A kneeling figure of Vulcan, depicted naked, raises his right arm above his head, his left arm lowered. Vulcan is a burly, middle-aged man, balding and with a beard. The hair, including the pubic hair, was formerly gilded, with traces remaining. This is a heavy bronze; there are holes in both hands for tools, which are now missing. There is a hole in the top of the head.

Vulcan (Greek: Hephaestos) was the Roman god of fire and a blacksmith, who forged the weapons used by many gods and mythological heroes. His assistants in his forge were the Cyclops, a race of brawny one-eyed giants. The son of Jupiter and Juno, Vulcan was the husband of Venus, god of love, who cuckolded him with the god Mars, the shepherd Adonis, and many others. Unlike male deities such as Mars or Apollo, generally pictured as handsome young men in the prime of life, Vulcan is usually depicted as a mature or even elderly individual. Crippled from birth, after his father, Jupiter, had in a fit of anger thrown his infant son from Olympus down to earth, Vulcan often appears as a hunched and rather crabbed figure, as here.

The bronze now lacks its attributes, as does the other known version, discussed below, so that its original appearance must be conjectured. Vulcan would certainly originally have held a hammer in his raised right hand and, in the left hand, a pair of tongs to hold the object on which he was working, perhaps a sword or other weapon, or else one of the wings of Venus’s son Cupid. It would seem likely that there would have been some form of base, which would have incorporated a small anvil below the left hand. Vulcan might originally have been accompanied by other figures, for example Cupid, if it was the young god’s wings that were being forged.

The statuette may be dated to the decades around 1500, when scenes of Vulcan at his forge enjoyed considerable popularity, especially in Northern Italy. Whereas the notion of Vulcan working on the arms of Aeneas, or forging arrows for Cupid, is supported by references in Greek and Roman literature, the iconography in which he forges Cupid’s wings seems to have been a purely Renaissance invention.¹ Some sense of the original compositional context can be gained from early prints by Benedetto Montagna (c. 1481–1541 or later) or Nicoletto da Modena (fl. c. 1500–11), for example the latter’s Vulcan Forging the Arms of Achilles² and Vulcan Forging the Wings of Cupid (fig. 59.1).³ There is a Riccesque plaquette in the Straus Collection (cat. 57, 44.596) that shows Vulcan forging the wings of Cupid, while Cupid’s mother, Venus, stands by. Another, larger bronze relief depicting Vulcan amidst an assembly of the gods, with Vulcan beating Cupid’s wing on his anvil and Venus holding out her infant son, was evidently well known in late fifteenth-century Venice, when it was described in Francesco Colonna’s fantasy Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in 1499.⁴

The god is also depicted in a small bronze group of Vulcan at His Forge, the most complete version of which is that in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris,⁵ with another in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia in Rome.⁶ In both, the naked figure of Vulcan is set on a triangular base with ball feet; the Rome group is configured as an inkstand, with an inkwell, probably a later substitution, in the place of the anvil, whereas the composition survives in complete form in the example in Paris. This model is one of the many bronzes that were long attributed to the Paduan sculptor Andrea Riccio, starting with Wilhelm Bode and Leo Planiscig in the early twentieth century.⁷ It has more recently been associated with other sixteenth-century Paduan sculptors, Severo da Ravenna (1465/75–before 1538) and Agostino Zoppo (c. 1512–1572) (fig. 59.2), the latter most recently by Luca Siracusano.⁸

All these depictions show Vulcan seated, whereas in the Straus bronze he is, unusually, shown kneeling. This type of kneeling figure, also used by Severo da Ravenna in his bronze figures of the kneeling giant Atlas, is derived from ancient models. Examples include a small bronze Etruscan figure of a kneeling satyr from Armento in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich,⁹ a Roman kneeling satyr recently discovered in Hungary,¹⁰ or another in the Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne.¹¹

The only other known example of the model, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, was published in 1904 as Paduan work of the early sixteenth century, whereas Leo Planiscig in 1930 suggested it was more likely to be Florentine in origin, by a follower of the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni (1420–1491).¹² In this, Planiscig was following an opinion first expressed by the German museum director Wilhelm von Bode, whose expertise is written on the back of a photograph in the archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Bode wrote that he considered the Vulcan to be “a particularly capable autograph work of Bertoldo and is further distinguished by its fine afterworking and its excellent state of preservation.”¹³

There is in fact no real relationship between the Vulcan and Bertoldo’s bronze sculptures, as James Draper recognized, when he rejected the attribution in his monograph on the sculptor, instead locating the bronze within a North Italian workshop in the ambit of Riccio, and dating it c. 1530–40. Others who have in the course of visits to the museum suggested it is North Italian include Peter Fusco, Michael Hall, and Ulrich Middeldorf, whereas John Pope-Hennessy and Ursula Schlegel thought it a product of a German, probably Nuremberg workshop. The bronze seems most likely to be the product of a North Italian, probably Paduan, workshop, from the first decades of the sixteenth century.

The Vulcan is first recorded in 1933, when it belonged to the Hungarian art historian and former director of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, Simon Meller, at that time living in Munich. Meller may have acquired the bronze from the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini, possibly as early as 1904, a date that is not mentioned in any of the correspondence leading up to the sale, so may have been subsequently supplied by Meller.¹⁴ As becomes clear from surviving letters that he wrote to Percy Straus in 1933, Meller’s decision that year to sell his bronze was prompted by the need to raise money to enable him to leave Germany, as the political situation rapidly worsened, especially for Jews and other minorities. The first mention of the bronze comes in a letter from Leo Planiscig to Percy Straus, in which Planiscig mentioned that his former colleague Simon Meller wished to sell this highly important bronze, which Planiscig considered not to be by Bertoldo, but rather a product of an unidentified Paduan workshop. Planiscig added that he had encouraged Meller to offer the bronze to Straus, and that Meller wanted 16,000 German Reichsmarks for it, which Planiscig did not consider high in the context of the times, but which nevertheless certainly could be brought down.¹⁵

Meller a few days later wrote to Straus as forewarned by Planiscig, justifying the price of 16,000 Reichsmarks by the fact that this represented just one third of its valuation three or four years previously, thus before the fall in the art market since the 1929 Wall Street crash and the subsequent Great Depression.¹⁶ Straus replied, asking to see the bronze but already cavilling over the price, prompting Meller in his subsequent letter, which accompanied the bronze on approval, to reduce the asking price by some twenty percent. In the same letter, Meller explained why he needed to sell: “I wish, as you will I am sure understand, to move as quickly as possible out of Munich and Germany, and would like to explore options in Paris and in London. If that does not work out, then I will return to my homeland and to Budapest.” When requesting for payment to be made to his bank account in Paris, Meller added that “I would not want to bring any money into Germany.”¹⁷ Ever the tough businessman, Straus offered in reply a price around twenty-five percent less, which Meller presumably accepted.

Leo Planiscig wrote enthusiastically to Straus in August 1933: “I congratulate you on the acquisition of the Vulcan by Bertoldo. It is a bronze of the very highest quality, of which there is a variant example in the Louvre, but very much less fine. In my Piccoli Bronzi book I called the Louvre piece School of Bertoldo. Your piece is absolutely first class! It is no longer easy nowadays to find a bronze from the Quattrocento.”¹⁸

—Jeremy Warren