16th-CENTURY MANNERIST SCULTOR, circle of GIOVANNI ANGELO MONTORSELLI (Montorsoli, 1507 – Florence, 1583)
Putto riding a dolphin
white marble, cm. 90x35x45
The sculptural group presented here depicts a putto riding a dolphin, attributable to the Mannerist period according to the study conducted by Professor Fattorini.
It is likely that our sculpture served as an ornamental element of a fountain, with water gushing from the animal’s mouth, now sealed.
As Fattorini recalls in his writing, the association between the figure of the putto and a marine creature is a recurring motif in Italian Renaissance sculpture, starting as early as the fifteenth century. Notable examples include Verrocchio’s bronze Putto with Dolphin, originally conceived for the fountain of Villa Medici in Careggi, and Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s Dying Putto at the Bode Museum in Berlin; the theme was reprised in the decorations of the Chapel of Relics in the Malatesta Temple in Rimini, the work of Agostino di Duccio, and in the fireplace by Desiderio da Settignano (no. 5086-1859) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The image of a putto riding a fish (or a marine mammal) may have originated in ancient sculpture, particularly in the Satyr Riding a Dolphin (Villa Borghese, Rome), from which it derived.
A similar subject was inevitably destined to be included in the decorative elements of some of the main monumental fountains of the sixteenth century, such as the Tribolo’s Hercules and Anteo in Villa Castello, the work of the Messina-born Orione di Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, or Giambologna’s Neptune in Bologna. One of these smaller fountains was the Putto Riding a Dolphin (no. 1116) of the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Esztergom, which shows a similar arrangement to our group.
In our sculpture, we note ‘a more meticulous attention to the rendering of the scales and fins of the grotesque marine animal, which menacingly displays its teeth and elegantly twists its caudal fin behind the head of the youth, who raises his right hand to support it, in a complicated play and with an unnatural movement, of clear Michelangelo inspiration.’
We can therefore affirm that the sculptural group falls within the canons of Mannerism, towards the mid-sixteenth century, when figures of this kind began to become very popular in Florence, spreading beyond the borders of Tuscany as well.
