Bellerophon

The “bronzetto” is a genre of sculpture particularly suited to bearing witness to the scholarly aspect of humanist classicism in Florence, Padua and Venice; and Bertoldo, a pupil of Donatello, typifies the process of “museum-like” reduction of the Master’s revolutionary poetry. In works such as this the Greek prototype is taken up with extraordinary technical and stylistic mastery, but not recovered for a “modern” meaning. Rather, as a very beautiful “object of devotion for the use of the humanists” of the Medici court, it exemplifies the principle of the “conscious reintegration of ancient images into ancient forms” (André Chastel).