The statuette depicts a naked young man with flowing hair, his hands held above his head, and his left leg held slightly behind him. A reasonably good cast, it has finely delineated toes and fingers. There are extensive traces of a blackish lacquer, and it is mounted on a green marble base.

This lithe figure of a youth is known in a large number of versions, reflecting the attractively enigmatic nature of this introspective and elegant figure. The composition has sometimes been called Narcissus, after the mythological youth who fell in love with his own reflection, but there is no reason to suppose that any particular subject beyond the depiction of a young male nude was ever intended. The figure was at one time generally thought to be Italian. Wilhelm Bode associated it with the Paduan goldsmith Francesco da Sant’Agata, to whom a number of bronzes of nude males were attributed by him and others, on the basis of comparison with the signed boxwood figure of Hercules in the Wallace Collection, London.¹ Leo Planiscig rejected this attribution, instead suggesting it was Italian, but a Venetian early sixteenth-century work after the antique.²

John Pope-Hennessy revisited the whole question of the “Sant’Agata” group of bronzes on the occasion of the bronze statuettes exhibitions he organized in 1961–62 in London, Florence, and Amsterdam. He reattributed the great majority of bronzes in the group to the Venetian sculptor Camelio (c. 1460–1537), but considered the Standing Youth to be no more than in Camelio’s style.³ Pope-Hennessy subsequently grouped the figure with a loosely related statuette of a youth with raised arms in the Frick Collection, New York, suggesting that both bronzes were the work of a Venetian workshop in the circle of the Lombardo family, the leading sculptors in Venice around 1500.⁴

Subsequently Paul Joannides described the statuette as possessing an intense physicality, embodying “a sensuous individual life, revealed at a moment of introspective vulnerability,” and he argued that it represented the most successful use in the Renaissance period of the motif of the standing figure with raised arms.⁵ He believed that the figure reflected Michelangelo’s progressive ideas for the project of a tomb for Pope Julius II, notably the figure of the Dying Slave (fig. 72.1), but also derived from an antique marble figure of Narcissus, in which the figure stands with legs crossed and its hands raised above its head, which seems to have been the direct inspiration for one of Michelangelo’s preparatory drawings for another slave figure for the Tomb.⁶ Joannides concluded that the model is “clearly Michelangelesque, clearly of high quality,” but that it was not a cast from one of his models and that its precise origins remained to be determined. The Michelangelo connection must have had some traction as early as the nineteenth century, since the American sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward made a small bronze bell around 1860, the handle a reduction of the Standing Youth, then clearly believed to be a version of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave.⁷

The first real steps toward understanding Barthélemy Prieur as a sculptor of small bronzes came in 1967, when Hans Weihrauch tentatively constructed a group of bronzes which he proposed were the work of a northern master, whom he called the Master of the Genre Figures. The group included, in addition to the nude male figures previously attributed to Sant’Agata and to Camelio, statuettes of nude women at their toilette and homely figures of a cavalier and maid, and of a maid milking a cow.⁸ Although Weihrauch had not included the Standing Youth in his group, a few years later Laura Camins, discussing the cast formerly in the Abbott Guggenheim collection, described the model as French in origin, attributing it to the workshop of Barthélemy Prieur, a sculptor of great ability.⁹ As a young man Prieur studied in Rome, where he seems to be recorded in the early 1550s. From 1564 to 1570 he worked for the Dukes of Savoy in Turin, before returning to France in 1570. In 1585, with the publication of the Edict of Nemours, the Protestant Prieur was forced to leave Paris and settle in Sedan, but he was able to return on the ascension to the throne of France in 1589 of the tolerant Henri IV. Prieur became sculptor to the king, until Henri’s assassination in 1610. Prieur’s work has come to be much better understood in recent years, thanks in part to publication of two inventories of his workshop, the first made after the death of his first wife in 1583, the second after his own death in 1611.

Location of the bronze to France had in fact been proposed as early as 1929, when the cataloguer for the marquis de Pompignan’s sale astutely described it as an early seventeenth-century French work.¹⁰ A French origin for the model has since been universally accepted, and the attribution to Prieur’s workshop is also generally now followed, although the artist’s style, as we understand it, is perhaps not quite as recognizable in this figure as it is in other figurative small bronzes now securely attributed to him, such as the Acrobat,¹¹ the Male Nude carrying a Child on his Shoulder, or the Kneeling Mother with a small Boy.¹²

Among the reasons for attributing the bronzes to a French workshop is that the best examples are technically characteristic of French bronzes around 1600, rather heavy casts in a yellowish metal, the surface finished with a reddish-gold varnish. In addition, the first record of the model is in a French collection, the post mortem inventory of King Louis XIV’s gardener André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), in which it was described as “a small bronze figure depicting an adolescent youth with his arms above his head,”¹³ listed along with numerous other bronze models now associated with Prieur. Michelangelo’s marble figure of the Dying Slave arrived in France in the late 1540s and by the 1550s had been installed with its companion, the Rebellious Slave, in niches on the facade of the château of Écouen, where it could easily have been studied.¹⁴ The statue of Narcissus discussed by Joannides as a potentially closer source also came to France, where it came to be known as the Mazarin Hermaphrodite (fig. 72.2),¹⁵ but is only recorded there from 1661, when it appeared in the inventories of the collections of Cardinal Mazarin.¹⁶ However, Michelangelo’s drawing would suggest that the statue was in the sixteenth century in Italy, presumably Rome, so Prieur could have seen it there.

There are variations between casts. If, for example, the Houston statuette is compared with the cast in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,¹⁷ a number of differences may be observed. The legs in the Houston version are joined further down the inside thighs, and the right foot is turned more sharply outwards. Its head is turned higher and there is a lock of stray hair at the forehead, absent from the Ashmolean version. The hair at the back of the head in the Houston bronze is altogether more regular, with more of the fillet covered by the hair, and is less sharply modeled than in the Oxford figure. The Houston figure’s hair descends to a point along the backbone, whereas in the Oxford version it is spread out more evenly. The fingers on the head are more regular in the Houston bronze and there is pubic hair above the genitals, whereas in the figure in Oxford, the penis is tiny and incredibly carefully modeled, with no pubic hair.

Among the many other versions of the model recorded in museums, private collections, and the art market, among the best are considered to be those in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge;¹⁸ Houston; the Wallace Collection, London;¹⁹ the former Abbott Guggenheim collection, New York; and Oxford. Another version with an early provenance, probably a seventeenth-century cast, is that in the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, which in the eighteenth century was believed to be a Roman bronze and was among the most highly regarded works in the collection.²⁰ There are no fewer than three examples in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,²¹ and others in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The figure was sold to Percy Straus as coming from the collection of the Marquis de Pompignan, who also owned the Mantegnesque figure of a boy now also in Houston (cat. 51, 44.592). However, another version of the model, sold at auction in 1988 from the collection of the dealer Alexander von Frey (through whose hands passed more than one of Percy Straus’s sculptures, e.g., the Antico Hercules [cat. 52, 44.582] and the model of Day after Michelangelo, [cat. 66, 44. 584]), was also claimed in the sale catalogue to be the example sold from the Pompignan collection in 1929.²² Although it would seem unlikely that Jean Seligmann would have invented this provenance from a sale that had taken place less than ten years ago, in the present state of knowledge it is not possible to be sure that the version now in Houston was indeed that sold in Paris in 1929.

—Jeremy Warren