A very good 19th Century cast iron recumbent boar after the Calydonian Boar, Il Porcellino at the Uffizi in Florence. Featuring a raised mane and platform base. In very good antique condition; there is evidence of a repair at the waist. A stunning 19th C. reproduction Calydonian Boar, Il Porcellino. An RT Facts find.
Dimensions: 39"L x 23"D x 30"H
A note on the original marble figure from "Taste and the Antique" by Franic Haskell & Nicholas Penny: "
"Also known as: Calydonian Boar, Il Porcellino. The Boar was recorded as in the courtyard of the house of Paolo Ponti by Aldrovandi in his account of the ancient statues of Rome published with Fauno's guide of 1556, but not in the account published with Mauro's guide of the same year (to later editions of which, however, it was added). By 1568 it was in Florence, in the Pitti Palace, and by 1591 in the Uffizi. It was severely damaged by the fire in the Uffizi in 1762 but was quickly restored.
Early accounts differ as to how the Boar came from Rome to Florence, and also as to how and where and when exactly it came to light in Rome, but agree that Ponti found it and agree in thinking of it as the Calydonian Boar killed
Meleager, an idea repeated by Gori in the eighteenth century. According to Ligorio it was excavated together with other figures which formed a hunting scene, and when the Boar was displayed in the Uffizi in the late sixteenth century two dogs were placed near it and it was confronted by the statue of a man who appeared to be attacking it. This 'peasant' or 'soldier' - one of the Medici statues destroyed in the fire of 1762— was also identified as Meleager and had it seems been copied by Antico in the early sixteenth century. 12 The idea of grouping the Boar with Meleager is also found in the version which Nicolas Coustou made for Marly (and which is still to be seen there), but most copies show the Boar alone, or accompanying another animal (at Chatsworth in Derbyshire the companion is a similarly seated Wolf), and eighteenth-century cataloguers and travelers described the Boar separately and tended to interpret it not as at bay with a hunter facing it but just alerted from indolence to the coming danger, 'as if in his den, angry, roused, half rising, and showing his formidable tusks'. Thus it was described by the exacting anatomist John Bell, who continued: 'His hair is stubby and clotted, his paws broad, coarse, and heavy, the whole finely expressing the growling ire kindling in an irritated animal.
The Wild Boar was considered in Aldrovandi's day as one of the most notable statues in Rome-Ponti was said to have refused an offer of five hundred gold scudi for it-and the praise of travelers for its naturalism was consistent throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As well as being elaborated by Coustou, it was copied by Foggini for Louis XIV. This copy (now in the Tuileries Gardens) may be the one that Lalande described as tired when compared with the original, but copies were, according to Northall's editor in 1766, 'in most collections of famous pieces of Sculp-ture. Some of these were full-scale (as in the private eighteenth-century garden at Grimston Park in Yorkshire or in the nineteenth-century public arboretum at Derby), others were small - in bronze, in ceramic and in plaster. A statuette, doubtless in the latter material, can be seen in the studio of Subleyras (in a painting of the 'Studio of the Artist' in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna)."
