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A hand-built 1:12 scale model of the Ferrari 375 Plus, executed by the French master craftsman J. Catti and distributed by Exoto, Inc., which placed this model on the cover of the Exoto Tifosi catalog, Second Edition, 1995.

The 375 Plus stands among the most formidable sports racing cars Maranello ever produced. Powered by the 4.9-liter Lampredi V12 and bodied by Pinin Farina, it carried José Froilán González and Maurice Trintignant to victory at Le Mans in 1954, with Umberto Maglioli adding the Carrera Panamericana later that year. Surviving examples rank among the most valuable Ferraris in existence.

Catti built his replica without compromise, and the Exoto catalog records some three hundred craftsman-hours in each limited-edition example. The sheet-metal body is formed entirely by hand, with its panels correctly riveted and its ventilation louvers genuinely open. The rolling chassis carries working suspension and steering; the engine and rear cover lids are secured with genuine leather straps, exactly as on the full-size car; and the metal tonneau cover is removable. The miniature Borrani wire wheels and Pirelli tires reproduce the original components, while the cockpit is finished with leather-covered seats, an aluminum-and-wood steering wheel, glass-covered instruments, a gated shift lever, and the correct center-throttle pedal arrangement. The model wears Modena prova plates, MO-36, identifying it in the works test car configuration.

At its 1995 release, the complete car was cataloged by Exoto at $18,900, catalog number JCA00375D.

The model is accompanied by an original copy of the Exoto Tifosi catalog, Second Edition, 1995, in which it appears on the cover, with a two-page feature illustrating the engine, cockpit, and rolling chassis.

A large and theatrical Swiss Black Forest jardinière in carved linden wood, circa 1870, formed as two bears at a gnarled tree, the crown of which opens into a naturalistic basin for a plant or palm.

A young bear scrambles up the trunk, forelegs thrown over a branch, glancing back at the adult below, who rears upright against the tree, head thrown back and mouth open, one forepaw raised toward the escaping climber. Both bears carry inset glass eyes, and the carving moves confidently between textures, the dense fur of the animals, the scaled bark of the trunk, and the burled, leafy crown of the basin, the whole rising from a molded circular base.

The bear is the emblematic subject of Brienz carving, and jardinières of this scale belong to the upper end of its production, sculptural furniture made for the salons and winter gardens of the hotel age. A single-bear jardinière of similar style is illustrated on page 121 of Swiss Carvings; the present example, over three and a half feet tall and fully carved from every angle, holds a room as few functional objects of the period can.

Dimensions: 43"height

Literature

Jay Arenski, Simon Daniels, and Michael Daniels, Swiss Carvings: The Art of the Black Forest, 1820–1940 (2006), p. 121, where a single-bear jardinière of similar style is illustrated.

A fine carved walnut figure of an alpine hunter by Johann Huggler of Brienz, the pre-eminent master of the Swiss Black Forest carving tradition, stamped with his initials JH to the rear of the boot, circa 1870.

The hunter stands at ease on a naturalistic rocky outcrop, a bearded man of the mountains caught in a moment of rest rather than pursuit. He wears a hat dressed with traditional alpine flowers, an open jacket over a buttoned waistcoat, breeches, and tall boots, a mountaineering staff planted against the rocks in his right hand, a coiled rope slung over his shoulder, and a binocular case carried at his hip. The carving holds its quality through every surface: the varied texturing of jacket, waistcoat, and breeches, the weave of the coiled rope, the individually rendered stones of the base, and above all the face, alert, weathered, and fully characterized, a portrait of a type Huggler knew from life in the Bernese Oberland.

The rear of the hunter's boot bears a stamped JH, the mark Johann Huggler used in the early period of his career, before the Huggler family began retailing their own work. Stamped examples from these years are rare, and the mark places the figure firmly in the 1870s, the decade of Huggler's finest independent carving. Huggler stands at the summit of the Brienz school; his works were shown at the great international exhibitions of the nineteenth century, and signed or stamped examples consistently represent the highest standard of the tradition. We have had the privilege of handling deeply personal works by Huggler, and the present figure shows the same authority brought to a subject at the heart of alpine life.

