A BRONZE MODEL OF THE PORCELLINO

The Porcellino, or Wild Boar, seems to have been discovered in Rome with other figures which made up a hunting scene. It appeared in a Roman guide of 1556 but by 1568 it was already in Florence, and by 1591 it was in the Uffizi (F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique - The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 161-162, no. 13). Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries it was widely admired as one of the most impressive and naturalistic pieces of ancient sculpture, however it was badly damaged in the fire at the Uffizi in 1762. Although immediately restored, the marble never regained the same level of popularity. The present depiction of the robustly modelled boar gives an excellent impression of the original state of the antique prototype.