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Italy, attributed to Giovanni Maria Mosca (c. 1493/95-1574), Achilles and Penthesilea, bronze plaquette, Padua, c. 1515-25, Achilles in all'antica armour supports the collapsing heavily draped Penthesilea, grasping her arm with his left hand and gesticulating with his other hand looking to the left. 102 x 47mm (Burlington Fine Arts Club, Illustrated Catalogue of Italian Sculpture and other Plastic Art, London 1913, Plaquettes, no. 22, this piece; Molinier -; Bange -), pierced at top centre, a very fine contemporary cast with traces of blackish patination, apparently unique (the reverse with collection labels for E.L. Paget and J.P Heseltine/Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1912). Provenance: Exhibited at the Burlington Fine Art Club, 1912, case H, no. 22.; J.P. Heseltine collection, his sale at Sotheby's, 29th May 1935, lot 168 part (as "The Finding of Lucretia"); E.L. Paget collection; Silvia Phyllis Adams collection, Bonham's, 23 May 1996, lot 129; and Cyril Humphris collection. The subject appears to be the death of the Amazon Queen Penthesilea at the hands of the Greek hero Achilles, a scene from the Trojan Wars. After Achilles had slain Hector, Penthesilea came to the assistance of the Trojans, but was herself then killed by Achilles who, as he struck the fatal blow, fell in love with the Queen and held her as she lay dying, lamenting her beauty, youth and valour. The theme is extremely rare in Western art, especially in the Renaissance period, but was more popular in the Greek and Roman world, when the scene most commonly depicted was the actual slaying of the Amazon Queen. However, the immediate aftermath is also occasionally seen, as in a Roman cameo in the British Museum (1814,0704.1765) depicting a nude man supporting a collapsing nude woman. With the male figure standing dominatingly above the collapsed woman, the Achilles and Penthesilea appears also to show direct knowledge of Titian's fresco of the Miracle of the Jealous Husband, painted in 1511 in the Scuola del Santo in Padua. This suggests an origin for the plaquette in Padua or Venice, in the 1510s or 20s. Although it is on a much smaller scale, it has affinities with a group of marble reliefs made around the same time, many of which depict heroines of classical antiquity, for example Cleopatra, Lucretia and Portia, usually shown at the moment of their deaths. The Venetian sculptor Antonio Lombardo pioneered this type of relief, but the majority of those surviving today are attributed to the younger sculptor Giovanni Maria Mosca, whose early career was spent in Padua and Venice, but who left Venice in 1529, spending the remainder of his life working in Poland. The handling of the draperies in the plaquette may be compared with those in Mosca's marble relief of Portia (Ca d'Oro, Venice), dated c. 1523-027, whilst the rather soft modelling of the facial features is characteristic of Mosca's style across his work. There are also parallels with a larger bronze relief by Mosca, depicting Artemis the Protector of Animals (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). One or two other small bronze reliefs have been attributed to Mosca, notably a spirited satyress (Cleveland Museum of Art; National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh).
(10000-15000 GBP)