Erotic Sculptures in Outdoor Spaces: Francesco Mosca’s Forgotten Venus and Adonis

• In Event: Tracking Statues in the Wild: Interpretive Paradigms for Sculpture in Gardens II

Abstract

In his 1568 life of Simone Mosca, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Simone’s talented son Francesco “completed for Roberto Strozzi two very lovely marble figures, namely the Mars and Venus that are in the courtyard of his house in Rome.” Despite this important contemporary testimony, this life-size freestanding group, now in the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, remains virtually unknown today and is not even mentioned in the influential histories of Renaissance sculpture by Joachim Poeschke and John Pope-Hennessy. Currently labeled as Meleager and Atalanta, even its subject has remained uncertain. In this paper I will reconstruct the patronage, function, and original context of this remarkable group and explore its relation to contemporary Florentine mythological and erotic sculptures in garden settings and courtyards, including works by Vincenzo de’ Rossi, Francesco Camilliani, and Battista Lorenzi.

Author

• Davide Gasparotto, J. Paul Getty Museum