Andrew Butterfield, an art dealer and Renaissance scholar, had seen the 2.5-foot-tall wooden sculpture several years before, in a photograph, and thought it was “really fantastic”.
“It felt so much like the embodiment of the early Renaissance,” he said recently. He passed on making an offer then. But the gilded figure of a plump, graceful cherub, or putto, nagged at him, and when he finally did buy it, in 2012, it set him off down an art-historical detective trail that made him glad he followed his instincts.
Rare work in wood Butterfield and several other experts he has enlisted now believe the statue is a lost work by Donatello, one of the defining artists of the Renaissance, and a rare example of the artist’s work in wood, making the discovery not only a major addition to Donatello’s surviving corpus but also to the history of Western sculpture.
The piece, which will go on view on October 30 at Moretti Fine Art in New York, could be worth at least several million dollars if its attribution is accepted. It has not been completely unknown to scholars, but it spent most of the last century in the modest collection of an Italian family — a Tuscan art dealer and then his son, an art professor in Rome — and has never been shown in public. It has also languished for the last half-century because a near twin of the sculpture, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was deemed by a curator there, in the 1960s, not to be by Donatello.
“Scholarship in Renaissance sculpture is somewhere between 50 and 100 years behind that of painting, and so discoveries of this kind are still possible,” said Butterfield, a master treasure hunter who has been credited in recent years with discoveries of pieces by Bernini, Ghiberti, Mantegna and Donatello. Butterfield stresses that the new piece is not currently for sale, but he hopes the piece will someday end up in a public collection. In a recent interview in his Westchester, New York, home, where he had the putto on display, he said, “Things still just bubble up, and mostly they are misunderstood.”
The piece he will show, which he bought from the estate of a Turin art dealer, Giancarlo Gallino, for a price he declines to disclose, has been seen so far by few people in the art world. So it is not entirely possible to gauge how it will be received.
But the scholars that Butterfield has lined up on his side are eminent and believe that several factors point definitively to Donatello and specifically to the 1430s.
“I would say that this is an extremely solid case,” said Eike Schmidt, a German expert in Florentine art who was recently named the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Schmidt added that he believed there was “very little leeway” for other attributions.
Francesco Caglioti, one of the world’s pre-eminent Donatello scholars, who also contributed an essay to the catalogue, making a case that both Butterfield’s sculpture and the Boston sculpture are by Donatello, wrote that several factors — the placement and style of the wings, most of which are now lost; a peculiar carved headdress; and the stance of the putti, almost on tiptoe on the right foot — all point to such a conclusion.
— New York Times News Service
