A FIRST HALF 17TH CENTURY BRONZE FIGURE OF MARS AFTER A FRENCH MODEL FROM THE LAST THIRD OF THE 16TH CENTURY
nude except for a plumed helmet with scrolling decoration, standing a contra posto with his right hand raised to hold a spear (now lacking), raised on a small integral base decorated with stylised foliage, over a later rectangular ebonised plinth,
the bronze 29.5cm high

King Francois I of France commissioned Cellini to make a monumental statue about 18.7 meters (some 54ft.) high of Mars (Walter Leo Hildburgh, 'Benvenuto Cellini's Model for His Colossal Mars', Burlington Magazine 85, no. 497 (August 1944), pp. 200-2). The statue was to crown a large square fountain in a courtyard at Fontainebleau. For this colossus Cellini said that he produced a model about 60 centimetres high, which held a broken lance, raised aloft in its right hand and the left hand was placed on the hilt of a scimitar fashioned in a most beautiful shape; it was posed on its left foot, and the right rested on the crest of a helmet as richly decorated as it is possible to imagine. The present, smaller, statuette (known in various casts with minor variations), of which Hildburgh, owned an example (now in the V&A, A.4-1944), differs from the big Mars most obviously in the position of the helmet, here firmly on the head and there under the right foot. Another statuette exists [in two or three casts only, e.g. one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] that is in this important respect identical with the image described by Cellini. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a vague connection and it is usually assumed that the statuettes reflect a wax model left behind in Cellini's studio when he fled from France, perhaps for the Mars in the series of life-size silver statues bearing candlesticks in a raised hand that he produced for the Gallery of Francois I inside the chateau of Fontainebleau, whose actual appearance is unknown (see C. Avery, 'Cellini's silver statues of the gods for Fontainebleau', in Studies in the Decorative Arts, The Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, XIV, no. 1, Fall-Winter 2006-2007, pp. 2-18 (esp. pp. 11-13). Another example in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, Germany, is catalogued by U. Berger & V. Krahn (Bronzen der Reniassance and des Barock: Katalog der Sammlung, Braunschweig, 1994, pp 304-5, no 245) as: 'after a French model from the last third of the 16th century, the cast seemingly Flemish, first half of the 17th century'.

A further example of this model was sold at Chiswick Auctions on 24 May 2017, lot 38.