Giuseppe Piamontini

Possibly acquired by Grand Duke Gian Gastone de' Medici (1671-1737);

Palazzo Pitti, Florence, until 1799;

Auction Paris 1803;

or Possibly Giovanni Battista Borri collection, Florence;

Sotheby's London, 6 July 2021, lot 66;

Where acquired.

This bronze bears unmistakable hallmarks of the individual style of Giuseppe Piamontini (1663 - 1744), a great among the sculptors of the golden era of the Florentine Late Baroque, which was a golden era of bronze Kleinplastik. [1] Although the composition is, as we shall see, documented and has already been recognized as by Piamontini, no cast was known until the discovery of the present group. 

Diana, shown resting on a rock, a bow in her raised right hand, a horn in her left, is of the same type as other goddesses and mythological figures by Piamontini, namely Juno, Venus, and Ariadne in the small bronze groups of Juno with the Peacock, [2] and the pendant compositions Venus and Cupid and Bacchus and Ariadne, [3] all of which are also known as large marbles. [4] In these compositions the female figures wear an elaborate coiffure with the ‘heavy lock of hair falling over the shoulder,’ are naked or half naked, as the Juno whose tunic is so arranged as to reveal a naked shoulder and presents those ‘long folds of … cloak, with their curved ridges,’ which have already been recognized in 1974 by Jennifer Montagu as peculiar to Piamontini. [5]

The origin of this type of female figure is the marble Allegory of Fortune at Sea, carved by 1693 (as a pendant to that of Pensiero) for the Feroni chapel in the Santissima Annunziata. [6] A powerful work that stands at the start of Piamontini’s successful career as a sculptor both in marble and in bronze, the Fortune not only anticipates the type of the head and drapery that will return in the artist’s later images of women in bronze but is the first seated female figure we know Piamontini created, and thus the origin of what became a leitmotiv in his work; also Juno, Venus, and Ariadne are shown seated, and so is Diana in this group. But whereas the Fortune was conceived as the decoration of a sarcophagus on which she rests, the figures of Piamontini’s bronzetti sit on clouds (Juno) or rocky formations that provide the craftsmen who chased the bronzes a pretext for showing their prowess in the minute definition of a texture which intends to be perceived as naturalistic (including the odd branch or plant with heavy leaves) but is actually a token to the decorative elegance which is so much a part of the Florentine bronzetto of the era of the Last Medici.

Although the chasing of the bases included in Piamontini’s bronze statuettes and small groups is not always identical, that of the Diana is of a pattern we encounter in certain other of his bronzes, as for instance the Syrinx formerly with Arthur M. Sackler, [7] or another powerful image, the Milo of Croton known in two bronze casts - respectively in Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, and in the J. Tomilson Hill Collection, New York. [8] The Milo, the composition of which served the artist for a large marble signed and dated 1740 (London, Trinity Fine Art), [9] also provides a point of comparison for the way Piamontini conceived the oak tree which is not only a similar motif but also treated in the cold work in comparable fashion in both the two known casts of Milo and the Diana. The motif of the tree is prominent in Giovan Battista Foggini’s Apollo and Marsyas known in more versions,[10] and in two of the religious bronze groups made for the Electress Palatine:[11] Girolamo Ticciati’s (1676-1744) Christ and the Samaritan Woman in the Spanish Royal Collection, and in the Return of the Prodigal Son (Detroit, Institute of Arts) by Piamontini’s pupil Antonio Montauti (1685-1740) – both completed in 1724. The discovery of Diana reveals that Piamontini was not insensitive to such a strong compositional device and that, as his model probably dates post 1724 (as we shall argue), he reacted not only to Foggini, but also to Ticciati and Montauti, whose group is admittedly one of the most impressive of the twelve religious bronzes made for the Electress Palatine.

We could go on comparing other details of the Diana with details in other certain works by Piamontini, but I will choose only the carefully designed and elaborately decorated sandals which must have an antique prototype and which recur in an almost identical way in the Feroni Fortune, the bronze and marble Junos, the bronze and marble Ariadnes, but also in other works by the sculptor, especially his other images of Diana to which we will now turn. Indeed, the goddess Diana appears to have held a special attraction for Piamontini. He made, in 1689, a marble bust in the Palazzo Pitti and a large standing statue of her in terracotta, formerly in the Arthur M. Sackler collection,[14] as part of a series of terracotta sculptures including Juno, Jupiter, and Paris. [13] And he modelled a wonderful terracotta where she is shown reclining, formerly with Daniel Katz Ltd, and measuring 42.5cm. (fig. 2). [14]

Neither the models of the standing large Diana nor the reclining small one can be dated, but in 1720 the Florentine patrician Filippo Martelli acquired from the sculptor a thematically related work, Meleager standing in front of an effigy of Diana. I identified this exquisite cast, one of the rare cases where a Florentine Late Baroque bronze has preserved intact its original red-golden varnish, in 2005 in the Museo Martelli (today a part of the Musei del Bargello).[15] Already Montagu had connected in 1974 this composition (known to her through a bronze then in New York, with Michael Hall, but today in London, Patricia Wengraf Ltd., fig. 1) with the model of a work listed as by Piamontini in the 1724 catalogue of the Accademia del Disegno exhibition.[16]

Always pioneering, Montagu identified the composition with a bronze which features in the 1761 inventory of the Palazzo Pitti, [17] where it is described as:

‘un Gruppo di Bronzo alto nel piu soldi 11 rappresentante un Uomo Nudo con due lancie nella mano sinistra, si vede da una parte una base simile sopravi un Idolo rappresentante Diana, che posa sopra un masso di bronzo simile del quale esce una testa di Cignale, e una di Cervo, e due Bracchi, che uno in atto di mirare il Cacciatore’[18] (‘a Bronze Group with a maximum height of 11 soldi [ca. 30cm.] representing a Naked Man with two spears in his left hand, on the one side can be seen a comparable [bronze] base, above it an Idol representing Diana, resting on a similar bronze rock from which emerges the head of a boar, and that of a stag, and two hounds, one of which looking at the Hunter’).

