Samson and the Philistines

Due to its signature, the sculpture has for long been considered to be the most ambitious work by Vincenzo Foggini, son of the celebrated Florentine sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini. This spectacular marble is indebted to Giambologna’s Samson Slaying a Philistine (also at the V&A: A.7-1954) dating back from 1560-62. However, the present sculpture is more frontal respecting to Giambologna’s serpentine figure. The composition differs also with the addition of another Philistine, an idea taken directly from Michelangelo’s lost project on the same subject, which is known through a number of bronze casts.

Surprisingly, the marble group can be traced back in the Florentine workshop of the Borgo Pinti, where Vincenzo Foggini and the former Court sculptors to the Medici worked. It appears that the sculpture was roughed out by at least 1608, date of Giambologna death. Giambologna’s original group of Samson had been sent to Spain in 1601 as a diplomatic gift from Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici to the Duke of Lerma, chief minister to Philip III of Spain. It is possible that Ferdinando I asked Giambologna to conceive a new marble of the same subject for Florence. Over the following decades, the unfinished group passed through the hands of Pietro and Ferdinando Tacca, then Giovanni Battista Foggini and finally his son Vincenzo.

The marble must have been nearly completed by the 1720s when it inspired its own variants by Giuseppe Brocetti including a terracotta, a lost marble group documented via a surviving drawing and a porcelain figure produced by the Doccia manufactory. However, it was only when Lord Malton visited Florence that Vincenzo Foggini signed and dated the work before it was shipped to England. The Samson is a rare and powerful work completed over the course of 150 years by four generations of sculptors at the Medici court.

(Kira d'Alburquerque, 2025)