Italian, probably Florence, 18th century

The present model is derived from the Capitoline Brutus, a Roman bronze portrait head mounted on a Renaissance marble bust, which was first recorded in the drawings of Maarten van Heemskerk in the 1530s. Based on the profile’s likeness to a coin in the collection of Fulvio Orsini, the head was identified in the 16^th century as representing Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman republic in the 6^th century B.C. While many modern scholars have preferred to emphasise the influence of early-3^rd-century Greek portraiture on the head, some have acknowledged the possibility that it does represent Brutus, and may have been cast in the 1^st century B.C., when portrait busts of early Roman figures were fashionable. The earliest reference to a copy of the bust occurs in 1790 in the letters of the French painter Jacques-Louis David, while other Grand Tour versions are known from the 18^th and 19^th centuries (Christie’s, New York, 24^th May 2001, lot 139). The present bust is particularly well cast in the hair and is reminiscent of reductions by master sculptor Massimiliano Soldani Benzi (1656-1740).