This gilt-bronze group probably represents the Biblical hero Samson defeating the lion. The naked figure of Samson sits half-astride the lion, forcing open its jaws with his bare hands. The lion’s tail flickers upward, connecting with Samson’s right arm. There is a rectangular hole in underside of belly, for extraction of core material, and another hole in lion’s right hind leg on inside. Samson’s left leg is broken below the knee. The cast is thin and even-walled, and the gilding is heavily worn in places. Other versions discussed below are sectional, made from separately cast elements carefully fitted together and soldered in place; although it was not possible from visual examination to find clear evidence for the manufacture of the Houston version, it is probable that it was made in a similar way.

This dynamic bronze group has in the past been thought to represent the mythological hero Hercules battling against the Nemean Lion, which he was forced to slay with his bare hands, in order to accomplish his first Labor (see cat. 52, 44.582). However, the gesture of killing the animal by forcing open its jaws is more commonly associated with Hercules’s Biblical counterpart, Samson, who was among the more popular Old Testament figures in Western art from the Middle Ages onward. Like Hercules, Samson appeared to have unlimited strength but, in common with Hercules, he proved vulnerable to female guile, in Samson’s case the Philistine woman Delilah. Samson’s slaying of the lion is one of the two standard stories illustrating the hero’s strength, the other his slaying of the Philistines with an ass’s jawbone. In the episode with the lion (Judges 14.5–14), Samson came across a young lion in the vineyards of Timnath, “And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand.” The carcass of the lion, half-eaten by scavengers, soon became home to a swarm of bees, from the hive of which Samson took honey. Hosting a feast, Samson posed the famous riddle, unsolvable for those present: “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”

The composition is a vigorous and original one. When they are illustrated, examples are almost invariably reproduced with the lion lengthwise, an angle that produces a slightly balletic effect. The model is perhaps most exciting when the bronze is viewed from the front left, an angle that emphasizes the force in the action, with Samson’s left knee pinning down the lion’s paw, the strain in the left arm evident, as Samson wrenches open the lion’s jaw, his body arching back with the strain. Known in a large number of versions, the model has long posed problems of attribution, dating, and function. It is usually described as an inkwell but, as Nicholas Penny suggested in his discussion of the version in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,¹ in several of the known examples the lion is equipped with a tongue, and it is difficult to see how an ink receptacle, usually made of glass or lead, could have easily fitted into the cavity formed by the lion’s open mouth. Perhaps if it was intended as an inkwell, a skin of lead was specially fashioned for the cavity; there are some remnants of lead at the bottom of the Ashmolean example. Even so, ink would have evaporated very quickly from such a relatively large receptacle without any cover, so it is conceivable that many, even most, examples of this model were made without any particular function in mind.

The model was at one time thought to date from late fifteenth-century Florence and to be related to a lost painting of Hercules and the Nemean Lion, one of three large paintings of the Labors of Hercules made by Antonio del Pollaiuolo for the Palazzo Medici in Florence, known principally through the description by Vasari in his Life of the Artist. The Houston version was even catalogued as the work of Pollaiuolo in the 1945 catalogue of the Straus Collection, a suggestion first made by Leo Planiscig in a letter of March 1939 to Percy S. Straus.

Planiscig, who had in 1930 published the model as the work of a Florentine late fifteenth-century follower of Bertoldo di Giovanni,² waxed lyrical about the bronze, describing it as “one of the most beautiful fifteenth-century pieces known and it is the work of Antonio del Pollaiuolo. I can demonstrate this beyond the shadow of a doubt on stylistic grounds.”³ In reaching this rather over-bold conclusion, Planiscig must have taken into account not only the evidence from the passage in Vasari, but presumably also thought he could perceive comparisons between the grimacing face of Samson and that of the giant Antaeus, in Pollaiuolo’s bronze group of Hercules and Antaeus in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.⁴ The Bargello bronze relates quite closely to the lost painting of the same subject from Pollaiuolo’s series, recorded in a small autograph copy. Planiscig also referred Straus to a drawing in the so-called “Raphael Sketchbook” in the Accademia, Venice, compiled by an anonymous Umbro-Florentine artist around 1500 and, as its sobriquet suggests, once attributed to Raphael himself. The drawing depicts Hercules and Samson in combat with a lion.⁵ The drawing in fact has little more in common with the bronze model than its subject, as Planiscig perhaps realized when he received a photograph from Venice. In his subsequent letter to Straus, he explained that having seen the photo, the drawing was a variant of the bronze, but he nevertheless thought that it strengthened his attribution of the sculpture to Pollaiuolo. Planiscig told Straus he wanted to publish his “discovery” as quickly as possible and asked for good photographs of the Samson.⁶

