8.
guglielmo della porta (active 1534–77) Head of a Cherub, after the Monument of Pope Paul III in St Peter’s, Rome Bronze 7½ in. (19 cm) high This bust is an extract taken from one of the two bronze statues of cherubim seated astride the massive volutes that flank the pedestal of the monument to Pope Paul III Farnese which now stands against the wall of the chancel of St Peter’s to the left of the high altar. The project originated as a free-standing monument destined to stand vaingloriously beneath the very crossing of St Peter’s, which Vasari describes as follows: “At the sides of the said base are set four putti in front of and behind the tablets with the inscriptions and on the sides there are four narrative [reliefs] and the figures of the Cardinal Virtues”. When the monument was reduced into a wall-tomb, two of these putti and all the reliefs were redundant. Only the grand recumbent figures of Justice and Prudence are in situ, and the other pair of Virtues were sent to flank a fireplace in the Palazzo Farnese. The two unused putti were noted by Pietro de Solis after Della Porta’s death in the workshop of a Roman goldsmith and so they would probably have been available for study by younger sculptors. Various projects for the tomb had been successively promoted by the Pope’s nephew, the powerful Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, but the Pope’s demise in 1549 gave the campaign a new impetus and its production presumably followed soon afterwards, so the volutes and cherubim probably were in existence from around 1550. This, 1550, is the papal jubilee year in which the young Giambologna is thought to have arrived in Rome from his native Flanders to continue his training, principally through the study of the famous antiquities in the eternal city and of the works by the now elderly Michelangelo (died 1564). But he would also have been captivated by the work of contemporary sculptors who were then at the height of their careers, such as Guglielmo della Porta in Rome and Benvenuto Cellini in Florence. In his book on the sculptor of 1987 Charles Avery proposed that Giambologna certainly took note – perhaps by making models in wax or casts in plaster from the abandoned pair of bronze statuettes – of Della Porta’s vivaciously invented cherubim: indeed, he virtually re-used their design, with legs flailing apart, a decade later for the fishing boys (58 cm high) on an early fountain in Florence (c. 1561–62). These are now in the Bargello Museum. c.a. related literature M. Gibellino-Kraseninnicowa, Gugliemo della Porta scultore Lombardo, Rome, 1944, pp. 14–16, 39–49 (esp. p. 46); C. Avery, Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture, Oxford, 1987, p. 206, pl. 230; H.-W. Kruft, ‘Porta, della, Guglielmo’, in. J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, vol. 25, pp. 255–57
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