Hercules Contemplating the Nemean Lion
Agosti, Giovanni, and Dominique Thiébaut, eds. Mantegna 1431-1506. Paris: Musée du Louvre éditions, 2008, 313–14, no. 130.
Allison, Ann Hersey. “The bronzes of Pier Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi, called Antico.” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 89–90 (1994): 95–97, no. 11.
Allison, Ann Hersey. “Un riesame dell’opera di Antico.” In Bonacolsi l’Antico: Uno scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este, edited by Filippo Trevisani and Davide Gasparotto, 17–25. Milan: Electa, 2008, 18, 21, fig. 7.
Bober, Phyllis Pray, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture. A Handbook of Sources. 2nd ed. London: Harvey Miller, 2010.
Bonnaffé, Edmond. Eugène Piot. Paris: Paul, Huard & Guillemin, 1890.
Detroit Institute of Arts. Decorative Arts of the Italian Renaissance 1400-1600. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1958, 104, 114, no. 239.
Ferrari, Daniela. “L’Antico nelle fonti d’archivio.” In Bonacolsi l’Antico: Uno scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este, edited by Filippo Trevisani and Davide Gasparotto, 300–28. Milan: Electa, 2008.
Gnecchi, Francesco. I Medaglioni Romani. 3 vols. Milan: Hoepli, 1912.
Grueber, Herbert A. Roman Medallions in the British Museum. London: Longmans, 1874.
Hackenbroch, Yvonne. “Italian Renaissance Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts at Houston.” American Connoisseur, June 1971.
Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Hackenbroch, Yvonne. “Italian Renaissance Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts at Houston.” American Connoisseur, June 1971, 121–24, fig. 2.
Hiesinger, Kathryn Bloom. “Renaissance Bronzes in Houston.” Forum 9, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 74–76, fig. 1.
Hill, G. F. A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini. 2 vols. London: British Museum, 1930.
Hôtel Drouot. Catalogue des Objets d’Art et d’Antiquités, des Tableaux, Dessins et Médailles des XVe et XVIe siècle de la Collection de M. Eug. Piot. Paris: A. Laine, 1864, 13, lot 30.
Jestaz, Bertrand. “Un bronze inédit de Riccio.” La Revue du Louvre (1975): 58.
Keith, Graeme, ed. The Triumph of Humanism: A Visual Survey of the Decorative Arts of the Renaissance. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1977, 29, 81, no. 12, fig. 2.
Leithe-Jasper, Manfred. Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. London: Scala, 1986, 84, 89.
Luciano, Eleonora, Denise Allen, and Claudia Kryza-Gersch. Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011, 96, pl. 27.
Mattingly, Harold, Edward A. Sydenham, and C.H.V. Sutherland, eds. The Roman Imperial Coinage. Vol. 4, Part 3: Gordian III - Uranius Antonius. London: Spink, 1949.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early Renaissance Sculpture from Northern Italy 1440–1540. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973, no. 26.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Sculpture from the David Daniels Collection. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1979, 14.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Catalogue of the Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection. Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1945, 35–36, no. 69.
Nesselrath, Arnold. “Antico and Monte Cavallo.” The Burlington Magazine 124 (June 1982):353–57.
Paris, Katherine Wallis. Gloria dell’Arte: A Renaissance Perspective. Tulsa: Philbrook Art Center, 1979, 35, no. 26.
Piot, Charlotte. “Eugène Piot (1812–1890), publiciste et éditeur.” Histoire de l’Art 47 (2000): 3–17.
Planiscig, Leo. “Bronzes of the Italian Renaissance: I. An Unknown Work by Antico.” The Burlington Magazine 66 (March 1935): 126–29.
Pollard, John Graham. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art: Systematic Catalogue, Renaissance Medals. 2 vols. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2007.
Pope-Hennessy, John. Renaissance Bronzes from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Reliefs, Plaquettes, Statuettes, Utensils, and Mortars. London: Phaidon for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1965.
Radcliffe, Anthony, and Nicholas Penny. The Robert H. Smith Collection. Art of the Renaissance Bronze 1500–1650. London: Philip Wilson, 2004.
Shackelford, George T.M. “The Classical Tradition: Sculpture in the Museum Collection.” Bulletin, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 9, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 26.
Sheard, Wendy Stedman. Antiquity in the Renaissance. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art, 1978, no. 93.
Trevisani, Filippo, and Davide Gasparotto, eds. Bonacolsi l’Antico. Uno scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este. Milan: Electa, 2008.
Warren, Jeremy. Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 3 vols. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum Publications, 2014.
