Candlestick supported by three female demi-figures (pair with .1379)

Candlesticks of this type are representative products of the many anonymous foundries active in and around Venice about 1600 and later, where the styles and models of prominent cinquecento sculptors like Vittoria and Roccatagliata were repeated well into the seventeenth century. Several other versions of this class of candlestick are known, with minor variations: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (former collection Samuel H. Kress); Grassi Museum, Leipzig; former collection J. Pierpont Morgan, New York; former collection Clarence H. Mackay, New York; former collection Rodolphe Kann, Paris; former collection Alfred and Otto Beit;1 Sotheby’s, New York, 12 – 15 January 1991, lot 65 (a pair with similar bases, but different vase-shaped nozzles, as manner of Roccatagliata). The three sphinxes appear on the base of an inkstand in the former collection of Castiglioni.2

Catalogue entry from: Frits Scholten. The Robert Lehman Collection. European Sculpture and Metalwork, Vol. XII. Frits Scholten, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 204.

Notes:
1. Sale, Christie’s, London, 7 December 2006, lot 180 (as by the workshop of Roccatagliata).
2. Planiscig, Leo. Andrea Riccio. Vienna, 1927, fig. 665.

Henry Goldman, New York; Goldman sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 28 February 1948, lot 61. Acquired from the Goldman sale.