This figure of the shepherd Ganymede stands naked, in a contrapposto pose, his right hand raised on high and holding a small bird, the left hand pointing downward. A separately cast circular bronze base has a rough naturalistic surface, in turn mounted on a marble socle.

Ganymede was a shepherd, the son of Tros, a legendary king of Troy. Jupiter fell in love with the boy and, transformed into the guise of an eagle, carried him up to the heavens, where he served as Jupiter’s cup-bearer. Although the legend receives only rather brief references in literary sources, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.155–61), its homoerotic theme made it a popular subject in ancient Greek and Roman art, and again in Renaissance Italy, especially Florence.

Perhaps the best-known depiction of the subject from the Italian Renaissance is the presentation drawing made by Michelangelo Buonarroti for his young friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri in 1532, the best surviving version of which, sometimes identified as the autograph presentation drawing for de’ Cavalieri, is in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.¹ In addition to this design, which was widely reproduced through prints, plaquettes, and sculpted derivations, Ganymede was the subject of paintings and sculptures,² among which one of the best known is the marble statue of Ganymede by Benvenuto Cellini, in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (fig. 62.1),³ of which the Houston bronze figure is a simplified version.

Cellini himself told the story in his Autobiography of how he made his marble statue of Ganymede in 1548–50, using as the starting point a classical marble torso that Duke Cosimo I de’Medici had acquired from Palestrina:

I cried to the Duke: “My Lord, this is a statue in Greek marble, and it is a miracle of beauty. I must say that I have never seen a boy’s figure so excellently wrought and in so fine a style among all the antiques I have inspected. If your Excellency permits, I should like to restore it – heads and arms and feet. I will add an eagle, in order that we may christen the lad Ganymede. It is certainly not my business to patch up statues, that being the trade of botchers, who do it in all conscience villainously ill; yet the art displayed by this great master of antiquity cries out to me to help him.”⁴

Cellini’s marble statue is an extremely refined sculpture, set upon a naturalistic roughly circular marble base, upon which stands Jupiter in the guise of the eagle, looking up hungrily or protectively toward the small eagle that Ganymede clutches in his right hand. Behind the eagle lies a bag, perhaps Ganymede’s shepherd’s bag, abandoned as the boy prepares to be carried up to the heavens. Cellini’s composition is heavily indebted to Jacopo Sansovino’s marble statue of Bacchus of 1510–12, also now in the Bargello.⁵

The Houston bronze is a reduction of Cellini’s marble in which many details have been omitted or simplified. The eagle and the shepherd’s bag are left out, and the naturalistic detailing of the base much reduced, so that it is simply roughly indicated in the bronze. The hair is much simplified, as is the band around Ganymede’s head, which ends in a loose ribbon in the Houston statuette. The bird in Ganymede’s right hand is so roughly modeled in the bronze that it is hardly recognizable, whereas the omission of the eagle renders this element in any event meaningless.

These differences were sufficient, when the bronze statuette came onto the market in 1932, to lead Leo Planiscig to believe that it was some form of model for the marble statue, an autograph unicum that he considered was only really comparable with the smaller bronze figures made by Cellini for the base of his large bronze figure of Perseus, on the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. In letters to Percy Straus and the dealer Jacques Seligmann,⁶ Planiscig further drew attention to Cellini’s wax model for his Perseus in the Bargello, suggesting that the present bronze might have been cast from the original model for the Ganymede. He regarded the dark patina of the statuette as entirely consistent with Cellini’s practice and the slight roughness of the bronze as indicating its status as a cast of a model: “Further, the argument that we have here a cast after the original model for the Ganymede is consistent with some uneven passages in the bronze and the absence of any extensive afterworking; it was made in fact as a sort of record, intended not for the public but for the workshop of the artist.”⁷ In a subsequent letter, Planiscig sent Straus a photograph of another small bronze reduction of the Ganymede, now in the Frick Collection, which reproduced Cellini’s Ganymede in its final form, thus helping to confirm the status of the Houston statuette as “a stage in the work, which is certainly more interesting and more important as a reference point for its dating.”⁸

Although the bronze Ganymede was catalogued in 1945, on its entry into the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as an autograph work by Cellini, it has long been correctly regarded as a later work, dating from at best the eighteenth but more probably the nineteenth century. Cellini’s marble statue of Ganymede enjoyed considerable popularity in the eighteenth century, and it is from this time that small bronze reductions began to be made. One was produced in the workshop of Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, as part of his extensive series of small copies of “the most famous statues to be found in this city,” by which Soldani meant antique sculptures such as the Dancing Faun and the Medici Venus, but also a smattering of more modern works, including Sansovino’s Bacchus and Giambologna’s Florence Triumphant over Pisa.⁹ An example of Soldani’s small-scale copy of the Ganymede, which includes the eagle and places the figures on a rocky base approximating to the base on the original statue, is in the collection of the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace.¹⁰ Soldani’s models were among those acquired by the marchese Carlo Ginori in the early 1740s for his new porcelain factory at Doccia. The Ganymede was an especially popular model for the Doccia manufactory, being offered in five different sizes, all it seems with the eagle.¹¹ There are other small bronze reductions of the marble in the Frick Collection and in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The statuette in the Frick Collection,¹² referred to by Planiscig, is a close copy of the marble statue, as is the slightly smaller, partly gilded figure in the Metropolitan.¹³ Both are likely to be late casts dating from the nineteenth century. Another bronze example of the figure of Ganymede without the eagle was recorded as formerly in the Evan Morgan collection in London.¹⁴

The Houston Ganymede was stated by Arnold Seligmann to have come from the collection of the “Countess Nacko, Budapest,” but in a letter to Percy Straus, Seligmann claimed that it had been the property of “a german [sic] collector established since the war in Paris,” and that it was only because the circumstances of the Depression that he had managed to secure it.¹⁵ The Hungarian family is in fact the Nákó, of whom there were two branches, the nobles of Nagyszentmiklós et Máriafölde of Comloşu Mare (Nagykomlós) in modern Romania, and the counts de Nagyszentmiklós from Sânnicolau Mare (Nagyszentmiklós). One candidate for the “Countess Nacko” might be Baroness Eszter Lipthay de Kisfalud et Lubelle (1869–1955), the widow of Count Sándor Nákó de Nagyszentmiklós (1871–1923). They lived at the main house in Nagyszentmiklós, which is said to have been filled with works of art.¹⁶ Count Nákó sold the property in 1912. However, perhaps more probable is the daughter of János Nákó of Nagykomlós, Mileva Nákó von Nagyszentmiklós (1838–1926), subsequently the Duchess of San Marco.¹⁷ Mileva’s eccentric father, János, rented a luxurious villa in Bad Ischl near Salzburg, which he bought in 1870, filling it with his art collection. Mileva herself in 1856 married another collector, Giulio Capece Zurlo, the Duke of San Marco and Chamberlain to Francesco II, the last king of Naples. After Francesco’s abdication and departure from Naples in 1861, the Duke of San Marco continued to serve his royal master, moving with his wife to Bad Ischl, where he devoted himself to art collecting. After the deaths of the duke in 1888 and of Mileva’s father a year later, the duchess devoted the remainder of her life to the welfare of her tenants on her Hungarian estates, as well as other good causes, particularly in Budapest. She bequeathed the art collections in Bad Ischl to the Christian Museum in Esztergom, where they arrived in 1926, after the death of the duchess.¹⁸ It may be that overtly secular works such as the Ganymede were not taken by the Christian Museum and thus came onto the market around this time.

—Jeremy Warren