Borghese vase

Giovanni Zoffoli was the brother or nephew of Giacomo Zoffoli, a Roman silversmith and bronze founder who built a successful practice, continued by Giovanni, of producing reductions after antique sculptures for those making the Grand Tour. It is difficult to separate the two, their work being quite consistent.[1] About 1785, Giovanni printed a list of available models, which on February 15 of that year the architect Charles Heathcote Tatham annotated and sent from Rome to fellow architect Henry Holland. Number 15 on the list, the “Vaso a Pila,” or basinlike vase, offered for 15 zecchini, is the same model as ours.[2] The model was in fact the smaller of two antique vases in the collection of the Borghese family, then in Rome but now in the Louvre, having been bought by Napoleon from his brother-in-law Camillo Borghese in 1807.[3]

The Borghese “Vaso a Pila” originally had low handles, of which Zoffoli was unaware and which would have counterbalanced the extraordinarily flared neck. The bronze does, however, replicate the four satyr’s masks and the thyrsi ending in pinecones and hung with goatskins. The lower body was cast separately and joined by means of an iron bolt and nut with solder. The underside is filled with wood. Another cast appeared at auction in 2003, having undergone changes: it is initialed on a different side, the heads of the animal skins are a bit more caprine than our slightly bovine ones, and the metal is redder.[4] Two casts of another Zoffoli model, “Vaso a Urna,” larger and thus more expensive (20 zecchini each), are in the Ashmolean.[5]
-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. First studied by Honour 1961.
2. The list was published in ibid., p. 205, and in Haskell and Penny 1981, p. 342.
3. See Jean-Luc Martinez in Giroire and Roger 2007, p. 160, cat. 89.
4. Sotheby’s, London, July 8, 2003, lot 161.
5. Penny 1992, vol. 1, pp. 162–63, nos. 110, 111.