UNKNOWN MASTER, Italian
(active in the 1430s in Florence)

Sprite (Mercury/Favonius)

c. 1432
Gilt bronze, height 62 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Originally, this bronze statuette was a fountain figure. The water once flowed up through the left leg and torso to spout out of the open mouth. It is supposed that it is connected with a fountain constructed in the garden of the Casa Vecchia, a Medici edifice that preceded the Palazzo Vecchio on the Via Larga in Florence.

The pose of the statuette resembles to Giovanni Francesco Rustici's Mercury Taking Flight, originally atop a fountain in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

The statuette was executed by an anonymous Florentine sculptor close to Donatello.




© Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx.