Mercury

Entry

This Mercury is one of at least six variations of this type,⁴ among others to be found in the Los Angeles County Museum,⁵ in the Louvre,⁶ in the Frick Collection in New York (this bronze is adapted to a Perseus, who holds a sword and Argus’s severed head),⁷ in a private collection in Boston and a bronze sold in 2008 on the German art market. This last work is likely identical to a version in the former Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, lost since 1945.⁸ The most elaborate version is in the Bargello in Florence and is held to be the original model.⁹ This example was probably made by Willem van Tetrode (c. 1525-1580) around 1560-62 in association with the bronze statues for the Pitigliano scrittoio, a large display cabinet commended by Vasari as the sculptor’s magnum opus. The bronze could have been given to Cosimo I de’ Medici by Tetrode on the handing over of the scrittoio in June 1562, although there is no proof of this. That the statue was part of the cabinet itself, as Radcliffe and Avery believed, is unlikely.¹⁰ In Vasari’s enumeration of works belonging to this group, he makes no mention of a Mercury. Moreover, this figure has no place in the decoration programme.

The Amsterdam bronze does indeed differ in pose from the Bargello model, but it has the same type of face and the same body modelling and can thus be attributed to the same hand. Mercury stands on his left leg, while the Bargello bronze stands on the right. The curve of the arms also differs, giving the Amsterdam statue a more elegant impression; essentially, seen from the side, his pose follows the lines of a letter ‘S’. Consequently, compared with the descending Mercury in Florence, his movement is more forward leaning, as if in flight. There are insufficient grounds for the older attribution of the bronze to the more obscure fiammingo Elia Candido (born Elias de Witte, active 1567-d. 1574),¹¹ or for the recent attribution of the version in the Louvre to the young Adriaen de Vries (1556-1626).¹²

Undoubtedly, the sculptor adopted the theme of the Mercurio volante from his master, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), who used it on the pedestal of his Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. Tetrode was responsible for the execution of the bronzes adorning this pedestal around 1550-51, when employed by Cellini as an assistant.¹³ In terms of the model, Tetrode’s version of the descending Mercury in the Bargello is also highly similar to Cellini’s large statue of Perseus. Cellini’s Mercurio volante, however, is placed in a niche of the pedestal and therefore conceived frontally, while Tetrode planned a three-dimensional bronze. In all probability, Giambologna’s work was more important for the creation of the flying Mercury. The version in Bologna of around 1562-64 is this sculptor’s earliest rendition of the theme.¹⁴ Both artists were engaged more or less simultaneously in exploring the same ambitious subject. Whether there was any question of an artistic contest between the two sculptors – perhaps by order of Cosimo I, as Berger and Krahn suggested – cannot be proved.¹⁵ Nor is it possible to establish whether Tetrode’s Mercury was the earlier of the two, as Radcliffe believed.¹⁶ Initially, the two men devised their compositions quite differently: Tetrode’s earliest Mercury in the Bargello stands up straight, as if descending from the heavens, while Giambologna’s statue in Bologna makes a more upward or forward motion. In the Amsterdam variant, however, it appears Tetrode has incorporated a number of elements from Giambologna’s composition, for instance, by changing the god’s supporting leg from right to left and introducing forward motion, thus suggesting this variant was made after the Bargello version.

A mid-sixteenth century drawing of the interior of an art academy shows an anatomical model hanging by a rope in practically the same pose as Tetrode’s Bargello Mercury.¹⁷ This might indicate that his first composition was known in Florence in the 1560s. The drawing is by the Flemish artist Stradanus (born Jan van der Straet, 1523-1605), a compatriot of Tetrode and one of the founders of the Accademia del Disegno. A very finely cast reduction of the Bargello type is assumed to have been cast in Florence by Antonio Susini (active 1578-d. 1624).¹⁸ Tetrode took the original model of his Mercury with him to the North in 1567, where it rapidly spawned imitations. Together with Giambologna’s Mercury, Tetrode’s more static variant was echoed in southern Germany by Hubert Gerhard (c. 1540/50-before 1621), in a bronze (h. 93 cm), datable around 1594, formerly in the possession of the Von Stetten family in Augsburg (now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum), and a gilt bronze from 1587 by Carlo del Palagio (1540-1598) adorning the East Hall grotto fountain in the Munich Residenz.¹⁹ Tetrode himself developed yet another variant in about 1574 when he was in Cologne; this version is only known from an engraving by Adriaen de Weerdt (RP-P-OB-47.332). In addition Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) copied the Mercury in a design for his planets series engraved by Jacob Matham (RP-P-OB-27.159).²⁰ There is a possibly seventeenth-century bronze reduction of the Mercury in Braunschweig, alongside a replica cast by Caspar von Turkelsteyn (1579-in or after 1648) in Brussels around 1630.²¹ By contrast there are only three known replicas of the Amsterdam type. Did Tetrode prefer his first, more innovative version when Giambologna’s Mercury quickly gained popularity?

Frits Scholten, 2024
An earlier version of this entry was published in F. Scholten, M. Verber et al., From Vulcan’s Forge: Bronzes from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1450-1800, exh. cat. London (Daniel Katz Ltd.)/Vienna (Liechtenstein Museum) 2005-06, no. 34