Grotesque Animal, Oil Lamp

Entry

This small oil lamp is in the tradition of grotesque all’antica bronze oil lamps of various sizes that were made in large numbers in Northern Italian, particularly Paduan, workshops.³ The elaborately embellished large examples made by Riccio would also actually have worked,⁴ but the numerous mass-produced small lamps were probably intended purely as amusing curiosities for collectors and not as functional artefacts. Many of the small lamps have a comic-erotic or indecent shape,⁵ or are produced in the form of grotesque animals⁶ and caricatured Moor and satyr heads.⁷ Through their exotic iconography they refer to a world in which desires were not held in check, and Nature was still in disorder and inhabited by monstrous hybrid creatures.⁸ The Latin inscription VITA QVID ALIVD (Life, what else?) on a small lamp in the shape of a reclining monster, for instance, hints at this.⁹ Drôleries and grotesques traditionally inhabited a shadowy fringe, from where they could give a sardonic and ironic commentary on the serious world.¹⁰

The small Amsterdam oil lamp, of which there are no other casts known, differs from the majority of Italian examples because it has been designed as a standing figure, a satyr-like animal bending forward. Standing lamps seem chiefly to have been made outside Italy. There is, for example, a similarity in size and pose to a small lamp in the former Abbot Guggenheim collection. That one is shaped as a standing satyr-like dwarf dressed as a bishop with an enormous phallus and a lion’s head with gaping mouth.¹¹ It is a visual pun on the Latin word cornutus, which means both mitred bishop and cuckold (betrayed husband, idiot) and because of this sardonic iconographic reference to the Roman Catholic Church a provenance from the Protestant Netherlands or Germany is likely for this example. The current attribution to Cornelis Floris II (1514-1575) is not convincing, however. A related lamp in Berlin (fig. a) – a small standing monster with goat’s legs – was also attributed to Floris, but is in fact entirely consistent with grotesque designs by Arent van Bolten (c. 1573-before 1633).¹² Two Italian oil lamps can be regarded as southern predecessors of the Amsterdam lamp. They have the appearance of reclining monsters, and in terms of pose and modelling – notice for example the pronounced, wrinkled back and spine – are similar to the satyr lamp.¹³

On the grounds of the overall similarities to a number of larger bronze oil lamps or grotesque beasts that were associated with Van Bolten, Leeuwenberg also attributed the Rijksmuseum lamp to this sculptor and silversmith from Zwolle.¹⁴ The little lamp shares with Van Bolten’s designs the penchant for the grotesque, and the liking for sinuous forms that tend towards the auricular style. All the same the differences between this piece and his work are just as striking as the similarities – the much smaller size, the manufacture with a painstakingly hammered surface to give the suggestion of a scaly skin, the less fluid modelling, the static pose and the round base on which the satyr stands and which supports his outstretched head. For the time being there are too few points in common with Van Bolten’s work to support the attribution.

The shape and the static position suggest that the bronze was at one time designed to be mounted on a larger object, for example as a supporting or crowning component of a table ornament, a Kunstkammer object or a piece of furniture. A sketch for a salt attributed to the Augsburg artist Hans Friedrich Schorer (c. 1585-after 1654) gives an impression of this sort of application (fig. b).¹⁵ The receptacle of this piece is supported by a series of squatting sphinxes-cum-oil lamps which here probably functioned as individual salt cellars. It is not impossible that the Amsterdam lamp is an independently conceived replica of an applied figure like this. A provenance from the Netherlands around 1610-30 is likely.

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. 41