In this standing Virgin and Child, the Virgin is heavily robed, her body turned toward her left in a contrapposto pose, and her right foot placed on a rectangular block. The naked Christ Child, wriggling in his mother’s arms, is held tightly against her right hip, his left arm around her neck and his right hand held out in blessing. The group has an integral small rectangular base, and is mounted on a rectangular marble socle. The pupils of the eyes are marked with punches and the border of the robe decorated with double incised lines. The refined surfaces have been worked with a wire brush. The bronze was the subject of a handheld x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (xrf) examination undertaken by Dylan Smith of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in August 2012, which determined that the bronze is a quaternary alloy, with a higher level of zinc than tin.¹ Smith has suggested that Antonio Susini’s use of quaternary alloys, which also includes instances in which the level of tin is higher than that of the zinc, should be dated to the early years of the seventeenth century, before Susini established his own independent workshop in 1608.

This splendid composition, one of the finest of the Renaissance bronzes in the Straus Collection, is close in style to the works of Giovanni Bologna (Giambologna, 1529–1608), to whom it was attributed when it was bought by Percy Straus in 1929. It recalls, for example, the bronze figure of the Virtue Faith, one of six life-sized bronze figures made by Giambologna between 1579 and 1586 for the Grimaldi Chapel in the church of San Francesco in Casteletto in Genoa, and now in the Great Hall of the University of Genoa (fig. 60.1).² As Charles Avery has noted, both figures have a distinctive drapery, with an apron-like swath of horizontal drapery across their fronts underneath the breasts, which are divided by a central fold of drapery. Below the horizontal apron, the drapery cascades in strongly accentuated v-shaped folds. Avery plausibly suggested that the model for this individualistic treatment might well have been an antique bronze figure of the goddess Minerva, specifically the large Etruscan figure known as the Minerva di Arezzo, which was discovered in Arezzo in 1541 and immediately acquired by Duke Cosimo I de’Medici, who had it installed in the Studiolo di Calliope in the Palazzo Vecchio.³ Both the Faith and the Virgin and Child, with their small breasts and heavy bodies, are distinctly Michelangelesque in their conception.

Although the model is so close to Giambologna himself, documentary evidence suggests that it was the invention of his close assistant Antonio Susini, who joined Giambologna’s workshop in around 1580, thus just the time that work was beginning on the statues of the Virtues for the Grimaldi Chapel in Genoa. Susini worked with Giambologna until around 1600, when he established his own workshop, and was celebrated for his skills as a caster and finisher of bronzes.

Susini is referred to as the maker and the designer of a bronze figure of a Virgin and Child, no. 974 in the posthumous inventory of the moveable goods of Lorenzo di Jacopo Salviati drawn up after Salviati’s death in 1609: “A Madonna in bronze in the round with our Lord in her arms and with a base of ebonised wood, by the hand of Antonio Susini, and his invention.”⁴ The association of Antonio Susini with a model of this subject receives further corroboration from a payment made to “Ant. Susini,” probably in February 1611, for “a Madonna, in bronze and other figures and a horse in bronze.”⁵

As well as this compelling documentary evidence, the Virgin and Child may be attributed to Susini on stylistic grounds, with its stylized, almost chiseled drapery, strongly squared finger and toe nails, the lightly incised decoration of the drapery borders and eyeballs. The version of the model in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin was indeed attributed to Susini as early as 1930 by Wilhelm von Bode, following the suggestion of Friedrich Kriegbaum, who had noted the parallels between the figure and the figure of Dirce in Susini’s signed and dated (1613) bronze reduction of the classical sculptural group known as the Farnese Bull, in the Galleria Borghese in Rome (fig. 60.2).⁶ There are two other closely comparable versions of the Virgin and Child known, the one in Berlin,⁷ and another in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence,⁸ which may be identifiable with the “Madonna of bronze in the round with the Child at her neck by the hand of Susini” recorded in 1611 in the Galleria in the Uffizi and, presumably, identical with the bronze for which Susini was paid in February that year.⁹ Both these examples have also undergone xrf analysis, which demonstrated that their alloys were quaternary alloys with higher levels of zinc than lead, so are closely comparable to that of the Houston Virgin and Child.¹⁰

A further gilded version was last recorded on loan to the South Kensington Museum in 1865 from the collection of the dealer Alexander Barker,¹¹ and another version was sold at Christie’s in 2012.¹²

The Houston version of the model is first recorded in Vienna, in the collection of Guido von Rhò, who must have acquired it after 1908, since it does not feature in the catalogue of this collector’s bronzes, published by Edmund Wilhelm Braun in that year.¹³ By 1923 it had entered the collection of the entrepreneur Camillo Castiglioni, who built an important art collection, much of which came from the collection of Eugen von Miller zu Aichholz, Castiglioni buying the Palais Miller-Aichholz in Vienna, together with its contents, after Miller zu Aichholz’s death in 1919. Castiglioni’s bronzes were catalogued in 1923 by Leo Planiscig. His downfall came as a result of a failed speculation against the French franc in 1924, which in turn led to the collapse of the Austrian savings bank, of which he was then president. His collections were put up for auction in Amsterdam in 1925; the sale was something of a disaster, with fewer than half the lots selling, so that many items in the catalogue reappear in the catalogue for the 1930 sale in Vienna of the remainder of the Castiglioni collection. Of the ten bronzes in the sale attributed to Giambologna, the Houston Virgin and Child was one of only three to find buyers, selling for the relatively high price of 5,000 guilders, considerably more than the 300 guilders paid for a cast of Giambologna’s Architecture (lot 79), now in the National Museum Wales.

—Jeremy Warren