Niccolò Tribolo
Aesop
May one see it?
Unknown: the museum keeps its counsel
Victoria and Albert Museum
London, United Kingdom
The owner is known. Whether it is on view today, the museum does not say, and we were not trained to guess.
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum's own collection data
About the sculpture
This bronze statuette is made by Niccolo Tribolò, in Florence in the second quarter of the 16th century.
The bronze represents Aesop, depicted as a hunchback dwarf holding a rod, and standing astride an owl. Italian sculptor, engineer and garden designer, who was apprenticed in Florence first as a wood-carver with Giovanni d'Alesso d'Antonio and then as a sculptor with Jacopo Sansovino, whom he continued to assist well into the second decade of the 16th century.
Tribolò worked (with a team of other sculptors) on the basilica of the Santa Casa at Loreto and in 1533 he completed Andrea Sansovino's marble high relief of the Marriage of the Virgin which began 1527 and he also helped Michelangelo to complete the Medici tombs in S Lorenzo.
Read on
Tribolò also worked around 12 years for Cosimo I in Florence and undertook an extraordinary wide array of works: decorations for state occasions, firework displays, theatrical costumes and décor as well as water conservation and other hydraulic projects. His most influential undertaking was the laying out of the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace in Florence.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- 2626:1, 2-1855
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum: the museum's own open data · fetched 6 days ago
- Image: Victoria and Albert Museum — © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
