This bronze lamp is the work of the Renaissance artist Andrea Briosco, also known as Riccio—Italian for “curly”—because of his curly hair. Early in its history, this classically inspired lamp belonged to a number of distinguished collectors in Padua, where Riccio found an eager clientele among the city’s antiquarian-minded humanists. The lamp combines the ancient Roman boot-type lamp and the Renaissance spout lamp. Filled with oil, and with a wick burning in its spout, it would have produced a flame that made all the sculptured forms around it dance in a fantastic interplay of light and shadow, heightened by differences in texture on the surface of the bronze. The lamp is embellished with elaborately curling vines, a frieze of children (some playing musical instruments), and a strip, just under the rim of the bowl, of alternating satyr masks and shells.
The lamp’s hinged lid is now missing, and part of the upper handle is broken. When it was intact, it would have balanced on its elaborate foot.
Lamp
Padua was the seat of a great university and a center for humanist studies. Riccio is known to have been versed in classical art and literature and to have found friends and patrons among the learned scholars of Paduan society. The form of this extraordinary bronze Lamp, the most elaborate of several he produced, is based on Roman prototypes, and its surface is encrusted with motifs drawn largely from antique sources.
While the other lamps by Riccio are shaped like ships, this one, inspired by the Roman half-boot, is designed as a bizarre shoe balanced on a pyramidal base. The lid is missing and certain elements have been broken, such as the uppermost scrolled handle, but one can readily visualize the fantastic effect of the Lamp when lighted. With its sprightly silhouette and glittering surface illumined by flames darting from the spout, it would have provided its possessor with much pleasure and entertainment. The Lamp is known to have belonged early in its history to a series of distinguished Paduan collectors.
The intricate reliefs covering the surface of the bronze are modeled with a goldsmith's refinement and crisp detail. The subjects evoke the populace of classical art and poetry, including a Nereid and Triton, Pan, harpies, and innumerable putti, along with goats, musical instruments, shells, masks, and garlands. The variety seems inexhaustible. The artist's imagination, both copious and controlled, is occasionally playful but more often touchingly melancholic. Although not even an inch high, the face of a satyr on the Lamp's handle expresses fathomless grief.
On a minuscule scale, the Lamp includes many ornamental motifs that are found on the Paschal Candlestick, which Riccio began in 1507 and, after years of interruption, finally finished and installed in S. Antonio in 1516. The Lamp is presumed to date from that same period.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Petrus Campesius, Padua. Giacinto Fagnani, Padua. Girolamo Santasofia, Padua. Sold through Durlacher Bros., January 3, 1910, to J. Pierpont Morgan, London and New York. Duveen. Frick, 1916.
Source: Sculpture in The Frick Collection: Italian. Volume III. New York: The Frick Collection, 1970.
