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In this book’s breathtaking images, extensive documentation, and incisive analysis, a cycle of six highly important bronze reliefs representing The Hours of Night and Day is being published for the first time. Made in Florence at the beginning of the eighteenth century, these bronzes epitomize pre-modern notions about time, which are visualized through an elaborate array of mythological and allegorical components. In describing and deciphering the meanings and traditions of the scenes represented in these bronzes, the authors unveil a multi-faceted concept of time that is based upon the human perception of the Hours, while also pointing toward their otherworldly, magical dimension.
The Hours of Night and Day, a celebrated masterwork in its own time, is the result of a fortuitous collaboration between the painter and modeler Giovanni Casini and the bronze sculptor Pietro Cipriani. With the discovery of these long-forgotten bronzes, and of bronze versions after Greco-Roman statuary—most notably the Venus de’ Medici and the Dancing Faun now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles—it becomes apparent that Cipriani was one of the foremost bronze sculptors of his age. Finally, this book documents the legacy of these bronze reliefs in derivative works created for subsequent generations. As further testimony to the enduring appeal of Casini and Cipriani’s extraordinary creation, variations of the reliefs from The Hours of Night and Day became popular as decorations on vases and as porcelain reliefs throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and on to the present day.
