Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 100. (Budapest, 2004)
URBACH, ZSUZSA: Ein flämischer ikonographischer Bildtypus im italienischen Quattrocento. Bemerkungen zur Studie von Éva Eszláry
Florentine master of Flemish origin, Giambologna (1529-1608). Although he is not so widely known as his master, he was the first who managed to carry out a monumental rearing equestrian bronze statue. Requesting advice even from Galileo Galilei, he cast the equestrian monument of the Spanish King, Philip IV, between 1634 and 1640, which, following his death, was erected in Madrid by his son, Ferdinando. 21 Ferdinando Tacca started his career in his father's workshop, after whose death he took over the direction of the workshop, inheriting his unfinished commissions as well. In 1640, he cast four more bronze lions to the equestrian statue of Philip IV, then in 1642, again in Madrid, he cast the figures of the four Evangelists for the Royal Chapel. 22 Besides being a sculptor, Ferdinando Tacca was appointed court architect and stage designer in the Medici Court; the first stilloperating theatre in Florence, the Teatro della Pergola was designed by him 23 , and from 1656 onwards he organised the ecclesiastical and the secular pageantries in Florence. Even though Ferdinando Tacca is an important link between the Mannerist Giambologna and the Baroque Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725), his oeuvre has begun to be outlined only in the last few decades. 24 One of his most significant works is the bronze antependium depicting the Lapidation of Saint Stephen Protomartyr at the former high altar in the Santo Stefano al Ponte in Florence. 25 On the basis of this relief, Anthony Radcliffe attributed a whole series of bronze statuettes of dual figures to the artist. Radcliffe noticed that the modelling of the face of the woman hugging her child on the right side of the relief and the figure of the dancing young man on the right edge are identical to the bronze statuette Ruggiero and Angelica in the Louvre. On the basis of similar analogies, the English art historian ascribed a further six small bronzes portraying two figures, inspired by literature or mythology, to Ferdinando Tacca, among them also the Venus and Adonis bronze statuette in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. 26 At the end of the 1980s, further bronze statuettes appeared in a private collection in Paris that correspond with the Budapest small bronzes. The set of four interrelated hunting scenes in Paris is important not only because two of them are closly 21 On Pietro Tacca, see K. Watson, Pietro Tacca Successor to Giovanni Bologna, New York 1983. 22 The early works of Ferdinando Tacca were destroyed. On his further works, see Radcliffe, op. cit. (n. 3), 14-23; Brook, op. cit. 1985 (n. 3), 111-28. 23 L. Zangheri, "Ferdinando Tacca: Architetto e scenografo," Antichità Viva 13, no. 2 (1974), 50-61. 24 Radcliffe, op. cit. (n. 3); Brook, op. cit. 1985 (n. 3); id., op. cit. 1986 (n. 3); id., Sculptors in Florence during the reign of Grand Duke Ferdinando II of Tuscany (1621-1670): Ferdinando Tacca and his circle, Ph.D. diss., University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art 1986. 25 Today the bronze relief decorates the altar of one of the chapels. Ferdinando Tacca made further bronze works for this antependium; for more about them, see Brook, op. cit. 1986 (n. 3). 26 Radcliffe, op. cit. (n. 3), 15; cf. H. R. Weihrauch, Europäische Bronzestatuetten, Braunschweig 1967, 234.