Warren, Jeremy. The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Italian Sculpture. 2 vols. London: The Trustees of The Wallace Collection, 2016.
Wilson, Carolyn C. “Leo Planiscig and Percy Straus, 1929–1939: Collecting and Historiography.” In Small Bronzes in the Renaissance, edited by Debra Pincus, 247–74. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2001, 262–63, fig. 20.
ProvenanceEugène Piot (1812–1890); [Piot sale, Paris, April 26, 1864, lot 30]; Alexander von Frey, Vienna (1882–1951); [bought by Percy Straus from Alexander von Frey, through Leo Planiscig, in May 1934]; bequeathed to MFAH, 1944.This exquisitely modeled small relief, the finest early Renaissance sculpture in the Straus collection, depicts the classical hero Hercules resting after having killed the Nemean lion in the first of his Labors. Hercules was condemned to carry out twelve seemingly impossible tasks after he had, in a fit of drunken madness, killed his own children. The customary punishment for a god who had offended the gods on Olympus was to be made to serve a mortal, thus the Delphic Oracle ordered the semidivine Hercules to serve King Eurystheus of Tiryns for a period of twelve years.
During this period, Hercules was to undertake any task that the king should require of him. The first labor assigned him by Eurystheus was the slaying of a lion that had been terrorizing the citizens of the district of Nemea, close to Tiryns. As the lion was invulnerable to Hercules’s weapons, he was forced to kill it by strangling it with his bare hands. Most depictions of the story, for example Antico’s bronze roundel, discussed further below, or the series of small plaquettes by Antico’s contemporary Moderno, show the close struggle between the hero and the lion.1 Here, however, we see its aftermath, with Hercules standing cross-legged, naked except for a cloak held loosely behind him, and gazing down toward the Nemean lion, which stretches out dead on the ground before him. He is supported by his club, held in place along with one end of the drapery in the crook of his right arm. His club is long and slim and elaborately embellished, at the top with woven leather covering, at the bottom with what seems to be a metalwork covering, with palmette decoration at its end. The scene is set against a plain background within a deep recessed integral frame which has at the top an integral suspension point, consisting of acanthus leaf with, at top, a ring, to which is attached another large ring.
This is a remarkably sophisticated composition. The recessed frame extends only around three sides of the relief, the bottom edge forming a sloping ground, upon which Hercules stands, as if upon a stage, with the lion lying behind him, and the sides of the frame providing a sense of receding perspective. However, the perspective seems to be deliberately confused so that, on the left side, Hercules appears level with the frame, his club and his right elbow as it were resting against its edge, the body of the lion therefore clearly behind the frame space. On the right side on the other hand, the front parts of the lion strongly overlap the frame. Hercules is placed in an elegant, balletic position, his right leg, arm, and the club providing a strong curving upward compositional line that leads the viewer towards Hercules’s head and the hero’s dispassionate gaze down toward the animal. Our attention is in this way also directed toward the beautifully conceived lion, which at first sight might appear almost simply to be sleeping, until one notices the lolling tongue, signalling the animal’s utter exhaustion at the end of its struggle. Its prostration contrasts deliberately with Hercules, whose perfectly toned and exquisitely posed body suggests he had hardly to lift a finger to defeat his opponent.
The relief has been generally attributed to the Mantuan sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, known as Antico, since its appearance in the early 1930s. As his nickname suggests, already in his lifetime Antico identified himself with the Renaissance rediscovery of the ancient civilizations of Rome and Greece. As a young man he spent time in Rome, where he worked at some point in the last decades of the fifteenth century on the restoration of the famous colossal marble groups on the Quirinal known as the Horse Tamers of Monte Cavallo, proudly inscribing his signature at the back of one of the groups.2 Antico made small copies of the Horse Tamers, now lost. Almost all his surviving works are, in fact, reductions or interpretations of Antique Roman sculptures. The Houston Hercules is not directly copied from any known surviving antiquity, but ancient images of Hercules resting from his Labors were known by the late fifteenth century. They could be found on the reverses of some Roman coins and medals, including a medallion for the Emperor Commodus, minted in AD 192, in which the hero is shown on the reverse standing with his club acting as a support for his arm, just as in the Straus relief.3 Another coin minted during the reign of Gordian III shows a very similar figure resting on his club in the same manner.4 The most famous monumental sculpture of the resting Hercules in the Renaissance period was the marble group known as the Farnese Hercules, probably discovered only around 1546.5 However, an over-life-size gilded bronze statue of the naked Hercules, holding his club and the apples of the Hesperides (fig. 52.1), was excavated in the Foro Boario during the papacy of Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–84), who had it set up in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, where it has remained to this day.6 The statue differs in important respects from the Hercules in the Houston relief, in that the legs are not crossed and the positions of the arms are different; however, there are strong parallels between the monumental sculpture and the small relief in their depiction of two powerful young men, with magnificent torsos, who both exhibit a similar balletic pose, albeit in opposite directions. Whereas the club held by the Capitoline Hercules is today raised, in the sixteenth century it rested on the ground, like that in the Houston relief. Antico may have been in Rome when the Capitoline Hercules was excavated and may even have helped with its transfer to the Palazzo dei Conservatori. It seems likely that this sculpture, together with the numismatic images, contributed to the design of the Houston Hercules.
