Naked Youth with Raised Left Arm

Scholars have only recently begun to study Paduan sculptors with the care previously devoted to Florentines. Admittedly, many more Florentine sculptors were worthy of such attention, but the Florentines also blew their own trumpets louder and more often than the North Italian biographers and historians; much more is known about their artists than about the North Italians. The artistic identities of three sculptors whose careers overlapped in Padua—Bartolomeo Bellano, Riccio, and Severo da Ravenna—are only now being disentangled. In the process, the production of Riccio, who was the most gifted of the three, and of Bellano, appears to be shrinking rapidly, while Severo is credited with a veritable factory reproducing works by many artists, including Bellano and Riccio. The Frick Collection, for example, has a statuette of David, a variant of a bronze by Bellano, which is now thought to be the work of Severo's shop; on the other hand, the present bronze by Riccio of a Naked Youth with Raised Left Arm was once attributed to Bellano.

The influence of Florentine artists further blurs the regional and individual traits of Paduan sculptors, especially Riccio's. Donatello, who has been cited as inspiration for this Naked Youth, had worked in Padua, and the authority of his example upon local artists was reinforced by Riccio's master, Bellano, who assisted Donatello both in Florence and in Padua. Bertoldo also spent two years on assignments in Padua, and Riccio himself in his youth resided for a time in Florence.

This splendidly modeled figure, believed to be an early work by Riccio, has the rugged virility of a Donatello sculpture and perhaps even greater intensity of emotion. The pose derives from an antique prototype sometimes thought to represent Marsyas at the moment he makes the regrettable decision to pick up the pipes discarded by Athena. His boastful pride over his musical talent soon angered Apollo and led to Marsyas being skinned alive by the god. However, from the grimace of horror on the bronze youth's face, it seems more plausible that he is recoiling from something like a snake rather than from a fate he might have avoided had he foreseen it. Mantegna may have provided the immediate source for the subject, pose, and expression of Riccio's figure; Riccio's bronze closely resembles Mantegna's drawing in the British Museum of a faun attacking a snake and an engraving of the same motif from Mantegna's school.

Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.