HARTFORD, CONN.- The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art acquired Striding Mars (Mars Gradivus) a rare and important work by the Italian Renaissance sculptor, Giambologna. Modelled between 1565-1570 and cast in Florence around 1580, the small-scale (15.5 x 22.5 inches) bronze statuette epitomizes the artist’s mastery of the human form, with the grace, elegance, and dynamism for which he has been renowned for centuries.
“Opportunities to acquire a masterpiece of outstanding quality such as the Giambologna’s Mars are rare. This extraordinary work of art transforms our collection of European sculpture to complement the exceptional strength of our European paintings,” said Matthew Hargraves, Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Giambologna, born Jean Boulogne in Douai, Flanders (now part of France) in 1529, ventured to Rome to pursue mastery of his art in 1550, and eventually settled in Florence under the patronage of the powerful Medici family. In his lifetime, he became the most influential sculptor in Europe with his works in marble and bronze travelling to Spain and England, as well as the German states where works including Striding Mars were collected by princes and connoisseurs.
Striding Mars possesses a quality of movement and anatomical precision characteristic of Giambologna’s oeuvre, which ranged in subject from mythological figures to Christian themes and allegorical representations. The artist’s works often capture fleeting moments frozen in time, imbued with a sense of drama and emotion. With limbs extending into space, Mars is designed to be seen from all angles as a bravura display of both Giambologna’s talents and the splendor of the human body. Enabled by the superior tensile strength of bronze as compared with marble, the artist refined the Renaissance presentation of the body, drawing upon Michelangelo’s principles which Giambologna may have learned directly from the master as a young man. The representations of Mars in his battle-ready stance gained significant popularity in the second half of the sixteenth century, likely due to Grand Duke Cosimo I de’Medici’s preference for the figure as a symbol of Florentine authority. For his Mars, Giambologna employed a life model in the form of a towering soldier he spotted in a Florentine church, standing at the height of 7 feet 6 inches tall. (The same model appears as a monumental figure in Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines, modelled ca.1581, and in his Neptune, created between 1563 and 1567, for a fountain in Bologna.
Mars was one of Giambologna’s most frequently replicated models, both within his lifetime and beyond. This cast, however, is of outstanding quality and is one of perhaps only three made around 1580 with the assistance of Domencio Portigiani, a friar of from the Convent of San Marco in Florence before Giambologna engaged the services of Antonio Susini. The cast retains all the lively detail of Giambologna’s original wax model and the outstanding chasing associated with Portigiani.
