His head tilted back and turned to the right, the man depicted in this characterful portrait is animated by an alert and confident gaze. Framed by vigorously modelled curls of hair, his aging features are rendered with a sophisticated naturalism evoking that of ancient Roman portraiture.

The head of the present bust relates closely to a small bronze bust of a man in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. KK 5615, fig. 1), which is considered the prime cast among several surviving bronzes of the model. The Vienna bust includes a short truncation with a piece of drapery fastened around the man’s left shoulder, while a variant in the Museum of Replica Handbags s in Budapest (inv. no. 5365, fig. 2) – though identical in the head – has a longer bust with bare shoulders. Another version of the Budapest variant, generally considered an inferior cast, has been recorded in the Metropolitan Museum, New York and was formerly in the Untermyer collects ion. A cast which follows the Vienna model was recorded in a South American private collects ion, circa 2007. Jeremy Warren (op. cit. 2014, p. 163, n. 21) mentions a version of the model formerly in the Edouard Chappey and Heilbronner collects ions which was subsequently with Kugel in Paris, and several further casts are reputed to exist. The present version, published by Claudia Kryza-Gersch (op. cit. 2008, p. 312) as part of her discussion of the Vienna bronze, is unique in consisting of only a bronze head, which is set into mottled yellow marble (probably giallo antico) shoulders. While it corresponds to the other bronzes in its under life-size dimensions, it appears to be the only known cast with hollowed pupils; the eyes of the Vienna bust are inlaid in silver, but its pupils and irises are not delineated.

Once attributed to the Mantuan court sculptor Antico (circa 1460-1528), the busts in Vienna and Budapest have been the subjects of scholarly discussion throughout the 20th century. It was Peter Meller who, in his seminal 1977 article on the sculptor (op. cit., p. 202), first proposed an attribution of both busts to Simone Bianco. Hailing from the province of Arezzo, Simone Bianco established a substantial career as a sculptor in Venice within the ambit of Tullio Lombardo (circa 1455-1532), in whose workshop he may have trained. His signed oeuvre, which consists of six marble busts in public collects ions including the Louvre and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is representative of the sculptor’s specialism in ideal portraiture inspired by antique prototypes. He appears to have catered exclusively to private patrons, notably the Grimani family, for whom he may also have restored antiquities (see Markham Schulz, op. cit.). Although few of his commissions are recorded, and much of his oeuvre is made up of attributions, Simone has emerged through recent scholarship as a unique artistic personality in early 16th-century Venice, celebrated for his idiosyncratic all’antica busts, which are distinguished by both artistic flair and technical refinement.

Meller’s attribution of the Vienna and Budapest busts to Simone Bianco rested primarily on a comparison with the sculptor’s signed marble bust of a man in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (inv. no. NMSk 75a, fig. 3), which shows a similar facial type and gaze, with an analogous modelling of the folds of skin around the mouth and in the neck. Meller further noted a resemblance of the busts to the Roman marble known as the Grimani Vitellius, formerly in the Grimani collects ion, and now in the Museo Archeologico, Venice, indicating that the author of the model is likely to have been active in the Grimani’s Venetian milieu. The attribution of at least the Vienna bronze to Simone Bianco has largely been accepted, including by Manfred Leithe-Jasper (op. cit.) and, with some reservations, Kryza-Gersch (op. cit. 2008 and 2016). However, despite the relatively recent discovery of documents proving that Simone Bianco produced portraiture in bronze as well as marble – in 1523, he received a commission from Marco and Marino Grimani for two life-size bronze busts of deceased members of their family – the attribution of surviving bronzes to the sculptor has somet.mes s been contested. In 2015 Anne Markham Schulz argued firmly against Simone’s authorship of the Vienna bust, noting deficiencies in the treatment of the hair in comparison with the sculptor’s signed works (op. cit., p. 42 and n. 66). Conversely, in her 2008 discussion of the Vienna bust, Kryza-Gersch had called Simone’s authorship into question by arguing that the ‘seducente realismo’ of the bronze would represent a rare apex in the sculptor’s oeuvre, which is otherwise characterised ‘da un certo schematismo’ (op. cit., p. 312). Despite these doubts, in the absence of another known sculptor who, on stylistic grounds, could have conceived this highly accomplished model, Simone remains a plausible candidate, and a comparison between the group of bronze heads and the signed marble bust in Stockholm is undeniably compelling.

As well as the authorship of the model, the question of the relationship between the casts remains to be resolved. While the facture of the Vienna bronze indicates that it was designed for reproduction, the variations in both appearance and quality between the surviving casts suggest that the model may have been reproduced over some t.mes . Both the Vienna and the Budapest heads were modelled separately from their bronze shoulders, which were added below the neck before casting. It is therefore possible that the present head was cast individually for insertion into marble shoulders, as was not uncommon with all’antica busts in the sixteenth century. However, considering the somewhat repetitive carving of the marble in comparison to the finely cast head, it is also possible that the head was detached from a bronze bust made in temporal proximity to the Vienna and Budapest busts, and inserted into its present setting at a slightly later date. A close comparison between the three casts reveals only minor differences in modelling, which include slightly longer tufts of hair at the centre of the forehead in the present head, a stronger curling of the ringlets at the temples in the Vienna and Budapest busts, and a rounder shape of the eyes in the Vienna and Budapest examples, framed in the Budapest bronze by pronounced eyelids, which the present head lacks. While the ears appear to be more precisely modelled in Vienna and Budapest, the closely cropped hair at the back of the present head is remarkably fine and crisp compared to that in the Budapest bronze.

In their small dimensions, all’antica spirit, and their existence in several casts and variants, the bronzes surrounding the Vienna bust of a man relate to a group of small bronze busts of women, of which examples are housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the Wallace collects ion, London (inv. no. S 62), and the Galleria Estense, Modena. Recent scholarship (see Warren, op. cit. 2016, no. 53) attributes the models for the female busts to Antonio Lombardo (circa 1458-1516) and proposes that the bronzes were cast in the Paduan foundry of Severo da Ravenna (1465/75- before 1538). More likely to represent ideals of beauty than actual portraits, the female busts seem to have been intended for display in the studioli of educated private collects ors. The small busts of a man attributed to Simone Bianco were almost certainly created for a similar context. Whether they represent an ideal of virility derived from the antique, or a portrait of an individual is, however, unclear. Herbert Keutner (personal correspondence with private collects ion, Innsbruck, 1994) suggested that the model could portray the prominent Venetian humanist Pierio Valeriano Bolzanio (1477-1558) based on a striking resemblance of the head’s profile to his medal portrait. Although this identification has not been substantiated, the group of busts to which the present head belongs forms a remarkable test.mes nt to the sophisticated humanist environment of Renaissance Venice.

RELATED LITERATURE

P. Meller, ‘Marmi e bronzi di Simone Bianco’, in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 1977, vol. 21, 1977, pp. 199-210; M. Leithe-Jasper, Renaissance Master Bronzes from the collects ion of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Los Angeles and Chicago, 1986, pp. 138-139, no. 30;V. Avery, 'The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts in Renaissance Venice and Padua: Surrogate Antiques', in J. Kohl and R. Müller (eds.), Kopf/Bild: Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Munich and Berlin, 2007, pp. 75-112; C. Kryza-Gersch, entry in A. Bacchi and L. Giacomelli (eds.), Rinascimento e passione per l’antico. Andrea Riccio e il suo tempo, exh. cat. Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent, 2008, pp. 312-313, no. 35; J. Warren, Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture: A Catalogue of the collects ion in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2014, pp. 159-163; A. Markham Schulz, ‘Simone Bianco, the Grimani collects ion of Antiquities and Other Unexpected findings’, in Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, vol. 17/18, 2015/2016, pp. 27-43; C. Kryza-Gersch, ‘Simone Bianco: Venezianische Skulptur zwischen Antikenbegeisterung und Antikenfälschung‘, in S. Kansteiner (ed.), Pseudoantike Skulptur, I, Fallstudien zu antiken Skulpturen und ihren Imitationen, Berlin 2016, pp. 9-24; J. Warren, The Wallace collects ion: Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, London, 2016, vol. 1, pp. 219-222, no. 53