The terracotta sculpture is a copy of the figure of Day, based on the uncompleted marble figure by Michelangelo Buonarroti, made for the Medici Chapel in Florence. It depicts a massive male figure, who looks outward to his right and is naked, except for a swath of drapery upon which he partly lies, and which runs around his back and over his legs. The left arm is cradled behind the back, and the right arm is held across the chest, the hand joining at the left armpit. There is a crack below the left knee, running down to the ground; the left foot is missing; and the right foot is broken at the end. At the back, below the left shoulder and the right leg, there are holes to allow the escape of gases during firing. The model is coated in a brownish slip, with darker patches in places. The model is a fairly accurate copy of Michelangelo’s powerful male figure of Day, the main difference lying in the face, which was only roughed out by Michelangelo.

Michelangelo’s sculptures for the Medici Chapel in the New Sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence have, ever since they were made, been regarded as among the most celebrated statues from the Italian Renaissance.¹ The architectural space of the New Sacristy was intended to match Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy on the other side of the church, and was originally planned to contain four tombs. Michelangelo began work on the project in the 1520s, but by the time of his departure for Rome in 1534, had completed only a small proportion of the original grand conception, notably figures of Giuliano de’Medici, Duke of Nemours (1479–1516), and Lorenzo de’Medici, Duke of Urbino (1492–1519). Among the uncompleted sculptures left on the floor of the chapel were four reclining figures representing in allegorical form the times of day, Dawn and Dusk, Night and Day (fig. 66.1). These figures were finally installed in 1545 by Niccolò Tribolo, mounted as pairs upon the sarcophagi of Giuliano and Lorenzo, respectively. Despite their incomplete state, these sculptures have ever since been regarded as among Michelangelo’s most powerful and mysterious works, being especially admired by artists, for whom the Medici Chapel became a mecca.² Although it is now missing from the Houston model, the left foot of Day, which projects out toward the viewer in the original sculpture, was quickly seen as a conscious display of Michelangelo’s skill and ingegno, so that copies began to circulate in Italy from within Michelangelo’s own lifetime. For example, the Venetian sculptor Alessandro Vittoria acquired in April 1563 a model of the foot, sold to him as Michelangelo’s original.³ Like the Houston model of Day, two more terracotta models of the foot once formed part of the large collection of models of body parts and figures after Michelangelo that came from the studio of the Netherlandish sculptor Johan Gregor van der Schardt (1530–c. 1581).⁴ In common with many Northern artists, Van der Schardt traveled to Italy, where he is recorded as working in the 1560s, mainly in Rome, but also in Florence, Venice, and Bologna. He was acknowledged during his lifetime for his skills as a sculptor and in particular as a copyist of sculptures. Thus in 1569, Veit von Dornberg, the Imperial ambassador in Venice, wrote to the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II, who was seeking artists from Italy for his various building projects, recommending Van der Schardt whom, von Dornberg stated, had “with the utmost care measured the most beautiful figures and statues in Rome and copied their form and outline with the most exacting detail.”⁵ Van der Schardt entered the service of Maximilian in that year, and for the remainder of his life, other than spells in Italy (1571) and Denmark (1577–79), he seems to have remained mainly in Nuremberg.

Van der Schardt was on very friendly terms with the German merchant Paulus von Praun, resident for many years in Bologna, who formed the most important collection in Nuremberg of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, naturalia, and other works of art. The collection contained two portraits by Van der Schardt of the merchant, who seems to have been the sculptor’s most important patron,⁶ as well as a self-portrait bust in painted terracotta, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.⁷ The Praun collection was carefully preserved by his heirs, remaining largely intact in Nuremberg until the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was documented through inventories, one taken in December 1616 after Praun’s death, and the second in 1719, as well as detailed descriptions of the Praunisches Kabinett, published by the Nuremberg historian Christoph Gottlieb von Murr (1733–1811) in 1778 and 1797.

