Attributed to Orazio Mochi

This playful marble follows the traditional Renaissance iconography of Charity represented as a woman with three children. It differs from 16th-century depictions of the subject in its omittance of the imagery of nursing, conveying the virtue instead through the more chaste gesture of proffering fruit. Lacking the symbolic attribute of a flame above her head – here converted into freely flowing locks of hair – and dressed in a neatly tied bodice, the female figure is imbued with the sincere naturalism that characterised Florentine sculpture in the early 17th century. It was the sculptor Valerio Cioli (1529–1599) who introduced this aspect of worldliness into the Tuscan capital’s courtly sculpture, epitomised by the genre statuary he and his collaborators created for the Boboli Gardens.

Among the numerous sculptors active within the Boboli decorative scheme was Cioli’s nephew, Giovan Simone, to whom the present group has in the past been attributed (see Bellesi, op. cit.). Though allowing for the fact that different hands cannot always be easily distinguished in this milieu, Claudio Pizzorusso (referenced below) has proposed an alternative attribution of the Charity to Orazio Mochi. This is based primarily on a stylistic comparison with the so-called Saccomazzone group, which was conceived and modelled by Mochi and sculpted in stone for the Boboli Gardens by Romolo Ferrucci del Tadda. The group’s expressive faces and careful rendering of the drapery, with heavy undulating folds, is paralleled by the present Charity. Mochi is recorded to have been an accomplished marble carver, which substantiates his proposed authorship of this beautifully carved group.

The present lot is the subject of an expertise by Claudio Pizzorusso.

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