There is in this Martelli cast a detail of the composition that is strikingly similar to one in this Diana: the two hounds. We will indeed see that the Meleager composition appears to anticipate that of our Diana, as was already recognised by Patricia Wengraf, who considered it as a pendant to the Meleager.[19]

Indeed, five years later, a small bronze Diana by Piamontini was exhibited in the 1729 Accademia del Disegno exhibition, in the catalogue of which it is described as: ‘Gruppo di Bronzo d’una Diana del Signor Giuseppe Piamontini’.[20]

(‘a bronze group of a Diana by Mr. Giuseppe Piamontini’). In this catalogue the artists are indicated in italics, the owners of the works exhibited in Roman type. As only Piamontini’s name in italics appears here, the owner of this cast is left unmentioned. It could, therefore, have been the sculptor himself whose workshop was, moreover, around the corner from the Santissima Annunziata, in the Sapienza.|21] Montagu identified the composition of this Diana with a bronze also featuring in the 1761 Palazzo Pitti inventory, which immediately follows upon the Meleager and is so described: ‘un gruppo di bronzo alto braccia ½ rappresentante una Femina con arco nella mano destra, e nella sinistra un corno posa sopra di un masso di bronzo, ai piedi del quale si vedono due Bracchi in disparte con tronco simile ove si vede appeso un panno, et il carcasso con le freccie. [22](‘a group of bronze, ½ braccia [ca. 30 cm.] high representing a Woman with a bow in the right hand, and in the left a horn, resting on a bronze rock at the foot of which can be seen two hounds, nearby a similar trunk from which a cloth hangs, and the quiver with arrows’). This is the precise description of the composition of our bronze. Since, however, this has a maximum height of 45cm., by all likelihood the compiler of the inventory measured the height of the figure of Diana, which is ca. 34cm. (to the upper part of the bow), closer to the half a Florentine braccio indicated by the Pitti inventory.

As the theme of the Diana is linked to the Meleager, [23] the height of the two bronzes almost the same, and owing to their proximity in the Pitti Palace (the 1761 inventory lists the works according to the spaces where they were preserved), there can really be little doubt that the Diana described there in 1761 was a pendant to a Piamontini Meleager and thus also by Piamontini himself.

This Pitti Diana can already be identified with ‘Un groppo (sic): entrovi Diana su un albero’ (‘A group containing Diana on [sic] a tree’) listed in a Pitti inventory drafted sometime between 1737 and 1743.] [24] As is the case with a splendid bronze relief representing the Death of Saint Joseph by Massimiliano Soldani today in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, which also appears for the first time in that inventory, the Pitti Diana (and of course her companion Meleager) could have been acquired by the last Medici Grand Duke Gian Gastone. [25]The discovery of a bronze of a Florentine facture and bearing the style of Piamontini is thus the welcome proof for the attribution first advanced by Montagu in her ground-breaking 1974 article. The fate of the Pitti Diana is known. Seized by the French in 1799, it ended up in an 1803 auction in Paris in the catalogue of which, published by Françoise Arquié-Bruley in 1987, it is described under number 23 as ‘Un groupe représentant Diane et ses attributs’ (‘A group representing Diana and her attributes’). [26]

Is the Pitti cast our cast? Impossible to say, since there was another, different, cast which belonged to Giovan Battista Borri and which is described in the inventories of that collection as ‘Uno detto [gruppo] del Piemontini, un Riposo di Diana, Alto 5/6 [braccio],’ ‘con Cani, Albero’ (Ditto [group] by Piemontini, Diana resting, 5/6 [braccio] high,’ ‘with Dogs, Tree’) which I have erroneously connected with the Diana terracotta formerly with Daniel Katz because I did not know the present bronze yet.[27] The wax model for the Juno bronzes was already in existence by 1705, [28] the Martelli Meleager is of 1720, a Venus and Cupid bronze was exhibited in 1724 whereas the marbles of Juno and Jupiter were exhibited in 1729. Since the composition of the Diana has been clearly conceived as a pendant to that of the Meleager, it should date post 1720 and before 1729 when a Diana bronze was exhibited. When our bronze was cast is, however, more difficult to say. Its expressive roughness – so different from the handling of the surface in the Martelli Meleager – does argue for a post 1720 dating and perhaps later than Piamontini’s two bronzes for the Electress Palatine, The Sacrifice of Isaac and St. Louis with the Crown of Thorns, signed and dated respectively 1722 and 1723.

We are grateful to Dr Dimitrios Zikos for cataloguing this lot. This text is dedicated to Jennifer Montagu.

For notes see page 265.