The statuette shows a well-proportioned, rather muscular boy, standing with his weight on his left foot and his right leg slightly drawn back, as he twists to his right and looks over his right shoulder, calling out. The boy’s projecting stomach features a prominent triangular belly button. In his slightly raised left hand he holds the end of what may be a piece of cloth, and his curled right hand also once held an object. The eyes have deeply bored pupils, the whites originally silvered, the silver inlay largely lost in the right eye, but it survives in the left. The forehead projects at the top, with a large coif of hair. The surface is carefully afterworked, with numerous, rather random scratches. The head is now severely flattened at top. The heavy bronze was a solid cast, that is, a figure cast entirely in bronze, without any clay or plaster core.

This brilliantly conceived little figure has always been regarded as one of the finest small bronzes in the Straus Collection, and as the best version of a model known from a number of examples. There is another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which the silvered eyes are better preserved,¹ and other versions in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London,² the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples (two),³ and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.⁴ In addition to these examples in museum collections, another was on the art market in the early 1970s,⁵ and yet another damaged cast, with the left hand and forearm broken off, was formerly in the Gutmann collection in Berlin.⁶ In some versions, for example those in London and in Vienna, the boy holds a spoon in his right hand. It may be that at least for these examples, the figure was intended to depict the child in a story associated with Saint Augustine, who came across a small boy who was attempting to empty the sea into a hole dug in the sand with his spoon. The child was in fact a messenger from God and, when told by Augustine that his task was impossible, the child replied that Augustine’s attempts to explain the Trinity was a no less futile task. If this was the original context for the figure, then it would be reasonable to assume that it might once have formed part of a group with a figure of Saint Augustine, but no stylistically consonant bronze statuette of this subject is known.

The various versions differ quite substantially in their finish and quality. Those in Houston and in the Metropolitan Museum are both solid casts,⁷ whereas other examples are hollow cast. The modeling of an example such as that in the Victoria & Albert Museum is quite different, suggesting that it was not made in the same workshop and is probably a little later in date. There is general agreement that the Houston version is the finest version, although the silvered eyes are better preserved in the example in New York, in which dark pupils are most effectively set within a silver surround.

The Houston version emerged in 1929, in the auction sale of the collection of the marquis de Pompignan in Paris. Quickly bought by Percy Straus, it was published in the same year by Leo Planiscig as the work of the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1434–1488). Although no letters survive from Planiscig for this year, it is known that he had met Percy Straus in Paris and, in a letter from 1934, Planiscig makes clear that he had recommended the purchase of the Standing Boy.⁸ In his 1929 article, Planiscig, who had a few years previously catalogued the version in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, as Florentine early sixteenth-century work, argued that the little bronze should be related to figures of Christ in Verrocchio’s Virgin and Child reliefs but, above all, to the bronze fountain figure of a boy with a fish in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Planiscig was convinced that the figure was based on a lost classical prototype. The attribution to Verrocchio enjoyed some support, and the statuette was accordingly catalogued under that name when lent to various exhibitions in America, the latest the Renaissance Bronzes exhibition at the Smith College Museum of Art in 1964. Although John Pope-Hennessy, in his introductory essay to the catalogue, rejected an attribution to Verrocchio himself, according to Wendy Stedman Sheard, Pope-Hennessy continued to believe that the maker of the bronze was a Florentine sculptor in the circle of Verrocchio.⁹

In his 1934 letter to Straus, Planiscig enclosed a photograph he had been sent by the drawings scholar James Byam Shaw of a drawing in the Museo Horne in Florence depicting the Standing Boy model seen from two angles, clearly based on a version of the small bronze model. Planiscig stated that in his view the drawing was clearly North Italian, Paduan, and Mantegnesque, and he accordingly attributed it to the engraver Zoan Andrea. Planiscig managed to sustain his earlier attribution of the bronze to Verrocchio, by suggesting that an example must have been available in Padua in the years around 1500, perhaps brought by Verrocchio when he came to Venice to work on the bronze statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni. Byam Shaw published the drawing a couple of years later,¹⁰ suggesting that Mantegna might have had in his possession an example of the statuette, which clearly served as the model for the figure of a boy at the far left of his engraving of a Bacchanal with a Wine Vat,¹¹ whilst it also seems to have been used by Mantegna as the basis of the Christ Child, in more than one late painting of the Holy Family.¹²

In an article published in 1941 in which he briefly discussed bronze statuettes attributable in his view to Verrocchio, W. R. Valentiner thought that the Straus statuette was Paduan, not Florentine. Jennifer Montagu discussed the attribution of the Standing Boy in her review of the Smith College exhibition of Renaissance bronzes, also highlighting its Mantegnesque qualities and rejecting Planiscig’s suggestion that it was based on an antique prototype. She pointed out another occurrence of the figure, among the group of three children at the extreme right of the upper register of the fresco of May in the Sala dei Mesi, painted by Francesco del Cossa in 1469, in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara.¹³ In 1978, in the exhibition Antiquity in the Renaissance, Sheard associated the Standing Boy more explicitly with Mantegna, suggesting that the model was invented by Mantegna himself, probably as a conflation of more than one antique model, and that it was made into a wax model, which could then be cast in bronze. She thought that the Houston version at least would have been produced under Mantegna’s direct supervision. Manfred Leithe-Jasper agreed that the model was produced in Mantua in Mantegna’s immediate circle.¹⁴ Keith Christiansen, noting the sixteenth-century painter and art theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s reference to Mantegna’s use of modeled figurines in constructing his compositions, also argued that the original model of the Standing Boy might have been made by Mantegna himself. Most recently, Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, in the 2008 Mantegna exhibition catalogue, attributed the Houston Standing Boy to a follower of Mantegna.

A number of contemporary sources refer to Mantegna’s skills not only as a painter but also as sculptor. It has long been accepted that Mantegna had some involvement in the making of sculpture, although the extent and nature of this has been much debated.¹⁵ He is recorded in 1483 as making designs for bronze vessels.¹⁶ Numerous attempts have been made to attribute specific sculptures to Mantegna but, until recently, the only generally, if not universally, accepted attribution has been the bronze self-portrait bust in Mantegna’s own burial chapel in the church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, described in 1560 by the Paduan historian Bernardino Scardeone as modeled by the artist.¹⁷ More recently, two new attributions have been proposed, the Mantegnesque pietra di nanto statue of Saint Euphemia in the Cathedral of Montepeloso (modern Irsina), given in 1454 by the priest Roberto de Mabilia,¹⁸ and a gilded bronze statuette of Marsyas, now in the Liechtenstein collection.¹⁹ In attributing this figure to Mantegna, Rodolfo Signorini and Anthony Radcliffe identified it with a bronze figure listed in Odoardo Stivini’s 1542 inventory of the contents of Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in Mantua, as “a nude figure bound to a tree.”²⁰ The Liechtenstein Marsyas, the attribution of which has not been universally accepted, is very close in its modeling to a pair of small solid cast figures of the grieving Virgin Mary and Saint John from a Crucifixion group, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (fig. 51.1), which might conceivably have been made in the same workshop.²¹ All three bronzes, although not the work of Mantegna himself, must have been made by a sculptor deeply familiar with his style and likely to have been active in his immediate circle. This would seem, in the present state of knowledge, to be the correct context for the Standing Boy.

—Jeremy Warren