One of the most charming of all bronzes from the Renaissance period, this little bust depicts the infant Saint John the Baptist, identifiable by his tunic with its furred edge, which is fastened by a knot at the right shoulder. His head tipped slightly to his right, his mouth slightly open, and his hair vigorously curled, the sculpture is outstanding as a fresh and naturalistic depiction of a young child. For example, there is a charming dimple in the chin. There are remains of a blackish lacquer patination and, on the inside wall of the bust, some strengthening in the wax at the lower edge.

Saint John the Baptist was one of the most popular saints in Renaissance Italy, highly regarded both as a relative and as a forerunner of Christ. In addition to later episodes from his life—the time he spent in the desert, his baptism of Christ, and his gruesome death at the hands of Salome, daughter of Herodias—his role as an infant companion of Christ was immensely popular. In Florence, where Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of the city, sculpted busts in marble, terracotta, and stucco of the infants Christ and Saint John were made in large numbers from the fifteenth century, sometimes for placing in churches, but even more often used as devotional objects within domestic contexts. Among the most important examples of this type of sculpture are the marble busts of the Christ Child by Desiderio da Settignano (c. 1430–1464) and the young Baptist by Antonio Rossellino (1427–1479), from the Oratory of San Francesco dei Vanchettoni in Florence, both now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.¹

Three-dimensional depictions of holy figures were regarded as possessing their own spiritual and virtuous essence, which could be transferred to worshippers engaging with them. Thus, young women often kept in their bedrooms private portable images known as “holy dolls,” contemplation of which it was believed would help to inspire virtuous behaviour in their unborn children.² For the same reason, busts of the young Christ, sometimes paired with busts of the infant Baptist, were frequently found in Florentine homes. Preachers such as the Blessed Giovanni Dominici urged parents to keep painted and sculpted images of holy figures in their homes, as examples for their children: “To have paintings in your house of child saints or young virgins, in which your own child, whilst still in its swaddling clothes, will be delighted by the example set him and will act according to the exemplar, with acts and signs appropriate to childhood. And just as I speak of paintings, the same I would say for sculptures.”³

While the Houston bust may well have been used for devotional purposes, the use of the expensive material of bronze and its additional qualities as a charming naturalistic portrait mean that it may have been made simply as an attractive decorative object in its own right. The high finish on all sides suggests it was made to be seen in the round, and that it would perhaps have been displayed on a table rather than, say, on a high shelf in a study.

It is one of five known casts of the model, three others in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence,⁴ the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,⁵ and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.⁶ A fourth version, until 1945 in the Staatliche Museen Berlin,⁷ was seriously damaged by fire in 1945 and thought lost for many years, but has recently been rediscovered in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.⁸ The busts of the Infant Saint John are, in turn, closely related to a group of five well-known ideal female busts, consisting of single busts in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,⁹ and the Wallace Collection, London (fig. 54.1),¹⁰ a pair in the Galleria Estense, Modena,¹¹ and another single bust in the Skulpturensammlung, Berlin.¹² Further less closely related works from the same broad group include a bust of a bearded man dressed all'antica in the Rijksmuseum,¹³ and a bust of a woman in contemporary dress, known from casts in the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, and in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.¹⁴

The Saint John busts were first published by Wilhelm Bode, in a discussion of the versions in Berlin and Florence, as well as the female busts in Modena and in the Wallace Collection.¹⁵ Bode’s attribution of the Saint John busts to Vittorio Ghiberti (1416–1496), the son of Lorenzo, on the basis of comparison with the heads of children in the frame made in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshop between 1452 and about 1463 to surround Andrea Pisano’s South Door in the Florence Baptistry, enjoyed some support over quite a period of time. The Houston bust was not only sold to Percy Straus with this attribution, but retained it as late as 1964, when it was lent to the Renaissance Bronzes in American Collections exhibition. Bode himself nevertheless quickly dismissed his hypothesis, in 1915 publishing the version from Kassel, recently transferred to Berlin, as an autograph work by Antico, using as arguments for his new attribution the deep black patination of the flesh areas and their contrast with the gilding of the cloak, as well as the style of the hair and the modeling of the eyes.¹⁶ Notwithstanding this, a few years in 1922 he still maintained a loose attribution to Ghiberti,¹⁷ but in his final statement on the Berlin bust, in his 1930 catalogue of the Berlin collection, he would go no further than to maintain a loose association with Florence, preferring an origin in Northern Italy, in the circle of Antico.

