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Kimbell Acquires 1624 Sculpture
The Kimbell Art Museum today announced its acquisition of the 1624 sculpture Samson and Two Philistines by Stefano Maderno (Italian, c. 1571–1636). A tour de force in both its composition and bronze casting, it is the first seventeenth-century bronze to enter the Kimbell’s collection. The sculpture is now on view in the Kimbell’s Louis I. Kahn Building.
Just over two feet tall, the sculpture is a knotted tangle of three nude male figures, depicting the Old Testament account of Samson—a figure possessed of super-human strength—raising the jawbone of a donkey to strike an enemy Philistine while another lies motionless at his feet. The arrangement of these two beaten figures twisted in a pile beneath Samson represents the mass of vanquished Philistines he left in his wake: “With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps” (Judges 15:16). The complex composition fully exploits its three-dimensionality and unfolds dynamically in the round.
“Samson and the Philistines is without question one of the greatest seventeenth-century Italian bronzes and is already integral to the Kimbell’s collection,” said Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “Remarkably, the sculpture looks so at home in the museum’s galleries that they now seem as though they had been incomplete without it.”
Photo courtesy of Kimbell Art Museum
Maderno’s contemporary and first biographer, Giovanni Baglione, noted that the sculptor excelled in the making of terracotta statuettes, which were then commissioned in bronze by collectors. Until now, however, no small-scale bronzes after compositions by the artist could be firmly dated to his lifetime. Samson and Two Philistines bears around its base the names of both its sculptor and caster, as well as its date of production.
The sculpture was cast by Horatio Albritio (Italian, c. 1578–1650), also known as Orazio Albrizzi, who was active in Rome in the early seventeenth century and who, among other projects, cast elements of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous Baldacchino in Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The inscription on the base of Samson and Two Philistines proudly states that the exquisitely finished statuette was cast in a single pour of bronze, an extraordinary technical achievement. Careful chasing and hammering give its surface an almost shimmering quality. One can only conclude that this was an important commission for both Maderno and Albrizzi, and no other example of the composition is known.
Emerson Bowyer, chief curator at the Kimbell, said “Displayed alongside the superb terracotta modello for the Triton Fountain by Maderno’s younger rival Bernini, Samson and Two Philistines enhances the Kimbell’s presentation of Roman sculptural production in the seventeenth century. Visitors will have the opportunity to appreciate it from every angle and experience its almost cinematically unfolding narrative.”
PROVENANCE
Noble Italian collection, and by descent; private collection, Rome; purchased by (Patricia Wengraf, Ltd, London), 2026; purchased by Kimbell Art Foundation, Fort Worth, 2026.
ABOUT STEFANO MADERNO
Stefano Maderno (Italian, c. 1571–1636) was a leading Roman sculptor during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was central to the transition between the late Renaissance, or Mannerist, style of artists such as Giambologna and the emergence of the Baroque, as epitomized by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Between 1587 and 1592 Maderno apprenticed in Rome with the Flemish sculptor Niccolò Pippi, before eventually executing numerous commissions for Popes and other high-ranking ecclesiastical figures. Today, he is best-known for his early, path-breaking marble Saint Cecilia (1600, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome), a figure that was unprecedented for both its realism and its poetic simplicity. It was highly influential in the development of Baroque sculpture, including Bernini’s passionate depictions of recumbent saints.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Admission to the museum’s permanent collection is always free. Admission to special exhibitions is half-price all day on Tuesdays and after 5 p.m. on Fridays.
The Kimbell Art Museum is open Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Fridays, noon–8 p.m.; Sundays, noon–5 p.m.; closed Mondays, New Year’s Day, Juneteenth, July 4, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. For general information, call 817-332-8451.
