Italian, Florence, circa 1600

Reputedly Pope Gregory XVI, Vatican City, until circa 1843; by whom given to Sir Francis Seymour Haden, London, United Kingdom, circa 1843 until 1910;

thence by family descent;

Cyril Humphris, London, until 1995;

His sale, Sotheby’s New York, The Cyril Humphris Collection, 11 January 1995, lot 210;

Private collection, Massachusetts

London, The Burlington Fine Arts Club, A collection of Italian sculpture and other plastic art of the Renaissance, 1912, no. 71.

Catalogue of a collection of Italian sculpture and other plastic art of the Renaissance, exh. cat. The Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1912, pp. 82, no. 71;

F. Goldschmidt, Die Italienischen Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock, cat. Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 1914, vol. I, p. 37;

E. Maclagan and M. Longhurst, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, cat. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1932, vol. I, p. 133.

The French term écorché literally means "flayed" or "skinned." It is commonly used by scholars to refer to a human figure that has been stripped of its skin, revealing the underlying layers of muscles. Sculpted representations of the human body, known as écorché figures, first emerged in sixteenth-century Europe, particularly in Italy. This is the finest known example of a statuette of an écorché of which further versions in bronze are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bode Museum, and the Louvre.¹ The Victoria and Albert Museum also possesses a fragmentary version in wax.² This wax from the Gherardini collection was long attributed to Michelangelo and later to Valerio Cigoli and Pietro Francavilla on the basis of Baldinucci’s mention of such statuettes.³ More recently the model has simply been attributed to late sixteenth-century Florence on the basis of its upwardly oriented pose and elegant elongation.

A label on the reverse of the base of this bronze mentions that the present bronze belonged to the surgeon and celebrated printmaker Sir Francis Seymour Haden and was exhibited by his executors in one of the grand Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibitions on Savile Row in London in 1912. More unusually, the label also states that the bronze had been a gift to Haden from Pope Gregory XVI. Such claims can rarely be verified but his posthumous biography in the Annals of Medical History states that Haden had several audiences with Pope Gregory when he was in Italy in 1843. It was during two or three of them that he took the liberty of sketching, on his shirt cuff, a portrait of His Holiness, who graciously appeared to be totally ignorant of the assiduous efforts of the artist. It was not until the portrait was completed that remarked he now understood why Mr. Haden had attended at three audiences without a change of linen.⁴

¹ Victoria and Albert Museum: inv. no. 5438-1901; Berlin: inv. no. 2464, Goldschmidt, op. cit., p. 37, no. 166; Louvre: inv. no. OA 9130

² Inv. no. 4115-1854, Maclagan/ Longhurst, op. cit., p. 133

³ Maclagan, op. cit., p. 137

⁴ Bick, op. cit., p. 477

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Goldschmidt, Die Italienischen Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock, cat. Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 1914, vol. I, pp. 36-37, nos. 166, 172-173;

E.C. Bick, “Sir Francis Seymour Haden”, Annals of Medical History 6, vol. VI, November 1934, pp. 475-482;

E. Maclagan and M. Longhurst, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, cat. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1932, vol. I, p. 133, no. 4115-1854 and vol. II, pl. 89a.