Dimensions: 19"height

Condition: Very good overall.

Literature

Jay Arenski, Simon Daniels, and Michael Daniels, Swiss Carvings: The Art of the Black Forest, 1820–1940 (2006).

A fine and rare sculptural group by Walter Mader of Brienz, one of the most accomplished masters of the Swiss Black Forest carving tradition, depicting a recumbent hound with four puppies clambering across her back, carved in mountain maple on an exceptional scale.

The mother lies stretched at rest, her head sunk between extended forelegs with the patient, weary calm of a nursing animal. Her coat is built up in long, sweeping tool strokes that follow the lie of the fur, and a studded collar is carved at her neck with the same care given to the figures themselves, placing her firmly in the working life of a real dog. Her teats are visible along the underside, the carver recording the plain truth of a mother with a litter, without sentiment or evasion.

Across her back the four puppies pile and jostle, each with inset glass eyes and each individually observed: one rests its chin drowsily against her shoulder, another braces a forepaw and noses forward mid-climb, a third stares out with wide, unguarded curiosity, and the fourth cocks its head as if deciding whether to join the game. The soft modeling of their faces, the paws and ears falling every which way, all speak to observation from life rather than workshop formula.

The group is unsigned, as is common for Brienz work of this period; the attribution rests on its direct correspondence in model, composition, and handling to Mader's documented dog groups, including a closely related example of the same subject previously sold by Daniels Antiques. Mader's feeling for dogs was no workshop convention: his lifelong friendship with Johann Huggler, the pre-eminent master of the Brienz school, was bound up with the loss of his own beloved dog, Nase, in the Alpine tragedy of 1871, commemorated in Huggler's carved portrait of the animal, which we have also had the privilege of handling. That intimacy with his subject carried Mader's dog groups to the international exhibitions of the nineteenth century in London, Paris, and the United States, and it is felt in every figure of the present work, among the most compelling dog subjects of the Black Forest tradition.

Dimensions: 36"length x 20"depth x 15"height

Literature

Jay Arenski, Simon Daniels, and Michael Daniels, Swiss Carvings: The Art of the Black Forest, 1820–1940 (2006).

A monumental pair of Fuji Meibo 25×150 big-eye binoculars on their original deck mounting and naval-pattern tripod, by Fuji Photo Optical Co., Japan, 1950s. The data plate carries Fuji's script Meibo trademark and the 2.7-degree field designation.

The 25×150 is the largest of the Japanese big eyes, the pattern developed for the Imperial Navy to find ships at night before radar could, and continued by Fuji for whaling fleets and coastal observation. The 150mm objectives, each nearly six inches across, gather roughly four times the light of the familiar 15×80, and at 25 times magnification the image is extraordinary, with a brightness and depth no instrument of ordinary size approaches. These remain among the finest night-sky glasses ever made. This example carries the straight eyepiece configuration, the more sculptural of the two patterns, the twin barrels running unbroken to the great brass-capped objectives.

The set survives complete: the massive fork carries the glasses on a curved elevation quadrant secured by a polished handwheel, the cone beneath turns on a bearing ring graduated through the full 360 degrees, and the all-metal naval tripod with telescoping legs, folding spreader, and disc feet completes the ensemble.

Instrument, mount, and tripod have been hand polished in our workshop to a mirror finish, the brightwork set off against the brass objective shrouds. The optics are clear and bright, and focus, elevation, and traverse all operate smoothly.

A pair of Japanese Imperial Navy 15×80 big-eye binoculars by Toko, the Tokyo Optical Company, circa 1940, retained on their original gimbal mount and deck-pattern pedestal, raised on a period hardwood tripod. The data plate carries Toko's diamond trademark, the 4-degree field designation, and serial number 1062.

Few of these instruments survive complete. Most big eyes reaching the market were separated from their shipboard fittings decades ago, so a set retaining its original gimbal, pedestal, and bearing ring is the exception. The instrument rides in a heavy polished fork, elevation set by a brass handwheel on a toothed quadrant, and turns on a brass bearing ring engraved through the full 360 degrees, a working compass rose in miniature. The bolted flange at the base is the original deck fitting that once fixed the mount to a warship's bridge wing.

