insert the figure into its base, which, as in some of the lamps, may have taken the form of a raptor’s talons. The well-formed chased and gilt hair, crown of grapes and leaves, and beard distinguish the present bronze from all others, which since the early twentieth century have been assigned generically to Riccio.[5] Wolfram Koeppe proposed an attribution to Agostino Zoppo on the basis of the river gods in the monument to Livy in Padua (p. 00, fig. 32a),6 but Zoppo’s beards are curlier, not straight and stringy like our athlete’s.
-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. See Lugli 1983, figs. 132, 133.
2. Paris 1999, cat. 114; Malgouyres 2020, p. 252, cat. 16.
3. Montfaucon 1719–22, vol. 5.2, pl. CLII.
4. Beck and Bol 1985, cat. 220a.
5. Planiscig 1927, fig. 201. Planiscig also gave to Riccio another flame shooter in which the nude figure thrusts his head between upstretched legs.
6. ESDA/OF.