After Tiziano Aspetti (Padua 1559 - 1606 Pisa), Italian, Circa 1600

David David-Weill, Paris, by repute;

AuctionArt, Paris, 17 June 2008, lot 67;

Where acquired by Aso O. Tavitian.

Tiziano Aspetti belonged to a dynasty of Venetian founders and sculptors. Born in Padua in 1565, he studied sculpture with Girolamo Campagna, one of the most important practitioners in Venice at the end of the 16th century. For almost sixteen years he worked exclusively for Giovanni Grimani, a great collector of ancient statuary, for whom he restored ancient marbles. However, like his contemporaries Alessandro Vittoria (Trento 1528 - 1608 Venice) and Girolamo Campagna (Verona 1552 - 1625 Venice), Aspetti created small bronzes intended to be placed in the studiolo of a connoisseur/ humanist.

The figure style and physiognomy of this bronze, of which only two other examples are known (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris¹ and a larger bronze in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore)² echo elements of the bronze figure of Mars by Aspetti in the Frick Collection, New York (1916.2.56) as well as some of the figures in Aspetti’s large reliefs produced for the altar in Sant’Antonio, Padua (the commission he received in 1593). 

The present cast is more finely worked than the other known casts and includes more surface details, such as scales on the hippocamp’s tail and sharper chiseling in the hair.

Neptune was the Roman god of the sea. Here, he is accompanied by a hippocamp, or sea horse, a mythological creature that was half horse and half fish. Originally the god would have held a trident in his left hand. Neptune was often represented as a symbol of the Republic of Venice. 

¹Weihrauch, p. 160-161, fig. 195, (no. FRBNF44439537)

²https://art.thewalters.org/detail/16880/neptune-with-a-seahorse/ (acc. No. 54.49)

RELATED LITERATURE

H. R. Weihrauch, Europaische Bronzstatuetten, Braunschweig 1967.