In the event Planiscig never published the bronze, perhaps because of the outbreak of World War II, or else he realized on reflection that he had been over-hasty in his judgment. Careful reading of Vasari’s description, as well as the existence of a probable record of Pollaiuolo’s design in an intarsia panel in the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, make clear that the lost painting showed Hercules confronting the lion face on.⁷ Leaving the Pollaiuolo question aside, scholars have always found it difficult to place this bronze. Among earlier twentieth-century opinions, Bode called it the work of an anonymous sixteenth-century Italian sculptor, based on an antique model,⁸ Frida Schottmüller the late sixteenth-century Venetian sculptor Tiziano Aspetti,⁹ while James Mann accepted the notion of a late fifteenth-century Florentine origin.

More recently, Anthony Radcliffe proposed that the model dated from the seventeenth century,¹⁰ attributing it to the Roman founder Bernardino Danese (documented 1661–75), about whom very little is known, but who is nevertheless documented as one of the bronze founders engaged in casting elements of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s altar of the Cappella del Sacramento in St. Peter’s, Rome.¹¹ The basis for Radcliffe’s attribution of the model to Danese was an assemblage in the Cotton collection in Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, consisting of a bronze bust of Paolo Giordano II Orsini, Duke of Bracciano (1591–1656) after a model by Bernini, mounted on a base with two recumbent lions.¹² The base of this piece, which may well not have been originally made for the bust, although they were together when bought by Charles Rogers in London in 1772, has an inscription recording it as a gift from its maker, Danese, to his friend the Bavarian priest Johann Anton Gugler, in Rome in the Jubilee year 1675. A version of the Samson and the Lion is also in the Cotton collection in Plymouth, bought by Charles Rogers at the same sale, that of the marchese Leonori of Pesaro at Christie’s London in January 1772, when both bronzes were attributed to Alessandro Algardi.¹³ Radcliffe explained that when the two bronzes in Plymouth were placed side by side, it was at once evident that “the base of the bust and the bronze group were modelled by the same hand and cast by the same founder. The lions are of identical type, modelled in the same way, and the quality of the casting and the surface tooling is the same.”¹⁴

This conclusion was not, however, shared by Nicholas Penny in his comprehensive catalogue entry on the version of the Samson and the Lion in the Ashmolean Museum. Penny did not think the similarities between the two bronzes were as strong as Radcliffe had suggested, pointing out that there is no evidence that Danese ever worked as a modeler, as opposed to a founder. Nor was Penny entirely convinced that the group had to be seventeenth century in date, but he suggested that the model could be identified with the three bronzes of “Herculles quy égorge le lion,” recorded in the post mortem inventory of King Louis XIV’s gardener, André Le Nôtre.¹⁵ It would however seem more probable that Le Nôtre’s versions of this subject were a French early seventeenth-century model known from examples in the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection, London,¹⁶ and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.¹⁷

Radcliffe’s suggestion that the model originated in seventeenth-century Italy would seem in the present state of knowledge to be the most likely, although it is difficult to date it more precisely or to point to a particular centre. In some versions, for example those in Oxford and in Plymouth, the animal’s fur and/or the lion cloth are textured with a stippling pattern, a common feature of bronzes made in Augsburg in Southern Germany, but also found in bronzes cast in Naples.¹⁸ As both Radcliffe and Penny have noted, there are significant variations in the quality and facture of the many known casts, which have also been assembled in different ways. So the model may have continued to be made over a longer period and in more than one workshop. There indeed exist modern versions that are obvious pastiches or forgeries.¹⁹ Penny made the acute observation that “In even the best casts . . . the execution seems unworthy of the conception, and one must suspect that the original has been lost. Perhaps it was made of silver.”

