Vulcan

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In Renaissance art, the Roman god of fire is usually shown in the character of a crippled blacksmith. As patron of those who worked with molten metal, Vulcan must have had a special meaning for the bronze artist. It would formerly have been the fashion to insist upon a name for this artist-and there are in fact certain resemblances to statuettes from the workshop of Girolamo Campagna-but in practice, the more one sees the fewer certainties there are about the lesser works generated by the increasingly numerous modelers and founders who were active in Venice in the late Renaissance. The figure once belonged to J. P. Morgan, whose collection of bronzes was so large that it forms the nucleus of more than one museum's holdings.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art