Italian or Southern German, 17th century

Probably: Hans W. Lange, Berlin, 19-20 June 1940, lot 167 (consigned by B.H., Charlottenburg);

Dr Otto Dettmers, Bremen, by 1961

This bronze is not recorded in the publicly available databases of lost or stolen art and is also not recorded as a loss with the Art Loss Register.

Sechs Sammler Stellen Aus, exh. cat. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 1961, p. 36, no. 75

Hamburg, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Sechs Sammler Stellen Aus, 1961

This powerful model, of which no other versions appear to be known, represents an unusual iconography: A heroic male figure wielding torches is seated upon a ferocious dragon, which perches on a cloudy sphere. When exhibited in 1961 the figure was identified as Jupiter, who was depicted wielding fiery thunderbolts in Baroque bronzes such as Alessandro Algardi's firedog (see a version in the Wallace Collection, London), in which the god is seated on his eagle atop a globe - a composition which may in part have inspired the present model. The lion skin draped around the figure's hips, however, suggests that this iconography could here have been conflated with Hercules slaying the Hydra.

The 1961 exhibition catalogue (op. cit.) described the bronze as Southern German based on an alleged attribution by E.F. Bange to Caspar Gras (1585–1674). While there are some stylistic similarities with works associated with Gras, such as the River God in the Peter Marino collection tentatively given to Gras by Warren (op. cit., no. 6), this attribution is ultimately unconvincing. A somewhat related composition of Jupiter and the Eagle in a private collection was formerly attributed to Caspar Gras and more recently to Willem van Tetrode (Scholten, op. cit., fig. 53).

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Scholten, Willem van Tetrode, Sculptor (c. 1525-1580), exh. cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and The Frick Collection, New York, 2003, pp. 46-47 and p. 128. no. 37; J. Warren, Beauty & Power: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Peter Marino Collection, London, 2010, pp. 74-79