A bronze lover's feast: James David Draper luxuriates in the textures—and original scholarship—of the Frick's well displayed exhibition of the Quentin Foundation's sculpture

The Quentin Foundation has assembled a topflight collection of renaissance and baroque tin statuettes, including some of the boldest statements made by dint of Mannerist and baroque sculptors. Nearly forty are now to be seen at the Frick Collection in fresh York in a handsome installation made all the more enjoyable for having no vitrines. The organ of sight can thus navel freely around the works, and it is possible to savour unimpeded the sensory appeal of these stylish figures--for the greatest in quantity part nude--and to relish their nuances of chasing and patination. The collection is international in character, thus that one judges stylistic variations from France and northern Europe as well as Italy.

The catalogue is all innovative collaboration between the dean of tin studies, Manfred Leithe-Jasper; venerated former director of the decorative arts department at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and Patricia Wengraf, the energetic and erudite London dealer. It is frankly stated in those cases when the Quentin Foundation acquired its and zincs through Wengraf. Leithe-Jasper contributes an essay upon the history of bronze collecting. Wengraf uses the occasion to publish her detailed findings upon Francesco Fanelli, the Baroque bronzista born in Florence on the other hand active mainly in Genoa and England. The issue is that we are now a great deal of more comfortably acquainted with Fanelli, whose works from the English period are better known, if many times slacker in quality owing to the multiplication of casts. The splendid Quentin hermes unique in its large scale and pulsing with bravura, is an exception. sum of two units of Fanelli's standard horses are also at hand One was adapted to a assemblage of St Eustace and the Stag ill the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg on the other hand the bosky group otherwise without doubt remains obdurately German and not Fanelli, as the caption to fig. 16 upon page 47 implies.

The authors do not hesitate to say in like manner when they disagree about attribution, as in the case of a gracefully fanciful Mannerist male deity (no. 16) Wengraf secure from dangers Adriaen de Vries as its maker, an idea Leithe-Japser does not endorse. In reality this curiosity is too slight for De Vries, and Leithe-Jasper is supported, it appear to bes to me, by the findings of Shelley Sturman, conservator at the National Gallery in Washington, who has supplied helpful analytic reports upon several of the works. In this case, Sturman finds the cuprous alloy unlike those of previously analysed De Vries bronzes

There are at least three total masterpieces: the north Italian Hercules and Antaeus, prototype of later versions; the Venus withholding a heart from Cupid by dint of Carlo di Cesare del Palagio; and the Neptune through Giuseppe Piamontini. There are also superlative casts of compositions there regularly rencountered These include all elegant cast of Giambologna's Mars; an appropriately jagged one of Francesco Segala's Hercules; and a jewel like one of Massimiliano Soldani's Apollo Musagetes. Overall, the collection is remarkable for the excitement of fabrics and the integrity of surfaces that the pieces display.

The collection also boasts a not many terracottas on more or les the same scale as the and zincs For exhibition purposes they provide welcome relief, serving as a sort of foil. I might have had derange sustaining the attribution to Giovanni Bandini dell'Opera of the paired clay Mars and Vulcan, on the other hand the catalogue points to Bandini's works made for Urbino (brought to light by the agency of Eike Schmidt in a 1998 article in Nuovi Studi). Indeed, the rugg Urbinate efforts contrast with Bandini's cooler Florentine manner, and the Bandini idea gains in appeal and conviction. upon the basis of this pail; I would peril an attribution to Bandini of another terracotta, a hawkish bust in the Ashmolean Museum, catalogued by the agency of Nicholas Penny in 1992 as a St Paul by the agency of Baccio Bandinelli. As striking as it is, I diocese nothing of Willem van Tetrode in the Quentin collection's painted terracotta Hercules. Soldani's haunting Dead Christ attended by dint of angels, on its original ebony base, is among that master's actual best ceramic sculptures.

Not your usual recitations of provenance and related versions, the catalogue notes are copious on the other hand delivered with acuity and panache, pointing without minute differences, of course, on the other hand always reminding one of the actual frolic that cataloguing can be. The horizontal of illustration is uncommonly high. In all, this is a labour of have affection for in which a discerning public will undoubtedly also find delight. I await to visit the exhibition repeatedly and to see several of the same faces each time I go

James David Draper is Henry R Kravis curator in the department of European statuary and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, fresh York

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