Watch List notes:

Rome (mid-15th century), Apollo, Marsyas and Olympus, oval bronze plaquette, Apollo with lyre stands beside Marsyas who is seated and bound to a tree; small figure of Olympus pleads with Apollo in the foreground, 48.4 x 42.6mm (Molinier 2; Bange 66; Scaglia I.1; cf. Kress 246-247, without inscription; cf. Warren, Ashmolean, 350-351, without inscription), pierced, contemporary cast, very fine. The plaquette derives from the so-called "Seal of Nero" attributed to Dioskourides in the early 1st century BC. Said to be the personal seal of Nero, it was owned by Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici and in around 1428 was set into a mount bearing Nero's inscription made by Lorenzo Ghiberti. On the present piece this inscription can be seen doubled up and it has been suggested that this version may have been cast from a (double struck) wax seal impression sent to Pietro Barbo (later Pope Paul II) by the seal's second owner Cardinal Alvise Trevisan prior to the original being owned by the Pope himself. After Paul II's death in 1471 the seal entered the collection of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Today, Ghiberti's mount no longer exists but the antique seal is in the Museo Nationale, Naples.
(300-400 GBP)