The sculpture is first recorded in the collection of the French dealer Eugène Piot, who from the 1840s traveled and bought extensively in Italy.7 In 1864 Piot held a sale of much of his stock, which included numerous sculptures that today are among the highlights of museum collections across the world. Other than the evident typographical error in the recorded dimensions, the description of lot 30, attributed to Riccio, matches the Houston Hercules closely: “Hercules at rest, leaning on his club, the lion lying at his feet. A relief worked with the greatest care. Height 29 cm., width 1m 15 cm [sic].”8 The relief is recorded in various of Piot’s manuscript lists of his collection, notably a summary note of his stock drawn up in June 1860, when he valued the relief at 300 francs.9
The Hercules is next recorded in 1934, when it was acquired by Percy Straus from the dealer Alexander von Frey, through the agency of Leo Planiscig, then director of the Sammlung für Plastik und Kunstgewerbe of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the outstanding bronzes specialist of his time. Planiscig was in his professional post responsible for the care of what is the finest group of Antico’s sculptures to be found in any museum. So his excitement at the emergence of an unknown new work by the master is understandable, and palpable, when he wrote in February 1934 to Percy Straus: “One of the most beautiful of Antico’s reliefs has just surfaced in Paris. . . . it is a piece that is worthy of your collection and I would very much like to see it in your possession. . . . It is probably the most beautiful and significant bronze that I have seen for many years.”10 By April 1934, Frey, who wanted Planiscig to provide an expertise for the relief, had sent it to Vienna for him to study. Writing to Straus on April 4, Planiscig repeated that it was the most beautiful bronze that he had seen in years: “it is an unquestionable secure work of Antico, made in around 1500 at the behest of the Dukes of Mantua. . . . If I may be allowed to advise you and if, as I hope might be the case, you have some faith in my judgment, I would most warmly recommend to you this piece, which would be an adornment to any significant private collection or to any museum.”11
Explaining that Von Frey wanted 100,000 French francs, Planiscig suggested that Straus should allow him to negotiate on his behalf since, if Von Frey knew that the sculpture might be bought by an American client, he would either increase the asking price or, at the least, stick firmly to his initial demand. Planiscig therefore proposed that he would tell Von Frey he wished to buy it for a friend and would offer 60,000 francs, with a view to settling at between that sum and 70,000. The money could be paid through a middleman or through a bank transfer in Planiscig’s name. A few weeks later, on May 1, Planiscig was able to report that he had been able to settle with Von Frey at 70,000 francs and that the relief had been sent from Vienna to Straus, at the address of the American Embassy in Paris, where Straus’s brother Jesse Isidor was serving as Ambassador to France.It is not known whether Planiscig ever received payments from Percy Straus for the strenuous efforts he made on the collector’s behalf, which would today breach the ethical standards that museum curators across the world are required to observe. However, in the case of the Hercules relief, Planiscig was especially keen to be allowed to publish it in a reputable journal, so certainly regarded permission from the new owner to do this as a major part of his reward. His article duly appeared in the Burlington Magazine in March 1935. Planiscig linked the Houston Hercules with five large bronze roundels depicting deeds of Hercules, which have long been recognized as among the most significant early works of Antico. They depict The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), Hercules and the Nemean Lion, Hercules and the Lernean Hydra (both Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence) (fig. 52.2), Hercules and the Cerynitian Stag (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Hercules and the Erymanthian Boar (Victoria & Albert Museum).12 The roundels are generally dated to early in Antico’s career, in part because the post mortem inventory of his first patron Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, who died in 1496, lists four bronze roundels with unspecified figures,13 as well as what seem to be wax models for the series.14 Roundels (tondi) of unspecified subject were later listed in the 1542 inventory of the Grotta of Isabella d’Este, while three roundels of the Labors of Hercules were in the 1627 inventory of the estate of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga, drawn up just before the sale of much of the collection to King Charles I of England. There is unfortunately nothing in any of these inventories that might be identifiable as the Houston relief. The five extant roundel models do not form a coherent series; the Infant Hercules not only does not depict one of Hercules’s Labors, but is distinct in style and probably earlier than the others; the two reliefs in Florence, generally regarded as the finest in the series, are partly gilded, whereas the others have no gilding. Nevertheless, the four tondi with the Labors of Hercules are stylistically consistent and are crucial for the attribution of the Houston Hercules. Although shown as a mature bearded figure in two of them, in the two roundels in Florence, Hercules is essentially the same lithe, naked, and beardless young man as in the Houston relief, and the cloak he wears or drapes from a tree in these is recognizably the same diaphanous garment. In the Hercules and the Lernean Hydra tondo, Hercules wields a thick knotted wooden club, quite different from the elegant and perhaps rather impractical weapon upon which he leans in the Houston relief. But the club in the Houston relief nevertheless inhabits much the same world as the beautifully modeled bow and quiver that may be seen hanging from the tree in all four of the tondi.
