Design of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic Medallion

Design of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic Medallion

Perino del Vaga (Pietro Buonaccorsi)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Although he received commissions for numerous monumental fresco cycles throughout his thirty-year career, it was as a designer of small-scale decorative objects that Perino’s artistic imagination took flight. This lavish design for a bronze candlestick brimming with ornament is a veritable advertisement for his prodigious powers of invention. In a seamless synthesis of the sacred and profane that epitomizes the cultural ethos of Renaissance Rome, classicizing swags, acanthus leaves, and grotteschi frame a medallion— presumably an engraved rock crystal—illustrating an episode of the Passion. The Christian imagery—both the narrative scene and the saint standing in a niche at the top—indicates that the candlestick was intended for an altar rather than a secular domestic context. Nothing about the patron or the intended setting are known, but according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese commissioned Perino to design rock-crystal plaques to ornament two altar candlesticks. Conceivably, the present sheet relates to that project, as do two studies by Perino in the Museum's collection.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Design of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic MedallionDesign of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic MedallionDesign of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic MedallionDesign of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic MedallionDesign of a Candlestick with Winged Figures at Base Surrounding Scenic Medallion

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.