Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronze Sculpture from the Robert Lehman Collection

In celebration of the recently published catalogue of Robert Lehman's collection of European sculpture and metalwork, this exhibition presents a selection of Italian bronze sculpture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, displayed as a group for the first time. Featuring bronze casts after models created by masters such as Severo da Ravenna and Desiderio da Firenze, this selection includes independent figural statuettes as well as functional objects created in key centers of Italian bronze production, in particular Padua and Venice. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, bronze statuettes were generally displayed in private studies, where they were accompanied by functional aids to scholarship such as inkwells, writing boxes, and candleholders. The scholars who inhabited these studies often had a profound interest in classical antiquity. Thus, it is unsurprising that classicizing motifs and figures from Greco-Roman mythology abound in these small works in bronze.

Mars (detail), ca. 1600. After a model by or in the style of Tiziano Aspetti (Italian, Padua 1559/1565–1607 Pisa). Bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.1387a)