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 One of the most outstanding pieces in the collection of models in Casa
Buonarroti is this terracotta, now accepted by the majority of the art historians to be the work of Michelangelo
himself. The present state of the model is the result of the reassembling of a number of fragments, carried out in
1926 under the supervision of Johannes Wilde and at the behest of superintendent of the Florentine Galleries at
the time, Giovanni Poggi. The work has often been linked with the Medicean commission for a large statue of
Hercules and Cacus, to be set up alongside the David in front of Palazzo Vecchio. Documentation of this
commission which caused Michelangelo such problems can be found from 1506 onward, but when the project
was taken up seriously again in 1525, the task was given to Baccio Bandinelli. After the expulsion of the Medici,
the Florentine Republic once again, in August 1528, asked Michelangelo to carve the two figures, but the artist
soon changed the subject, preferring the theme of Samson the Philistines. With the fall of the republic and the
return of the Medici family, the commission was assigned definitely to Bandinelli, who completed his colossal
group, representing Hercules and Cacus, in 1534.
As far back as 1928 Wilde had demonstrated the impossibility of connecting the model in Casa Buonarroti with
the aforesaid commission: in fact the proportions of the terra cotta seemed to him incompatible with those of the
block of marble that was to have been used for the work. Wilde proposed instead that the model was intended
for the tomb of Julius II, considering it a study for an allegorical group that was to form a companion to the
Victory, probably carved between 1527 and 1530 and now located in the Salone dei Cinquecento of Palazzo
Vecchio in Florence. |
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