The barrels run straight and level from objective to eyepiece, the configuration the Japanese navy specified for long watches on the open bridge. The 80mm objectives gather a remarkable quantity of light, and at 15 times magnification the image is bright, sharp, and immersive, as rewarding on a shoreline as on the moon. Each eyepiece focuses independently.

Among the small bronzes of the Italian Renaissance, few are as instantly recognizable as the Shouting Horseman. A warrior in classical armor sits a bare-backed, pacing horse, his head turned, his mouth open in a cry the sculptor never explains. He is caught in a single charged instant, and the interest is not power but life.

The original model is the work of Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, the Paduan master who did more than any other sculptor to make the bronze statuette a serious art form. Cast around 1510 for the private studies of Padua's humanist collectors, it was made by the direct lost-wax method, in which the wax original perishes in the casting, so only a single bronze from Riccio's own hand can exist. That cast passed through the collection of Frédéric Spitzer in Paris and, by the Salting bequest of 1910, into the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it remains. In the museum's view, it is the only cast from Riccio's hand, and the other known examples are casts of the rider taken from it, in all likelihood made while the bronze was in Spitzer's keeping in the later nineteenth century and set upon a variety of horses. It is through those casts that the shout has carried onto collectors' shelves across Europe. The present cast belonged to Sir Leon Bagrit, the industrialist and collector who delivered the 1964 Reith Lectures on automation.

The Present Cast

A bronze equestrian group of the Shouting Horseman after Riccio, the warrior in crested helmet and pleated tunic seated bareback and without reins upon a pacing horse, the off foreleg raised, the mane cropped to a standing crest with a bound topknot at the poll, his head turned and mouth open in a cry. The rider is a separate cast, secured to the horse at the skirt by three pins, as the rider casts made in Spitzer's keeping were set upon their horses. Cast in the nineteenth century, with a dark brown patina, raised on a veined Siena marble plinth, the underside with old labels including Trinity Fine Art no. 1412. The bronze 10¾ inches high, approximately 13 inches overall.

The final two photographs show, for reference, the original bronze as illustrated in the Spitzer sale catalog, Paris, 1893, lot 1454, before its entry into the Victoria and Albert Museum with the Salting Bequest in 1910, and the related cast formerly in the collection of Otto Beit, London, as published by Leo Planiscig, Andrea Riccio, Vienna, 1927, fig. 242.

Provenance

Sir Leon Bagrit (1902–1979), London, until 1979

Trinity Fine Art

Sotheby's, London, The Winter Collection, 10 December 2015, lot 1

Sources

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Shouting Horseman, Andrea Riccio, Padua, circa 1510, Salting Bequest, 1910.

Pomponius Gauricus, De Sculptura, Padua, 1504.

Daniels Antiques is always interested in acquiring Renaissance bronzes and later casts after the great models. Please contact us if you have a piece to sell.

The equestrian Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline is the only bronze equestrian monument of a Roman emperor to survive from antiquity. Cast in gilded bronze around 175 AD and standing more than thirteen feet tall, it survived the melting pots that consumed every other imperial horseman because the medieval city took the rider for Constantine. It stood for centuries outside the Lateran until 1538, when Paul III moved it to the Capitoline, and Michelangelo designed the piazza around it. It remains there today: the original is now indoors in the Capitoline Museums, with traces of its ancient gilding intact; a replica stands on the pedestal outside; and it is still an official emblem of the city of Rome.

The man on the horse wears no armor and carries no weapon. His right arm is extended in the gesture of clemency, and the sculptor gave him the face of someone who has thought about what he is doing. He had. Marcus Aurelius is the one Roman emperor whose book is still read. The Meditations were written in Greek, in camp on the Danube frontier, a private notebook of a man reminding himself how to behave while holding absolute power. Take care, he writes, that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye. The statue and the book describe the same person.