Bode always called the busts simply a portrait of a young child. Their identification as the infant Saint John the Baptist, and their attribution to Antonio Lombardo, were both first proposed by Leo Planiscig, when he compared the little bust to the figure of the Christ Child in the Zen Chapel in San Marco, Venice.¹⁸ At the same time Planiscig also noted the close relationship between this model and the ideal female busts. Although one or two scholars have expressed caution—James Draper describing them as anonymous early sixteenth-century Venetian works in the manner of Antonio Lombardo,¹⁹ whereas Carolyn Wilson called the Houston version a work from the circle of Antonio Lombardo—the attribution of the Saint John busts to Antonio Lombardo is today generally accepted.²⁰

The attribution of the model of the Saint John busts to Antonio can indeed be made with some confidence, owing to the strong stylistic parallels with Antonio’s work in bronze in the Zen Chapel, created between 1501 and 1521 in accordance with the will of Cardinal Battista Zen (1439–1501).²¹ In particular the Saint John may be related to the Christ Child in the Virgin and Child group on the altar of the Zen Chapel and, perhaps even more so, to the cherubims that surround the head of the figure of God the Father (fig. 54.2), originally designed as a tympanum for the front of the altar but eventually used as a baldacchino ceiling.²² The panel with God the Father and cherubims appears on a list of items dated March 27, 1506,²³ which the founder Zanin Alberghetti was due to cast, and Antonio Lombardo was paid for this panel as his work. A wax model for the Virgin and Christ Child was in existence by 1508 and the Christ Child is recorded as cast, in a note dated January 7, 1512, listing payments to be made to Antonio.²⁴ Although these figures were only cast after Antonio had abandoned the project and departed in May 1506 for Ferrara, where he would spend the remainder of his life, the relevant documents all refer to the models as his work. The physical features of the children in the Zen Chapel complex relate closely to the Saint John busts. All have prominent foreheads and cheeks, combined with short snub noses and widely spaced eyes; the crisp corkscrew curls of the hair are another common feature. There are nevertheless some quite significant differences between the modeling of the panel with God the Father, and the Virgin and Christ Child group. The latter is monumental, more finely finished in details such as the Christ Child’s teeth, but it lacks the expressiveness of the God the Father and of his surrounding cherubims which, in their lively charm, approach the Saint John busts closely. Antonio was still in Venice when this part of the altar was cast, in March or April 1506, whereas the larger group was almost certainly cast in his absence. He might therefore be expected to have had a larger role in determining the appearance of the cherubim.

There has on the other hand been a great deal more debate around the status of the female busts, in particular whether they too should be regarded as the work of Antonio, or rather as by his brother Tullio Lombardo (c. 1455–1532). In contrast with the delightful naturalism of the Saint John busts, the portraits of women are sculptural equivalents of the dreamy abstracted women seen in the paintings of Giorgione and early Titian, as well as a series of idealizing marble portrait reliefs by Tullio, the two finest of which, each depicting a woman and man, are in the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro, Venice,²⁵ and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.²⁶ These sculptures reflect, as do contemporary paintings, the fashion in early sixteenth-century Venice for an elegant idealizing mode celebrating female beauty and the pastoral. Largely through comparison with Tullio’s marble double portrait reliefs, the bronze busts of women have been thought to be his work, by Wilhelm Bode and some other scholars.²⁷ Bode’s hypothesis was also at first accepted by Leo Planiscig, who however, in his important article on the Lombardo family, published in 1937, observed that Tullio was an artist whose pictorial effects were more easily found in marble than in bronze. Planiscig instead proposed Antonio Lombardo as the author of the female busts, along with of course the busts of the infant Baptist. Although this suggestion did not at first meet widespread agreement, it has gradually come to be accepted, albeit sometimes with caution.²⁸ Alison Luchs stated that “few works demonstrate more graphically than these bronzes the frequent difficulty of distinguishing Tullio’s work from Antonio’s, but she thought that because of the stylistic parallels with the Saint John busts, which she considered ”certainly by Antonio,” “the case for Antonio as their modeller is the stronger.”²⁹ More recently the female busts have also been consistently attributed to Antonio Lombardo.³⁰

