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Lot Essay
Three decades ago the name Willem Danielsz. van Tetrode was barely known. However, today Tetrode is acknowledged as one of the most innovative sculptors working in the 16th century. Of Netherlandish origin, Tetrode trained and worked in Italy between 1545 and circa 1567, first with Benvenuto Cellini – with whom he collaborated on the base of the celebrated Perseus bronze (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence) – and later with Guglielmo della Porta in Rome. His series of bronzes for the Italian connoisseur Gianfrancesco Orsini, Count of Pitigliano (now Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence), form a touchstone for the sculptor’s work.
Tetrode is noted for the way he sculpted the human form in elegant and exaggerated positions with spectacular, but sometimes anatomically impossible, musculature. The Quentin terracotta can be added to Tetrode’s small, highly original and visually arresting models, with others including the Hercules Pomarius, the écorché or Anatomical Figure of a Falling Man, and the Mars Gradivus. These figures, with their long legs, abbreviated torsos and visually dazzling musculature, are unlike any other sculptor’s modeling. The Quentin Hercules stands apart from all the other Tetrode models as no other terracottas attributed to Tetrode appear to have survived. The fact that it lacks the necessary structural support to be translated into marble suggests that it was a model for either an unidentified or destroyed example in bronze, or it was always intended to be a finished work of art in its own right.
While it was the ground-breaking Tetrode exhibition at the Rijksmuseum and The Frick Collection in 2003 that introduced Tetrode to a world-wide audience and the Quentin Collection exhibition at The Frick Collection a year later that introduced the present terracotta into Tetrode’s œuvre, it was another New York exhibition that brought the Quentin terracotta into an entirely new context. This was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s daring and original exhibition Like Life… of 2018. As Bowyer vividly describes in the catalogue, ‘the extreme naturalism…of Tetrode’s painted Hercules hits one like a punch to the gut...’
So it was unsurprising, that the Quentin terracotta, with its bold nakedness and dramatic pose – highlighted by the life-like painted surface and so different from the cool bronzes and marbles of the Renaissance – was a centerpiece of the exhibition and appeared on posters and on the sides of New York City buses making their way down 5th and Madison Avenues.
Tetrode is noted for the way he sculpted the human form in elegant and exaggerated positions with spectacular, but sometimes anatomically impossible, musculature. The Quentin terracotta can be added to Tetrode’s small, highly original and visually arresting models, with others including the Hercules Pomarius, the écorché or Anatomical Figure of a Falling Man, and the Mars Gradivus. These figures, with their long legs, abbreviated torsos and visually dazzling musculature, are unlike any other sculptor’s modeling. The Quentin Hercules stands apart from all the other Tetrode models as no other terracottas attributed to Tetrode appear to have survived. The fact that it lacks the necessary structural support to be translated into marble suggests that it was a model for either an unidentified or destroyed example in bronze, or it was always intended to be a finished work of art in its own right.
While it was the ground-breaking Tetrode exhibition at the Rijksmuseum and The Frick Collection in 2003 that introduced Tetrode to a world-wide audience and the Quentin Collection exhibition at The Frick Collection a year later that introduced the present terracotta into Tetrode’s œuvre, it was another New York exhibition that brought the Quentin terracotta into an entirely new context. This was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s daring and original exhibition Like Life… of 2018. As Bowyer vividly describes in the catalogue, ‘the extreme naturalism…of Tetrode’s painted Hercules hits one like a punch to the gut...’
So it was unsurprising, that the Quentin terracotta, with its bold nakedness and dramatic pose – highlighted by the life-like painted surface and so different from the cool bronzes and marbles of the Renaissance – was a centerpiece of the exhibition and appeared on posters and on the sides of New York City buses making their way down 5th and Madison Avenues.