Neptune

Severo Calzetta da Ravenna

mid-16th century · Bronze · European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

This extremely porous cast is probably too crude for Severo’s workshop, even at its worst, and yet the person responsible seems to have been familiar with its practices. The workshop’s signature rectangular plugs are present above the buttocks; the metal emerged from the mold virtually unreworked except for some taps of a hammer, visible on the arms and legs; the implications of chest hair came straight from the wax without being tooled later; and there is some vitality in the curly hair and beard. Otherwise, this is a deplorable takeoff of Severo’s Neptunes standing above sea creatures, good examples of which are in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Frick.[1] Patrick De Winter tagged a slightly beefier Neptune in Berlin, with altered arms and a less strenuously nipped-in belly, as by Marcantonio da Ravenna after Severo, but it is almost hopeless to assign names to products of such little merit.[2] Our sea god originally steadied himself with a lost trident and tethered his monstrous companion to a lost leash or chain held in his cupped hand. The mentioned examples are splashier versions of Severo’s famous sea-monster inkwells. -JDD Footnotes (For key to shortened references see bibliography in Allen, Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022.) 1. NGA, 1942.9.104 (D. Smith 2013a); Frick, 1916.2.12 (Pope-Hennessy 1970, pp. 126–35). 2. De Winter 1986, p. 124, figs. 131, 132.

Artist

Severo Calzetta da Ravenna

Date

mid-16th century

Medium

Bronze

Culture

Italian, possibly Ravenna

Department

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Credit line

Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964