Object Description
Italian, 18th/19th century
After a model attributed to Guglielmo della Porta (1515-1577)
Relief of the Pietà
Gilt bronze
18.8 cm. x 13 cm.
The present gilt bronze relief is a version of a composition described by the art historian Ulrich Middeldorf as ‘perhaps the most famous sacred image in Europe around 1600’.
The original composition is attributed to the Counter-Reformation sculptor and Roman follower of Michelangelo, Guglielmo della Porta. For a contemporary cast dated to the sixteenth-century, see the relief in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (acc. no. 1989.75.1), which has the same composition as the present relief, but is believed to be south German in origin. Another contemporary cast with a slightly different background landscape is illustrated in Warren, op. cit., p. 805, fig. 299. The facture of the present relief suggests a later date, in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century.