The flagellation of Christ

These three little reliefs were originally fitted against stone, occupying the drum of a towering ciborium made of hardstones and gilt bronze that was once with French & Company, New York (fig. 141a). It perhaps collapsed and was certainly dismembered; the firm’s photograph bears a note saying that it still had some of the columns.

Florence provides the stylistic context for our figures, if not for the ciborium. The Christ and the flagellator at right recur in a pietre dure plaque of the Flagellation that is paired with another plaque of the Crowning with Thorns in a private Florentine collection.[1] The hardstone Flagellation has an altogether more dynamic composition than our trio of figures. Its rightward flagellator is seen from behind and oriented in complementary rotating fashion. Oddly, our leftward flagellator, with a pole, is an interpollation of the figure on the right of the Crowning with Thorns panel. The pietre dure pair, then, must be considered later versions of the scene (a bronze Crowning with Thorns seems not to survive). The models for the pair have been attributed to the great Roman sculptor Francesco Mochi, and the execution of the hardstones to the Florentine specialist Giuseppe Antonio Torricelli.[2] However, the figures are mellow, with nothing of Mochi’s striking nervousness. The scalloped garment edges are Florentine, as in the marble athletes and tricksters that populate the Boboli Gardens. An alternative is Antonio Novelli, a worthy extender of the cinquecento norms established among the followers of Giambologna, but quite solid in his modeling, offering few nods to the Baroque. He is not well known for work in relief, but Filippo Baldinucci, his biographer, relates that “Novelli wanted to turn to casting, and made two little narratives [storiette] with small figures in bronze: in one of which he represented the Flagellation, in the other the Lord’s Crowning with thorns: and likewise carried out a Christ Crucified, two-thirds of a braccio high (ca. 39 cm), and two Angels of similar size.”[3] This is a sure sign that other bronzes preceded the pietre dure reliefs.

The organization of the ciborium looks as if it could have been made in Rome rather than Florence, close to 1700. Novelli went to Rome at least once, in 1645, in the train of Giovan Carlo de’ Medici, newly elevated cardinal of Florence,[4] but his designs could have reached beyond Florence in any number of ways.
-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. González-Palacios 2003, no. 15, figs. 1, 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Baldinucci 1845–47, vol. 5, p. 66.
4. Caterina Caneva in Florence 1986, vol. 3, pp. 132–34.