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Rare Renaissance Statue Acquired by LACMA

Ahmanson Foundation Funds a Nearly Life-Sized Work by Santi Buglioni

LACMA announced on Jan. 12, 2007, that a major grant from The Ahmanson Foundation has enabled the museum to acquire a rare Renaissance sculpture by Santi Buglioni (1494–1576), Saint John Capistran, c. 1550. The nearly life-sized statue, which will be a significant addition to LACMA’s renowned collection of European sculpture, is a dramatic, freestanding figure, worked completely in-the-round and made of glazed terra-cotta.

Several full-size glazed terra-cotta statues from the Renaissance are known, but most remain in the churches and sanctuaries in Tuscany for which they were originally commissioned. Although the medium of glazed terra-cotta is familiar to us as earthenware, its adaptation for sculpture was pioneered around 1440 in Florence by Luca della Robbia.

The only competitor of the della Robbia workshop was Benedetto Buglioni (1459/60–1521). According to the great Renaissance historian Giorgio Vasari, Buglioni obtained the “secret of glazing clay” from a "woman of the della Robbia household." Benedetto’s nephew, Santi Buglioni, would eventually be the last remaining artist in Italy, Vasari asserted, who could create sculptures in this colorful material.

St. John Capistran

The dynamic figure acquired by LACMA is thought to represent Saint John Capistran (1420–1456), a fifteenth-century preacher whose exploits culminated in the victorious crusade against the Turks at Belgrade in 1456. He is often represented holding a banner in his left hand with the first three letters of Jesus’s name in Greek, as he does in this sculpture, and wearing a Franciscan habit, which was historically brownish-gray. In LACMA's statue, however, brilliant violet takes the place of the drab neutral.

The new gift from The Ahmanson Foundation follows the foundation's previous grant that enabled the museum to purchase the Portrait of Jean-Pierre Delahaye (1815) by the French painter, Jacques-Louis David, over the summer of 2006.

The collection of European sculpture at LACMA is recognized by experts as one of the best in the United States. Renowned for the remarkable variety of media represented, including cork, alabaster, plaster, papier-mâché, porcelain, stoneware, wax, and silver, the collection is particularly strong in polychrome multicolored sculptures. Among the department’s masterpieces are a bronze relief of Neptune and Europa by the eighteenth-century Florentine artist Antonio Montauti and the plaster Monument to Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon, also a major gift from The Ahmanson Foundation.

Saint John Capistran can be viewed in the Ernestine and Stanton Avery Gallery on the second floor of the Ahmanson Building.

See LA Times story, "LACMA buys Italian renaissance sculpture," Jan. 11, 2007.