Paulus von Praun must have acquired much of the contents of Van der Schardt’s studio, presumably after the sculptor’s death. The sculptures were certainly in the Praun collection by 1591, when the merchant made his will, and they were subsequently recorded in his post mortem inventory, taken in December 1616 in Nuremberg, which included around 170 terracotta sculptures, among them a large collection of some 85 terracotta models and 15 waxes of body parts, described as “a hundred pieces in the round such as heads, arms, feet and yet more, as belonging to the workshop.”⁸ By 1719, when a second inventory was made, around fifty of these models survived and were listed in more detail,⁹ and again as a generic group by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr in 1778 and 1797.¹⁰ Although they would share much of the later history of the surviving group of terracottas, already in 1616 the four models after Michelangelo’s figures of the times of the day were regarded as important enough to be listed separately from the larger group.¹¹ In the 1719 inventory they were more generically described as “the four times of the day, reclining.”¹² In 1778 Murr recorded three of the figures, but not apparently the Day, whereas in his 1797 description of the Praun Cabinet he listed all four, noting though that the Night had been broken. There seems to have been some confusion here, since the surviving model of Night in the Victoria & Albert Museum (fig. 66.2), discussed further below, is in fact relatively intact. It was in the 1797 description that Murr added this key comment to the section of terracottas in his catalogue: “The majority of these figures were modelled by the sculptor Jean George de Sart, after the most beautiful ancient sculptures to be found in Rome and in Florence.”¹³

In 1801, faced with a deteriorating political situation in Europe, Praun’s descendants decided to sell the collection, the terracottas being bought by the Nuremberg dealer Johann Friedrich Frauenholz and his partners. For the works of art, they followed the attributions provided by Murr,¹⁴ who had believed many of the terracottas, including the Medici Chapel figures, to be original models by Michelangelo. The Nuremberg collector Anton Paul Heinlein acquired from Frauenholz about 100 works of art from the Praun collection, among them 41 of the terracottas, subsequently sold at his auction in 1832, at which 33 were acquired by another local collector, Karl Emil von Gemming. These included the models after Dawn, Day, and Night, but not Dusk, which is untraced. In 1842 Von Gemming sold the models to the Dresden sculptor Ernst Julius Hähnel, who certainly acquired them in the belief that they were the work of the Divine Michelangelo. In a posthumous tribute to Hähnel, Julius Grosse described how the sculptor had found them, covered in dust, in the corner of an antique dealer’s shop in Nuremberg, gradually realizing that he had stumbled upon what he believed to be Michelangelo’s original models for the figures of the times of day and night in the Medici Chapel. Hähnel revered Michelangelo, his works including a complex Allegory of Michelangelo, in which are reproduced his models of Day and Night, as well as a full-size statue of the Italian sculptor, intended for the new picture gallery building in Dresden.¹⁵ In 1875 major celebrations were held in Florence to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Michelangelo, including an exhibition at the Casa Buonarroti, to which Hähnel contributed with the loan of ten plaster casts after models in his collection, made by the Gebrüder Weschke company in Dresden.¹⁶ The models also appear to have been lent to an exhibition in Dresden.¹⁷ Hähnel subsequently gave the casts he had lent to Florence to the Casa Buonarroti, and others to the museum in Dresden,¹⁸ whilst the casts could also be bought from Weschke, who advertised them in their catalogues. The cast of Day could be bought either without the left foot, or with it added.

