Frick Collection shows rare Tetrode bronze

NEW YORK, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- The Frick Collection is continuing to present exhibitions related to its own vast holdings of art by presenting the first-ever showing of nearly 40 small statues by Willem van Tetrode, the 16th century Delft artist who brought the tradition of classically inspired Italian Renaissance bronzes to the Netherlands and Northern Europe.

The Frick owns one of Tetrode's finest works, "Mercury with the Head of Argus," a gracefully spiraling figure inspired by works by Italian sculptor Giambologna. It was cast like most other Tetrodes in a reusable mold that made multiple versions possible, some even cast by later artists, and is displayed for the first time with two other important variants, one loaned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the other by the Los Angeles County Art Museum.

"Willem van Tetrode: Bronze Sculptures of the Renaissance," co-organized with the Rijksmuseum, offers an opportunity to enjoy this long-overlooked master's work in bronze together with examples of his marble sculpture and relief. All are in the Italian classic style because all of Tetrode's large religious sculptures for Dutch churches were destroyed in Protestant iconoclastic riots in 1573.

"The Frick is the perfect venue for Tetrode's sculptures. There are so many remarkable Renaissance bronzes on permanent display that visitors who are curious about placing Tetrode's achievement in a larger context need only walk a few steps into one of the galleries to see masterpieces by his predecessors and contemporaries," said Denis Allen, a Renaissance specialist recently appointed the Frick's associate curator.

Tetrode (1525-1580) spent 19 years in Italy, studying and working with the great Benvenuto Cellini in Florence and restoring antique Greek and Roman statuary in Rome.

He obviously was attracted to the classic depictions of the male nude, often in violent motion, since he virtually ignored the idealized classical female nude.

He began sculpting his own bronzes around 1559, starting with a small reproduction of a classic marble, the Farnese Hercules that shows the hulking hero resting on his club, and within a year was sculpting his own energized version of a spectacularly overmuscled Hercules, poised and ready to attack with his club, known as "Hercules Pomarius."

The Dutch sculptor was soon attracting commissions from wealthy Italian art patrons including Count Niccolo Orsini, who ordered a wooden cabinet in the classic style with shelving for display of statuettes of 12 emperors and eight famous Roman antiquities. This so-called Pitigliano Cabinet has been reproduced for the exhibit and filled with 11 of Tetrode's original statuettes.

When Tetrode returned to his native Netherlands in 1567, the small but animated bronzes he brought with him touched off a furor of collecting statuettes in the Italian style that lasted for nearly a century, then faded away so that Tetrode's name was known only to art specialists. Even today, most Tetrode statuettes are in private collections, several of them donors to the Frick exhibit that runs through Sept. 7.

Sumptuously displayed midst the greenery of the Frick's garden court, the show is rich in side-by-side examples of Tetrode's castings of the same subject, allowing for comparison that reveals small variations. The statuettes also reveal Tetrode's talent as a modeler in malleable wax as the matrix for the final bronze casting, allowing for sculptures of exceptional compositional originality that caught the power of muscular motion.

The most unusual of all is a delicately poised statuette of an athlete skinned down to his bare muscles and leaning back on his heels, his left arm thrust above his tilted head. It is a late work titled in French "Ecorche" (Flayed), intended as an anatomical model for other artists, and it so impressed Peter Paul Rubens a half-century later that he drew the statuette from three different viewpoints. It is on loan from the Hearn Family Trust in New York, owner of several Tetrodes.

Tetrode statuettes also influenced another later artist, Hendrick Goltzius, a 17th century Dutchman famed for his engravings of classical subjects including a number of studies of Hercules. An exhibition of more than 160 of his works, including several that pay homage to Tetrode, is currently on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also through Sept. 7. It is also he first major exhibition of Goltzius' life work.

The favorites of visitors to the Tetrode exhibit seem to be two fairly large, nearly identical sculptures of male nudes astride snarling, tautly-posed panthers. The two groups were once ascribed to a follower of Cellini but now tentatively ascribed to Tetrode, who is known to have sculpted panthers.

The surfaces of the sculptures are rough and unpolished and the overall effect is that of a powerful amalgum of the natural and the fantastic. The twin works could only be from the hand of a great bronze master and are being exhibited for the first time after their recent discovery in a British private collection. According to Allen, there are no known examples of comparable subject matter in all of Renaissance sculpture.