The Rothschild Bronzes are a pair of early-16th century sculptures, each depicting a nude male figure riding a panther, which have been verified as being made by Michelangelo. The sculptures are believed to have been created around 1506 to 1508, before the painting of Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco but after the marble statue of David. The bronzes are now considered the only known surviving bronze works by the artist in existence. The bronzes were displayed to the public at the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum from February to August 2015.
Sculptures
The two high bronzes each feature a nude male mounted on the back of a mythological panther-like animal. The sculptures are unsigned but recent assessments by scholars and art experts have attributed the bronzes to Michelangelo.
Attribution
The bronzes were formerly the property of Baron Adolphe de Rothschild and were exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878 as the work of Michelangelo, although this attribution was disputed at the time. The Rothschilds had acquired the statues the previous year from their owner in Venice. When his heir Maurice de Rothschild died in 1957, they were purchased by a French private collector. Over the years, the sculptures have been attributed to other artists, including Tiziano Aspetti, Jacopo Sansovino and Benvenuto Cellini, or their respective circles. In 2002, they were again sold at Sotheby’s London, to a British collector for £1.8m, with a loose attribution to Cellini. In 2012, they were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts as being from the circle of Michelangelo, although experts declined to attribute them directly to him. In February 2015, a team of experts from the University of Cambridge attributed the statues to Michelangelo. This was primarily based on their similarity to a detail in a drawing by one of Michelangelo's students, held at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, their similarity in technique to other works by Michelangelo and a neutron scan, conducted in Switzerland, which dated the bronzes to the first decade of the 16th century. The possibility that they might be by Michelangelo excited experts, particularly given that at the time no other Michelangelo bronzes are known to have survived.
Alternative Attribution
Paul Joannides included in his defense of the bronzes as being the work of Michelangelo two arguments, the first being that no other artist had been put forward as a possible creator of the figures, and second, that no argument had been made that these figures are not the work of the artist. Addressing the first of these issues, in 2020, Michael Riddick, in his "A Proposal that the Rothschild bronzes, attributed to Michelangelo, are instead the work of Francesco da Sangallo," arguing that the Rothschild bronzes are more likely to be the work of Francesco da Sangallo, the protégé of Michelangelo and son of Giuliano da Sangallo who mentored Michelangelo in architecture.
Refutation
To the second of Joannides' questions, in 2019, in his "Michelangelo's Principles of Composition" John Vedder Edwards points out that the Rothschild bronzes are composed in an "open profile," with their arms fully extended. This, Edwards argues, is in direct contravention of Michelangelo's principle of organizing his sculptural figures in a classic "closed profile" with the arms and legs drawn tightly in toward the body. Edwards argues that Michelangelo took to heart the instruction of early Renaissance sculptor Donatello that "a sculpture should be able to be rolled down a hill and have nothing break off." The presence of an "open profile," Edwards asserts, is definitive of a work being of an artist other than Michelangelo. Edwards does suggest that it is not impossible that Michelangelo may have aided Sangallo with the modelling of the torsos of the original wax figures, however there is no evidence to suggest that this must be so.