In the early twentieth century, interest in Hähnel’s models was revived through the publication of studies by Fritz Burger and Henry Thode, in which they were again identified as original works by Michelangelo. The model of Day was published in 1914 in a series of portfolios of photographs of Michelangelo’s works, issued by the publisher Callwey in its Kunstwart series, as the sculptor’s model for the Medici Chapel figure, and in 1924 the entire series of 33 models was published in a luxurious edition edited by Julius Meier-Graefe. This project was funded by the entrepreneur August Stauch through his South West Africa Trust Company, which had acquired the models two years earlier from Hähnel’s daughters. Having lost his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash and subsequent Great Depression, Stauch was forced to sell the collection in 1931 to another German collector, Dr. A. B. Heyer, who consigned them for sale at Christie’s in London in 1938, in which all thirty-three models were individually offered. The autograph status of the models had already been questioned in the 1920s, notably by Ernst Steinmann and Albert Brinckmann. This uncertainty, exacerbated by worries about the likelihood of another war, is likely to have contributed to the very low prices that the majority of the lots fetched. The Day made the highest price, £105, to the dealer Alexander von Frey, while a model of a river god made £70.¹⁹ The only institutional buyer at the sale was the Victoria & Albert Museum, which bought the terracotta models after Dawn and Night for £26 and £32 respectively, as well as reduced copies of the right arm of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietà and the right hand of his Moses.²⁰ Most of the models of body parts went for just a few pounds. Seventeen of them were bought by a Canadian collector, who subsequently bequeathed them to his twin sons, John Peter and Paul James LeBrooy. Another one of the models was subsequently acquired by the LeBrooys; Paul LeBrooy developed an abiding obsession to prove that the eighteen models were, along with the other fifteen formerly in the Hähnel collection, original works by Michelangelo. Having succeeded in convincing some scholars, LeBrooy published the book Michelangelo Models Formerly in the Paul von Praun Collection in 1972, in which he claimed that all eighteen of the models owned by him and by his brother were autograph works. Although they were eventually designated as outstanding cultural property by the Canadian authorities and donated to the Museum of Vancouver at the enormous valuation of 30 million Canadian dollars, they have been recently deaccessioned by the museum and sold as the work of Van der Schardt, for very much lower sums, to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.²¹

Alexander von Frey was evidently convinced, when he paid the highest price at the 1938 sale, that he had bought an autograph work by Michelangelo, and it was as such that it was offered to Percy Straus by the dealer Seligmann. In April 1939, Leo Planiscig, who had by this time been removed from his post at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and had settled in Florence, wrote to Straus, who had asked through Seligmann for Planiscig’s opinion. Planiscig had no doubt that “we have before us in the Praun/Hähnel bozzetto the original sketch in its final version for the figure of Day on the Medici tomb.” He added his satisfaction “that you have acquired this outstanding work that, like the Pollaiuolo bronze [the bronze standing boy, cat. 51, 44.592] goes beyond the everyday pleasing sort of object and which, for its ‘understanding’, presupposes capabilities on his part that not every collector possesses.”²² As part of his argument for the autograph status of the model, Planiscig compared it with a terracotta model of Day by Michelangelo’s follower and assistant in the Medici Chapel, Niccolò Tribolo (c. 1500–1550). Tribolo made terracotta copies of all four of Michelangelo’s times of the day, three of which, including the Day, survive in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello.²³ Planiscig thought that in Tribolo’s work “the head has changed its expression and the muscles are rather slack, and not following the inner body structure, are reproduced simply in their exterior form, just as copyists tend to do.”²⁴

Percy Straus may have been less gratified by the response to his letter to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Director Eric Maclagan, who had bought four of the models at the 1938 Christie’s sale. Maclagan commented that “I have known the Hähnel Collection for many years; and more than ten years ago I made a special visit to Berlin on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston to inspect and report on it. The fact that I purchased two of the models for the Victoria and Albert Museum shows that I regard them as interesting and important; the prices which they fetched in London make it clear that few people were willing to accept them as originals by Michael Angelo.”²⁵ Maclagan appended a copy of the text for a paragraph on the museum’s new acquisitions for its next annual report, in which he wrote that “It is hardly possible to accept these terracottas as original models by Michael Angelo and it seems far more likely that they are reduced copies of his works modelled in the 16th century, possibly with a view to the production of bronze versions such as may be seen in many collections.”

When the model of Day was first catalogued after its gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1944, it was as an autograph work by Michelangelo. However, by 1981 it had been reattributed to Niccolò Tribolo, presumably through perceived comparisons with his own terracotta model of Day in the Bargello. This attribution was retained until very recently, but, beyond the fact that they depict the same mode, there is little in common between Van der Schardt’s vigorous and Tribolo’s more elegant, but, as Planiscig suggested, perhaps more skin-deep, interpretations of Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

—Jeremy Warren