Charging Bull

Entry

At least twelve casts exist of this bronze.² The heavy, scarcely professional appearance of the present sculpture suggests a northern manufacture, possibly in a bell or cannon foundry. A technical idiosyncrasy is the round opening in the middle of the bull’s belly, through which the core material was removed. A comparably sized hole in the same place can be discerned on a bronze (also depicting a bull) in the collection of the Rijksmuseum (BK-16944), attributed to Artus I Quellinus (1609-1668). In both cases, these holes were perhaps made in the wax prior to casting, thus allowing air to escape when pouring the metal.

None of the twelve known casts of the bull can be linked to a documented provenance earlier than the late nineteenth century; nor does such a work figure in seventeenth-century paintings of Flemish art cabinet interiors. Avery therefore interpreted the model as perhaps being a nineteenth-century pastiche, or a seventeenth-century model or bronze from which large numbers of surmoulages were made in the nineteenth century.³ Considering the primitive execution of the Amsterdam cast, however, it seems less probable that, in this specific case, the work concerned is a product of the nineteenth century.

Contrary to Quellinus’s aforementioned Bellowing Bull and Giambologna’s oft-copied Pacing Bull (BK-15784),⁴ the modeller of this bronze has chosen for a far more dynamic, even charging stance. The stalwart bull’s legs are poised to attack his (invisible) opponent, with his tail whipping upward. The animal’s combative pose led Bode to conclude that a bronze version of the bull in J. Pierpont Morgan’s possession in 1910 was connected to two other bronzes in the same collection: one of a jumping dog, the other of a nude hunter with a dog.⁵ He proposed that these three works, today preserved at the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, were perhaps part of a large ensemble centred on the theme of a wild bull chase. As affirmed in paintings by Hans Bol, Peter Paul Rubens and Paul de Vos, this was a beloved theme in Flemish art. In sculpture, the largest known example of a hunting tableau composed of individual statuettes – fifteen, to be precise – is that of a bull chase preserved at the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum in Aachen (on long-term loan from the Ludwig collection),⁶ recently attributed to the Neapolitan sculptor Lorenzo Vaccaro (1653-1706).⁷

Avery rejected Bode’s association of the bull with the aforementioned statuettes on the basis of observed differences in style and facture. He convincingly identified the separate Jumping Dog as an invention of the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Bandini (1540-1599) and the Hunter with Dog as a work by the neo-classicist John Gibson (1790-1866).⁸ Avery upheld the bull’s localization in Flanders,⁹ generally acknowledged since Bode. His theory that the bull was conceived as an independent statuette – a rejection of its forming part of a bull chase or any other ensemble of individual works – is supported by the fact that not one of the other eleven bulls known today is accompanied by one or more other figures. Noteworthy, however, is the presence of the hole just below the left eye on the present bull. Was it possible that here at some point a dog (?) was attached, as such being butted by the bull’s head?

Bieke van der Mark, 2024