Other examples of the model may be found in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London;²⁰ the Wernher Collection, Ranger’s House, London; the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid; the City Art Gallery, Manchester; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.²¹ They also appear from time to time on the art market, for example one sold in 1977 from the Robert Strauss collection.²²

The Houston version, the only gilded one known, was acquired in 1939 by Percy Straus from Simon Meller, from whom Straus had bought many of his bronzes. As with previous purchases, Straus was alerted to the opportunity by Leo Planiscig, who wrote in March 1939 from Florence, whence he had moved from Vienna, after having lost his job at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Planiscig wrote that he had received a letter from Meller, telling him that he had available “an outstanding Quattrocento bronze depicting Hercules struggling with the lion,” and adding that it came from the Eissler collection in Vienna.²³ Planiscig went on to state, “Now, I know this bronze very well, from the time when there would have simply been no question of the possibility of acquiring it from the Eisslers.”²⁴ He was referring to the persecution of the Jewish timber merchant Hermann Eissler, who lost a significant portion of his collection in the years up to 1945. Hermann and his brother Gottfried (1862–1924) were among the leading collectors in Vienna in the decades leading up to the Anschluss in 1938.²⁵ They collected Austrian nineteenth-century paintings as well as more modern works, including the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, but also Old Master paintings and sculptures. Much of the collection seems to have been assembled in period around 1895 to 1912.²⁶ After Austria was incorporated into the German Reich in 1938, persecution of Hermann began, while the family managed to make more secure the positions of his second wife, Hortense (1895–1983), classified as an Arian, as well as his natural daughter Berta (1893–1975). In the spring of 1939, the Eisslers fled Austria, firstly to Budapest, where they were granted Nicaraguan citizenship. They then moved on, firstly to Switzerland and then to France, Hermann eventually settling in Nice, where he survived the war in hiding. In August 1939 he and Hortense, who had meanwhile returned to Vienna, divorced, clearly in order to try to secure their property from further confiscation, since they remarried in 1951. Hermann’s daughter Bertha also around the same time entered into a phantom marriage with a non-Jewish lawyer from Budapest, Joseph Morelli, which likewise allowed her to retain those parts of the collection held in her name.²⁷

The Houston Samson and the Lion is one of a group of works for which Hortense Eissler received an export permit from the Austrian Bundesdenkmalamt on September 21, 1938, when it was valued at 300 Reichsmark.²⁸ This permit, for export to the Galerie Neupert in Zürich, was issued following the expropriation for Hitler’s collection of four important paintings of apothecary shop signs by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, sent to Munich in June 1938.²⁹ After the war, these works came to form part of the collections of the Österreichische Galerie, Vienna. Hortense and Berta remained in Vienna during the war, selling some works to Hans Posse, the curator charged with building the collection for Hitler’s projected Führermuseum in Linz, while trying in vain to obtain in exchange from Posse permission to export the remainder of the collection.

After the end of World War II, Hermann, Hortense, and Berta made strenuous and repeated efforts to recover their property, all of which failed, much of the Eissler collection being accessioned into the Austrian state collections. In 2009, however, the Austrian Restitution Commission agreed to return the Waldmüller apothecary shop signs to the Eissler heirs, but once again rejected a request for return of other items, on the grounds that the sales by Hortense and Berta during the War had been voluntary.³⁰

The Samson and the Lion and other items exported in 1938, all with low values, were evidently quickly sold in order to provide some funds for Hermann Eissler in his new life in exile. It is clear from Planiscig’s letter that the bronze had been a valued object within the Eisslers’ collection and that Eissler would, in other circumstances, never have contemplated disposing of it. However, there seems to be no doubt from the surviving evidence that the bronze was fully in the possession of the Eisslers when sold, and that the sale was, to that extent, voluntary. In encouraging Straus to buy the bronze, Planiscig, who as discussed above believed it to be a masterpiece by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, advised his correspondent on how to deal with Simon Meller, whom Planiscig reported believed it to be the work of a lesser artist, Francesco di Giorgio: “Dr Meller would like to show you the bronze in Paris. Do not tell him, or anyone else, my attribution, which is a discovery. Let him go on thinking it is by Francesco di Giorgio, otherwise he will start asking too much for it. I would be so pleased if you could acquire this work for a reasonable price: it would be the crowning glory of any collection of bronzes.”³¹

Straus seems to have moved quickly to acquire the bronze since, when Planiscig next wrote, less than two weeks later on April 2, 1939, it was already in Percy Straus’s possession.

—Jeremy Warren