Giambologna's Venus, dispute continues among scholars

Regarding the case of the Venus at the Bath exhibited at the Pitti Palace, about which we wrote last week proposing a summary of the positions for and against the attribution of the work to Giambologna, we receive and publish a note from Dorothea Diemer, an art historian opposed to the attribution to the Flemish master. Diemer disputes the passage in which the Uffizi claims that “the exchange of available arguments was carried out in Burlington Magazine in favor of attribution to Giambologna.” The scholar, in particular, takes issue with the Uffizi’s assertion since, Diemer writes to us, "in our Burlington Magazine article, we decisively disputed Rudigier’s assertion that the bronze is an autograph sculpture by Giambologna; in our view, it is a copy cast one hundred years later (Dorothea Diemer, Linda Hinners, ’Gerhardt Meyer made me in Stockholm’: A bronze Bathing woman after Giambologna, The Burlington Magazine, July 2018, pp. 545-553)."

The museum, in rebuttal, lets us know that after Dorothea Diemer’s article, a rebuttal was published in the same Burlington Magazine, in October 2018, with an accompanying paper by her, at the end of which “the same scholar hopes for a full publication of all the scholarly findings, possibly reserving the right to intervene again” (“a positive approach to the question,” the October 2018 article reads, “would perhaps be given if Mr. Rudigier published the relevant documents in extenso. They might help to decide whether the St. Germain or the Stockholm scenario is the more probable”). Also the Uffizi informs that “this publication came out in 2019 in Rudigier’s volume on Giambologna,” and that in the memo sent to the press in late November where the Burlington Magazine debate was mentioned, “the article referred to is the one by Charles Avery on page 1044 in the December 2019 issue 1401.”) In the latter article Avery claims that the Venus “was surprisingly cast by a member of a distinguished Swedish dynasty of cannon-founders, Gerhardt Meyer.”

Giambologna's Venus, dispute continues among scholars

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