Eleanora Luciano has demonstrated that Roman coins, of which Gianfrancesco Gonzaga had an enormous collection, were the principal sources for the roundels and were cleverly selectively used by the artist: “Antico, while faithfully imitating the antiquities, manipulated them just enough to create new and dynamic relationships.”15 As the Houston Hercules is also partly based on ancient coin sources, this is a further factor linking it with the tondi.
The Houston relief and the related tondi have been variously dated. In his 1935 article, Planiscig dated them all to c. 1500; among more recent studies, Allison dated the tondo with the Infant Hercules strangling the serpents to c. 1480, the Houston reliefs to c. 1485, and the other four tondi to c. 1500. In the 2008 exhibition in Mantua, the tondi were dated to 1475–1500, while in the 2011 Washington show, four of the tondi were attributed to c. 1496, and the Houston relief to c. 1500. The four tondi of the Labors of Hercules are compositions in which the figurative groups take up most of the space, what is left being filled with an elaborate still-life of a tree, from which the hero’s bow and quiver are slung. The Houston relief in contrast is a starker composition, in which Hercules stands against an entirely empty field.
A dating of c. 1490–1500 for the Houston Hercules would seem reasonable. Compositionally it is very close to a bronze figure of the Young Hercules Resting that is known in a number of versions, the two finest in the Museo Estense in Modena and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.16 Hercules stands cross-legged as in the Houston relief and rests his right arm on his long club, which is heavily knotted. Unlike the Houston figure, his head is turned sharply to his right; the left hand also holds the end of the drapery, but the hand is wound round the drapery and rests on Hercules’s hip. The figure is therefore recognizably very close to the Houston Hercules, if it does not quite share its mannered elegance. The Vienna statuette has silvered eyes and was once gilded in the drapery, club, and hair, the sort of finish especially associated with Antico. Ann Allison attributed the Modena statuette to Antico himself;17 Radcliffe regarded the “superior sculptural qualities” and the heaviness of the casts as indications that even the prime versions in Modena and Vienna were not Antico’s work. Andrew Butterfield also rejected the statuettes as by Antico, regarding them, and indeed also the Houston Hercules, as the work of the same anonymous Mantuan artist in Antico’s circle.18 The Modena and Vienna statuettes are nevertheless generally agreed to have been cast in Mantua around the beginning of the sixteenth century, Radcliffe noting that such precise replication of wax models formed in the same piece-mould seems to have been possible before the second half of the sixteenth century in Italy only in Mantua.19 Although numerous and various sources for the statuettes and, by implication, the Houston Hercules have been proposed, Radcliffe concluded, surely correctly, that the model for the statuette was “a free invention indebted to a number of classical sources.”20 It is an open question as to whether Antico’s fine relief might have provided the starting point for the model for the statuette. The design seems to have been highly influential in the first decades of the sixteenth century, since numerous drawings and engravings, which seem to show knowledge of the statuettes, survive, among them the self-portrait medal of 1508 by the Venetian sculptor Vettor Gambello (Camelio), in which a small figure in a sacrificial scene on the reverse appears to be partly derived from one of the bronze statuettes.21
—Jeremy Warren
Notes
1. For Moderno’s Hercules and the Nemean Lion, see John Pope-Hennessy, Renaissance Bronzes from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Reliefs, Plaquettes, Statuettes, Utensils, and Mortars (London: Phaidon for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1965), nos. 161, 164, 179, 184; Jeremy Warren, Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum Publications, 2014), 3: nos. 316, 317, 319; Jeremy Warren, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Italian Sculpture (London: The Trustees of The Wallace Collection, 2016), 1: 152–55, no. 36.