A bronze equestrian group of Marcus Aurelius after that monument, the emperor bearded and bareheaded in tunic and paludamentum, his right arm extended, seated without stirrups or reins upon a walking horse with the near foreleg raised. Cast in two patinations, the figure in a deep brown and the pedestal in a warm golden bronze, the pedestal with panels bearing both inscriptions, the ancient dedication and the text of Paul III, dated 1538. Signed on the plinth: A. DRESSLER HOPFGARTEN ROMA 1866. Height 24 inches.

The model belongs to the Roman reduction trade that supplied the Grand Tour from the 1750s, led by Giacomo and Giovanni Zoffoli and by Francesco Righetti, whose small bronzes after the antique rarely exceeded fifteen inches and were prized above all by the English. Into this trade came two Prussians, Wilhelm Hopfgarten and Benjamin Ludwig Jollage, who opened their studio and foundry at 94 via Due Macelli by about 1808 and within a generation were the leading bronze founders in Rome. They cast for Canova and Thorvaldsen, and supplied papal gifts to Bavaria and to Charles X. Where their predecessors had worked small, they took the same subjects and made them large, and the Marcus Aurelius was the greatest of these: ordered by the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1828, singled out by Nagler, worked from the monument by pantograph with a fidelity that extends to the veining of the horse's chest, and displayed in the workshop's street window beside the Capitoline Wolf as the two emblems of Rome. The 1837 inventory gives the window cast's height as sixty-two centimeters. The present cast stands twenty-four inches. It is the size of the piece the founders put in the window.

At Hopfgarten's death in 1860, the concern passed by will to A. Dressler, his employee and sole heir, who took the molds and plaster models with the business, kept the Hopfgarten name as a guarantee of quality, and ran the shop through the following decade. Where fifty years of Hopfgarten and Jollage production had gone out unsigned and is known today only by attribution, Dressler stamped and dated his casts. A signed and dated Hopfgarten bronze is accordingly rare, and one carrying the workshop's most ambitious model is rarer still. The present group is dated 1866, and no other dated cast of the Marcus Aurelius has been traced in the public record. It is a documented cast, from the original matrices, of the model this foundry was founded on, in the size the founders themselves chose to display.

Acquired from Tomasso Brothers, Leeds.

Sources

Chiara Teolato, Hopfgarten and Jollage Rediscovered: Two Berlin Bronzists in Napoleonic and Restoration Rome, Rome, Edizioni del Borghetto, 2016, including the Jollage (1837) and Hopfgarten (1860) inventories, Archivio di Stato di Roma.

G. K. Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon, Munich, 1838.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long, 1862.

Musei Capitolini, Rome.

Daniels Antiques is always interested in acquiring Grand Tour bronzes, particularly signed examples by Zoffoli, Righetti, and the Hopfgarten foundry. Please contact us if you have a piece to sell.

France, second half of the 19th century

Memento mori, remember that you must die, is among the oldest disciplines in Western art, and its purpose was never morbidity. Scholars kept a skull on the desk for the reason Jerome is painted with one, and fraternal orders seated initiates before this precise emblem in a chamber of reflection, where the point was not to frighten but to clarify. Marcus Aurelius, writing on campaign to no reader but himself, put the whole tradition into a line: soon thou wilt have forgotten all things, and soon all things will have forgotten thee.

Cast life-size, the skull is modeled with its jaw fallen open over two crossed long bones, their shafts deliberately broken and finished with splintered ends. The anatomy is observed rather than emblematic, the cranial sutures wandering across the dome as they do on a real specimen, and the gilding is concentrated on the raised surfaces, falling away into the hollows against the dark patina beneath. The bronze is sand cast, the reverse hollow and left as cast, with four integrally cast pads at the bone ends, dressed flat and tapped to take screws from behind; their irregular spacing shows the piece was fitted to one particular object rather than made to a repeatable pattern.

Condition: Sand-casting texture and minor surface irregularities consistent with period production. Gilding worn in the hollows and rubbed at the extremities. A later lead patch and wire have been applied to the reverse for wall hanging, an adaptation from a subsequent life; the four original fixing pads and their threads are intact and unaltered. No foundry mark.

