Juno in bronze - Girolamo Campagne, Venice End of the 16th century

This beautiful full-length Juno accompanied by her peacock is based on a model made in Venice by Girolamo Campagna (1549-1625). A celebrated sculptor in the last decade of the 16th century, Campagna, along with Tiziano Aspetti, Alessandro Vittera and Roccatagliata, was one of an incredible generation of Venetian bronze-makers who gave the City of the Doges its letters of nobility in the field. At the head of a large workshop of masters, apprentices and pupils, he began producing bronze sculptures in 1590. The feminine canon of our Juno, with its full forms, generous thighs and round, high breasts, is reminiscent of Campagna's Venus Marina, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is also the case for its drawn eyelids, short nose and narrow mouth, although the quality of their definition brings it closer to another cast of the same model, this time attributed to a follower of the master.
In the light of these comparisons and the very similar position adopted by our Juno, which also sketches an elegant contrapposto, with her right hand resting on her left breast, her opposite arm falling alongside her body to grasp the animal and her head turned three-quartered, our bronze appears to be an original adaptation of the Venus Marina from Campagna's workshop. Three other similar variations have been identified in public collections: one in the National Gallery in Washington, another in the Musei Civici in Padua and the third in Ferrara. Within this corpus, our Juno stands out for its greater fidelity to Campagna's original model.