2. Arnold Nesselrath, “Antico and Monte Cavallo,” The Burlington Magazine 124 (June 1982): 353–57.
3. Herbert A. Grueber, Roman Medallions in the British Museum (London: Longmans, 1874), 39, no. 29; Francesco Gnecchi, I Medaglioni Romani (Milan: Hoepli, 1912), 2: 54, no. 29.
4. Harold Mattingly, Edward A. Sydenham, and C.H.V. Sutherland, eds., The Roman Imperial Coinage, vol. 4, Part 3: Gordian III - Uranius Antonius (London: Spink, 1949), 25, no. 95.
5. Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 229–32, no. 46.
6. Musei Capitolini, Inv. MC 1265. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 227–29, no. 45; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, 2nd ed. (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2010), 178–79, no. 129.
7. For surveys of Eugène Piot’s life and work, see Edmond Bonnaffé, Eugène Piot (Paris: Paul, Huard & Guillemin, 1890); and Charlotte Piot, “Eugène Piot (1812–1890), publiciste et éditeur,” Histoire de l’art 47 (2000): 3–17.
8. “Hercule au repos, appuyé sur sa massue, un lion couché à ses pieds. Haut-relief ciselé avec le plus grand soin. Haut. 0m29 cent., larg. 1m15 cent.”
9. “Hercule jeune Bas relief. 300’. Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Ms. 2229, “Note sommaire juin 1860.”
10. Letter of February 16, 1934. “In Paris is eine der schönsten Bronzereliefs von Antico aufgetaucht [...] Es wäre ein Stück Ihrer Sammlung wert und ich würde mir wünschen, es in Ihrem Besitze zu wissen [...] Es ist wohl die schönster und bedeutendste Bronze, die ich seit vielen Jahren gesehen habe.”
11. Letter of April 4, 1934. “Es handelt sich wohl um die schönste Bronze, die ich seit Jahren gesehen habe [...] Es ist ein einwandfreies, sicheres Werk des Antico, ausgeführt etwa um 1500 auf Veranlassung der Herzoge von Mantua [...] Wenn ich mir erlauben darf, Sie zu beraten und, wie ich wohl hoffen darf, Sie auf mein Urteil etwas halten, so kann ich Ihnen dieses Stück aufs Wärmste empfehlen, als Zierde jeder bedeutenden Privatsammlung und jedes Museums.”
12. For the roundels, see Ann Hersey Allison, “The bronzes of Pier Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi, called Antico,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 89–90 (1994): 97–108, no. 12 A-E; Filippo Trevisani and Davide Gasparotto, eds., Bonacolsi l’Antico: Uno scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este (Milan: Electa, 2008), 146–54, nos. 2.1–5; Eleonora Luciano, Denise Allen, and Claudia Kryza-Gersch, Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011), 92–95, pls. 23–26.
13. Dui tondi cum certe figuri suso; Una figura in su uno tondo; Uno tondo cum figura da vegio suso. Allison, “The bronzes of Pier Jacopo,” 274; Daniela Ferrari, “L’Antico nelle fonti d’archivio,” in Bonacolsi l’Antico: Uno scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este, Filippo Trevisani and Davide Gasparotto, eds. (Milan: Electa, 2008), 304.
14. [in una altra camerete supra el camerino del signore] Le forze de Hercules, de cera, suso una assesela. Ferrari, “L’Antico nelle fonti d’archivio,” 305.
15. Luciano, Allen, and Kryza-Gersch, Antico, 5–6, figs. 3–4.
16. For discussion of individual examples and of the series, see Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sculpture from the David Daniels Collection (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1979), 12–15, no. 1; Manfred Leithe-Jasper, Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (London: Scala, 1986), 85–90, no. 11; Anthony Radcliffe and Nicholas Penny, The Robert H. Smith Collection: Art of the Renaissance Bronze 1500–1650 (London: Philip Wilson, 2004), 70–79, no. 11.
17. Ann Hersey Allison, “Un riesame dell’opera di Antico,” in Bonacolsi l’Antico: Uno scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este, Filippo Trevisani and Davide Gasparotto, eds. (Milan: Electa, 2008), 17–20.
18. Note following visit by Butterfield to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in November 2003; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curatorial files..
19. Radcliffe and Penny, The Robert H. Smith Collection, 73–74.
20. Radcliffe and Penny, The Robert H. Smith Collection, 78.
21. G. F. Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini (London: British Museum, 1930), 118, no. 446, pl. 84; John Graham Pollard, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue: Renaissance Medals (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 1:191, no. 170.
Comparative Images
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