It was first suggested by Manfred Leithe-Jasper that these small busts might have been cast in the workshop of the sculptor Severo Calzetta, better known as Severo da Ravenna, in reference to the city where he was born and spent most of his career. It is generally thought that Severo came from Ravenna to Venice as a young man and trained in the workshop of Antonio and Tullio Lombardo’s father, Pietro. Although one marble statue signed by Severo survives, he is much better known for his work in bronze; indeed, research in recent decades has demonstrated that he operated, at first in Padua and later in Ravenna, one of the most productive bronze workshops in Renaissance Italy.³¹ The busts share common technical features which can be compared to secure autograph works by Severo, such as the statuette of Saint John the Baptist in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.³² One of the best-known technical trademarks of Severo’s workshop is his use of rectangular iron core pins, an element in the casting process. These can be found on most of the surviving examples of the Saint John and the female busts. Evidence of two are easily visible in the Houston Saint John, a rectangular pin hole visible on the inside wall of the bronze in the area corresponding to the forehead, and an open hole in the right ear. There is another on the back of the neck, at right, which is neither visible internally or externally. The strong even walls of the bust point to an experienced caster, and there are a few traces of plaster on the inside walls, a material used by Severo on other occasions for his core models. Most recent discussions of the bronze busts have therefore accepted that Severo might have been their caster, although this must remain a hypothesis. Other founders are known to have cast models by Antonio Lombardo, for example Zanin Alberghetti, who in 1506 cast the panel with God the Father and cherubim in the Zen Chapel (see fig. 54.2). It would also be rash to assume that a technique such as the use of rectangular pins was necessarily unique to Severo at this time.

There are some small differences in modeling between the versions of the bust of the infant Saint John. In those in Oxford, New York, and Houston, the eyes are kidney-shaped, whereas the pupils in the Bargello and Moscow versions are rounded. The modeling of the edge of the tunic of the Bargello Saint John is sharper, more even and less naturalistic than that in the other versions. Although all four versions that survive in good condition are of high quality, those in Florence and Oxford are probably the finest. The Houston version is for example a little weaker than the Ashmolean cast, the hair and drapery less crisply modeled, the teeth present but not individualized as they are in the Oxford version. The eyelids in the latter are less heavy, which subtly alters the expression, and the little swag of drapery at the back right shoulder finishes before the lower edge, whereas in the Houston bust it comes down to the edge.

The Houston Saint John the Baptist was first recorded in 1922, when it appeared in the sale of the Marquise de Ganay, born Emily Ridgway of Philadelphia. The Ridgways were relatives of Edith Wharton and prominent members of the wealthy American community resident in France. The bust passed into the collection of the Belgian banker Philippe Wiener, where it appears to have been the only Renaissance bronze in a collection otherwise very largely focused on French eighteenth-century decorative arts. After Wiener’s death in 1929, his collection was sold en bloc to the dealer Jacques Seligmann, who had a lavish catalogue printed to accompany the exhibition of the collection in Seligmann’s galleries in the former Palais de Sagan. According to his son Germain Seligman, almost the entire collection sold within two weeks of the opening, Percy Straus carrying off the little bronze bust of the Infant Baptist.

—Jeremy Warren