Dimensions: Width 11½ in (29 cm), height 8 in (20 cm), depth 3 in (7.5 cm)

Provenance: French private collection

Cast in the form of a lyre, the door knocker centers on a standing figure of Hercules, nude and bearded, his club lowered at his side, set within a fluted shell and flanked by two lions modeled fully in the round, their forepaws on the shell and their hindquarters rising along the curved arms of the knocker, which terminate above in scrolled horns framing a strapwork cartouche. The bronze retains a dark brown patina, the high points rubbed to a warm copper red from centuries of handling, and preserves its original hinged suspension and hammered striker boss, the working evidence of a knocker that hung and sounded on a Venetian door.

The knocker is a solid lost-wax cast. The reverse is open and irregular, the figure and lions finished in the round both front and back, and the surface preserves passages of the original wax texture alongside areas of crisp, selective hand-chasing, the working method of an accomplished sixteenth-century foundry rather than the thin, uniform walls of later reproductions.

The model is associated with Tiziano Aspetti (1559–1606), the Paduan sculptor who worked in Venice in the circle of Girolamo Campagna and whose name has long been attached by collectors to the finest Venetian bronzes of this type, andirons, statuettes, and door knockers alike. The composition belongs to a small family of casts sharing the same lyre-form frame with an interchangeable central figure. The closest comparison, and the only other recorded example with Hercules, is the cast in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. BK-NM-3309), attributed to Aspetti and dated to Venice, circa 1590–1600, acquired by the museum in 1894 and continuously published since 1904. The present example corresponds closely to the Rijksmuseum bronze in model and dimensions, differing in the treatment of the shell, and retains notably crisp definition in the head, beard, and club. A version of the frame with a female allegorical figure is in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich; a further female example, formerly in the Pierpont Morgan collection and inscribed on a tablet for the founder Giovanni Antonio Tavagni, was published by Bode in 1912; and two additional examples, with variants, were recorded in the Spitzer collection in the nineteenth century.

Door knockers of this kind, battenti, were among the signature productions of the Venetian bronze workshops of the late Cinquecento, cast from models supplied by the leading sculptors of the city and mounted on the doors of Venetian palazzi as emblems of strength and welcome. Hercules flanked by lions carried an unmistakable message of fortitude, while the shell spoke to the city's marine identity.

Condition: Minor casting flaws consistent with period lost-wax production, an old break between the end of the club and the tail of one lion, and honest wear to the high points. Retains its hinged suspension with an iron pin and its striker boss. Mounted on a later display stand.

Dimensions: Height 9¾ in (24.5 cm), width 8 in (20.5 cm)

Provenance: European private collection

Literature (comparative): Catalogus van de beeldhouwwerken in het Nederlandsch Museum voor geschiedenis en kunst te Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1904, no. 165, and 2nd ed., 1915, no. 78 (the Rijksmuseum cast); W. Bode, The Italian Bronze Statuettes of the Renaissance, London, 1907–12, pl. CCLXIV (the Tavagni example, ex-Pierpont Morgan); J. Leeuwenberg, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1973, cat. 657 (the Rijksmuseum cast); M. Schapelhouman, "Talking of Door Knockers," The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 64 (2016), no. 2, pp. 151–55, fig. 3 (the Rijksmuseum cast)

A powerful bronze portrait of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir William Reid Dick, one of the foremost British sculptors of the twentieth century, taken from the life study he modeled in 1942, and signed and dated on the reverse of the neck. Height 11 inches, dark green patina, on an integral square bronze plinth.

The portrait was commissioned by the Royal Academy from Reid Dick in 1942, at the height of the Second World War. Churchill, consumed by the direction of the war, was reluctant to spare the hours a sitting required, and by tradition agreed to sit only after the personal intervention of King George VI. The result is a likeness drawn from life at the very moment of Churchill's wartime leadership, the heavy features and set mouth recorded with the directness that was Reid Dick's hallmark as a portraitist.

