NICOLÒ ROCCATAGLIATA (GENOA, CIRCA 1560-1636 OR BEFORE, VENICE)

This delightful bronze is as charming as it is mysterious. Venus is perhaps gesturing, or requesting silence, from an off-stage companion, possibly Cupid, as suggested in the 2004 exhibition catalogue from The Frick Collection. Her coquettish contrapposto posture suggests some amorous complicity.

No other cast of the present composition is known. However, there is a closely related group by Nicolò Roccatagliata of Astronomy in the Robert H. Smith Collection, now donated to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Another similar figure, illustrated in the 2004 Frick catalogue, is the Roccatagliata group Venus Chastising Cupid, now in the Museo del Castello Buonconsiglio, Trentino. As Wengraf also notes in the Frick catalogue, these figures were previously attributed to Tiziano Aspetti, but Radcliffe subsequently proposed an attribution to Aspetti’s contemporary in Venice – the sculptor Roccatagliata – an attribution which has now been universally accepted. All of these female figures, with their wonderfully high arched eyebrows and heavily lidded eyes and dense, tied-up hairstyles are whimsically original and specific, as noted by Wengraf, but the present bronze, as a single figure rather than a larger composition, with her tall, turning body, presents an incredibly elegant and appealing composition.