In this fine collection of essays, Jeremy Warren brings together papers given at the conference held 18–19 June 2010 in association with the exhibition Beauty and Power: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Peter Marino Collection. Not every paper was included in the publication; Dimitrios Zikos’s essay on the Borri Collection is published in Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection (Patricia Wengraf et al. with research and editorial assistance from this reviewer [2014]). The eight essays are evenly divided between the late Renaissance and Baroque, though the bronzes discussed are mainly “around” the Marino collection. The exhibition catalogue is more useful for study of those works “in” the collection (see Beauty and Power: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Peter Marino Collection, Jeremy Warren, ed. [2010]). In his introduction, Warren describes Peter Marino’s collection, and the book reflects the architect’s and authors’ interests in the impact of the ancient world on artists in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as well as the cultural and political exchanges between Paris, Florence, and Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that proved so important for the development of the art of the small bronze.

In her first essay, Regina Seelig-Teuwen attributes the Marino Diana to Guillaume Bertelot (also known as Berthelot), and considers the sculptor’s work in small bronzes. Bertelot’s oeuvre is not well known, and his works while in Rome between 1610 and 1618 “are stylistically uneven” (29). The sculptor was summoned back to France by Maria de’ Medici, and Seelig-Teuwen suggests that Bertelot’s work for the queen included the bronze portraits of Maria as Juno and her deceased husband Henri IV as Jupiter, now in the Walters Art Gallery (30–31, figs. 12, 13; 34–35). This led the author to attribute the Diana in Marino’s collection, and that in the J. Tomlinson Hill Collection, to Bertelot from around 1625–30, (34, 35, figs. 15, 16 [as “Private collection, New York”]). Patricia Wengraf recently attributed the model to the circle of Ponce Jacquiot, dated between 1556 and 1585 (see Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection, cat. no. 27). The wide difference between the two attributions demonstrates the difficulties in assigning undocumented bronzes to sculptors whose oeuvres are still hazy, though Wengraf’s proposal is surely correct. It would have helped to include an image of the Marino Diana in Seelig-Teuwen’s essay instead of only the Hill Diana, but the attribution is elaborated upon by Jeremy Warren in the exhibition catalogue (see Beauty and Power, 126 [cat. no. 10]).

Seelig-Teuwen expands our knowledge of Bertelot’s oeuvre in her essay on his ivory sculptures for the Stipo Passalacqua in the Musei del Castello Sforzesco, and demonstrates the variety of media in which Renaissance sculptors often worked. Bertelot may also have executed the bronze Reason “letting herself be guided by the senses,” which caused “things to go badly.” Larger images would have helped; I would have liked to take a closer look at the bulls’ ears adorning Hearing’s robes (47, fig. 27).

Charles Avery’s “The Herculean Efforts of Stefano Maderno” includes a walk through the Florentine iconography of Hercules and Antaeus, and demonstrates how Maderno moved the composition into the Baroque. Avery disputes the claims of Maderno’s biographer that the models were frequently cast in bronze, as there is “precious little physical evidence” for any works other than the Hercules and Antaeus (63), though so much has been lost that one might be more cautious about this. He suggests instead that the terracotta modellini of the Labors of Hercules were meant to be carved in marble, to deflect attention from Bernini’s early domination of the large-scale marble market in Rome in 1621–22 — an interesting proposition that demonstrates the importance of looking at bronzes in a wider context. Rosario Coppel’s inclusion of the 1637 inventory of the Duke of Alcalá’s art collection in her paper reveals the importance and presence of Giambologna’s models in international collections and is a useful addition to the study of collecting.

Though nothing can replace the benefits of attending conferences such as the one from which this collection of essays derives, the publication is a useful point of reference for bronze enthusiasts.