Reid Dick models the Prime Minister without flattery or rhetorical softening. The head is bare and frontal, the brow heavy, the jaw and jowls fully described, the expression fixed in an attitude of resolve. There is no ornament, no gesture toward the swagger of official portraiture, only the weight of the man and the office he carried. The surface is worked freely, catching light across the modeled planes, and finished in a dark green patina.

Reid Dick stood at the center of British public sculpture between the wars and after. A Royal Academician from 1928, President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, knighted in 1935, and appointed King's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland in 1938, he was entrusted with many of the nation's most prominent commissions, among them the recumbent effigies of George V and Queen Mary at Windsor, the lion of the Menin Gate at Ypres, the eagle of the Royal Air Force Memorial on the Victoria Embankment, and the equestrian Lady Godiva at Coventry. His best-known work in the United States stands in London's Grosvenor Square, the memorial statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt, unveiled in 1948 by Eleanor Roosevelt in the presence of King George VI. His portrait of Churchill belongs to this company, a life study of the wartime leader by the sculptor of choice to the crown.

Provenance: Private collection.

Condition: Very good overall. The bronze presents a dark green patina with natural verdigris to the recesses. The signature and date, W Reid Dick 1942, are clear and legible on the reverse of the neck. Minor wear consistent with age and handling. No restoration noted.

A fire-gilt bronze figure of Mars, the god of war, shown bound in chains and disarmed. The youthful, heavily muscled god kneels down on one knee upon his own grounded arms, in a classical muscled cuirass with lappets at the shoulders and a pteruges skirt, his head turned down and to the side, his wrists chained behind his back in finely wrought links. Set down around and beneath him is a trophy of his own arms: the horn, a spear, a scabbard terminating in a scrolled chape, an oval shield with a lined border on which he partly rests, the doffed helmet, and the sword whose hilt is finished as a ram's head.

The subject is war restrained. The armor and attributes are the standard language of Mars in antiquity, as preserved in the life-size Roman statue of the god from Eboracum now in the Yorkshire Museum, and the ram 's-head pommel reinforces the identification, the ram being the animal of Aries, the sign ruled by Mars. What gives the group its meaning is that the god kneels bound upon his own weapons, pressed down onto the arms he has laid down, the helmet lifted from the head, and the hands chained away from them. A Mars parted from his arms is the established emblem of war held in check, and by extension, of peace.

That reading carries a particular weight here. The bronze was made in Augsburg in the first half of the 17th century, in the German lands that bore the worst of the Thirty Years’ War, and Augsburg among the cities that lived through it. A god of war brought to his knee and bound upon his own arms, made in that place and at that moment, would have been understood not as a generic classical conceit but as an image of peace longed for and war laid down. The heroic, idealized body argues for the god himself rather than a defeated mortal captive, though the composition plays knowingly on both readings.

The composition descends from the most famous seated Mars of antiquity, the Ludovisi Ares, the marble now in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome, which shows the god of war young and beardless and at rest among his own trophy of arms. Rediscovered in 1622 and restored by the young Bernini, it became the defining image of the reposeful war god and was quickly copied in bronze reductions for collectors, so a sculptor of the first half of the 17th century would have known it well. The present bronze belongs to that reposeful, attribute-rich tradition rather than to the striding, stripped-down Mars made famous by Giambologna, whose god rejects the helmet, spear, and shield entirely. Here, the panoply is kept and set down, the horn, the spear, the scabbard, the shield, and the sandals all rendered with care, and the god brought to his knee and bound, an image not of war in action but of war restrained.

The bronze is a thin-walled lost-wax cast, worked directly in the wax, fire-gilt on a warm ground now rubbed to a reddish underlayer on the high points through handling, and raised on an ebonized wood socle with an inset giallo marble panel of the kind made for the cabinet of a serious collector. The definition of the hair, the chains, the chased scabbard, and the ram 's-head hilt is that of a fine metalworker, consistent with the goldsmiths' tradition of Augsburg. The figure has also been associated with the group of small gilt bronzes given to the so-called Ciechanowiecki Master, though little is securely known of that hand.