A bronze lover's feast: James David Draper luxuriates in the textures��and original scholarship��of the Frick's well displayed exhibition of the Quentin Foundation's sculpture

The Quentin Foundation has assembled a topflight collection of renaissance and baroque bronze statuettes, including some of the boldest statements made by Mannerist and baroque sculptors. Nearly forty are now to be seen at the Frick Collection in New York in a handsome installation made all the more enjoyable for having no vitrines. The eye can thus navel freely around the works, and it is possible to savour unimpeded the sensory appeal of these stylish figures--for the most part nude--and to relish their nuances of chasing and patination. The collection is international in character, so that one judges stylistic variations from France and northern Europe as well as Italy.

The catalogue is all innovative collaboration between the dean of bronze studies, Manfred Leithe-Jasper; venerated former director of the decorative arts department at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and Patricia Wengraf, the energetic and erudite London dealer. It is frankly stated in those cases when the Quentin Foundation acquired its bronzes through Wengraf. Leithe-Jasper contributes an essay on the history of bronze collecting. Wengraf uses the occasion to publish her detailed findings on Francesco Fanelli, the Baroque bronzista born in Florence but active mainly in Genoa and England. The result is that we are now much more comfortably acquainted with Fanelli, whose works from the English period are better known, if often slacker in quality owing to the multiplication of casts. The splendid Quentin Mercury, unique in its large scale and pulsing with bravura, is an exception. Two of Fanelli's standard horses are also present. One was adapted to a group of St Eustace and the Stag ill the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg but the bosky group otherwise surely remains obdurately German and not Fanelli, as the caption to fig. 16 on page 47 implies.

The authors do not hesitate to say so when they disagree about attribution, as in the case of a gracefully grotesque Mannerist male deity (no. 16). Wengraf defends Adriaen de Vries as its maker, an idea Leithe-Japser does not endorse. In truth this curiosity is too slight for De Vries, and Leithe-Jasper is supported, it seems to me, by the findings of Shelley Sturman, conservator at the National Gallery in Washington, who has supplied helpful analytic reports on several of the works. In this case, Sturman finds the cuprous alloy unlike those of previously analysed De Vries bronzes.

There are at least three total masterpieces: the north Italian Hercules and Antaeus, prototype of later versions; the Venus withholding a heart from Cupid by Carlo di Cesare del Palagio; and the Neptune by Giuseppe Piamontini. There are also superlative casts of compositions there regularly encountered. These include all elegant cast of Giambologna's Mars; an appropriately rough one of Francesco Segala's Hercules; and a gem like one of Massimiliano Soldani's Apollo Musagetes. Overall, the collection is remarkable for the excitement of textures and the integrity of surfaces that the pieces display.

The collection also boasts a few terracottas on more or less the same scale as the bronzes. For exhibition purposes they provide welcome relief, serving as a sort of foil. I might have had trouble sustaining the attribution to Giovanni Bandini dell'Opera of the paired clay Mars and Vulcan, but the catalogue points to Bandini's works made for Urbino (brought to light by Eike Schmidt in a 1998 article in Nuovi Studi). Indeed, the rugged Urbinate efforts contrast with Bandini's cooler Florentine manner, and the Bandini idea gains in appeal and conviction. On the basis of this pail; I would venture an attribution to Bandini of another terracotta, a hawkish bust in the Ashmolean Museum, catalogued by Nicholas Penny in 1992 as a St Paul by Baccio Bandinelli. As striking as it is, I see nothing of Willem van Tetrode in the Quentin collection's painted terracotta Hercules. Soldani's haunting Dead Christ attended by angels, on its original ebony base, is among that master's very best ceramic sculptures.

Not your usual recitations of provenance and related versions, the catalogue notes are copious but delivered with acuity and panache, pointing out minute differences, of course, but always reminding one of the actual fun that cataloguing can be. The level of illustration is uncommonly high. In all, this is a labour of love in which a discerning public will surely also find delight. I expect to visit the exhibition often and to see several of the same faces each time I go.

James David Draper is Henry R. Kravis curator in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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