The Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter by Soldani in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2020

Title: The Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter

Artist: Massimiliano Soldani (Italian, Montevarchi 1656–1740 Montevarchi)

Date: modeled 1722, probably cast 1730–35

Culture: Italian, Florence

Medium: Bronze

Dimensions: Overall (confirmed): 18 1/8 x 17 1/4 x 10 7/8 in. (46 x 43.8 x 27.6 cm)

Classification: Sculpture-Bronze

Credit Line: Wrightsman Fund, 1985

Accession Number: 1985.238

Twelve sculptures of religious subjects made for the electress palatine, Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, between 1722 and 1725 constitute the most significant commission of Florentine bronze groups of its time. The sculptures were not linked by a specific program but shared a pictorial attitude characteristic of the period. Surveying the series in 1976, Jennifer Montagu cited documents indicating that the bronzes, made by the city’s leading sculptors, Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, Antonio Montauti, Giuseppe Piamontini, Giovanni Battista Foggini, and Agostino Cornacchini, were exhibited in various rooms of the electress’s apartment in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence.[1] Four of them stood on bases of ebony and lapis lazuli ornamented with gilt bronze designed by Foggini.[2] Soldani’s Sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter was placed on one of the bases and paired with Giuseppe Piamontini’s Sacrifice of Isaac. Of the twelve compositions, those that have not survived in bronze are known through terracotta models, Doccia porcelain versions, or plasters.[3]

When acquired by the Museum, this cast of The Sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter was believed to be the one in the electress’s collection, which after her death in 1743 passed to her nephew Marchese Neri Guadagni.[4] However, documents discovered by Charles Avery and others and published recently by Dimitrios Zikos give evidence that Soldani cast one or more later versions of the model and raise doubts that this was the one for the Palazzo Pitti. From letters now in Oxford written by Soldani to Giacomo Zamboni in London, we learn that the artist made a wax model of the composition in 1725 and asked the Florentine merchant to sell a bronze after it on the English market.[5] Soldani made his proposition in 1730, but the bronze arrived in England only in 1737. In a subsequent publication Zikos noted that the version belonging to the electress palatine was still in the Palazzo Rinuccini, Florence, in the nineteenth century; the Museum’s version, which was discovered in Bath, England, is thus more likely to be the later cast that Soldani sold through Zamboni.[6] Further support for Zikos’s argument is that there is no cartouche with the artist’s signature and date on this work, although cartouches are present on the eleven other statuettes made for the electress’s collection.

If this is indeed a later version, it is nonetheless from Soldani’s hand and the only known bronze of the composition. The scene shows the Gileadite leader Jephthah fulfilling a vow that if he won a battle against the Ammonites he would sacrifice the first person whom he happened to meet afterward. Tragically, that was his beloved only child. The sculpture was paired in the Palazzo Pitti with Piamontini’s Sacrifice of Isaac, since both sculptures depict fathers in the act of sacrificing a child after a vow. While in the Piamontini bronze, the angel stays Abraham from committing the execution, in Soldani’s, Jephthah prepares to strike. Soldani’s customary figural types are well suited to the scene. More graceful than brutal, the striding military leader’s posture suggests hesitation, but his swooning daughter’s body, splayed across the rocks, leaves no doubt that her murder is imminent. A draped female attendant consoles the doomed girl. To stage the scene, the sculptor created a rocky ledge with a seat for the victim to the left and a pyre and trophy of arms at the right. The props are superfluous to the composition, though they give detail to the story by showing the soldier’s weapons, laid aside after the battle, and the sacrificial fire. The flickering surface —  especially striking seen from the rear, where drapery, tree bark, stone striations, and flames seem to whip in opposing directions —  adds to the pictorial quality of Soldani’s work. Beautifully finished on all sides, it is nonetheless essentially frontal. Unlike painted treatments of the subject, in which the protagonists are surrounded by soldiers and other figures, Soldani’s focuses on the story’s basic elements. Yet the bronze group has all the drama and sweep of those pictures, stretching the limits of sculpture to compete with painting.

[Ian Wardropper 2011]


[1] Montagu 1976.

[2] Lankheit 1962, p. 326, doc. no. 632; see also Montagu 1976, p. 129, where is illustrated a drawing at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (fig. 3), related to the four bases designed by Foggini.

[3] Zikos 2005.

[4] Olga Raggio in Metropolitan Museum 1986, pp. 22 – 23.

[5] Zikos 2005, p. 25. Zikos believes that the extensive chasing of the Museum’s version signals that it is a later cast.

[6] Dimitrios Zikos in La principessa saggia 2006, p. 299; according to the dealer in Bath, however, this work had been on the art market in France in the 1920s.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/207536