JACOB CORNELIS COBAERT (Italy, 16th century) after a model by GUGLIELMO DELLA PORTA (ca. 1550-1577).
"Pietà".
Relief in gilded bronze.
Size: 16 x 14 cm; 25 x 20 cm (frame).
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish when a work is by the master, in this case Della Porta, and when it is the work of a collaborator. The complexity of the different roles assumed by the qualified disciples in the production of pieces made by the workshop makes it difficult to identify the authorship of the pieces. Rosario Coppel warns us of the extreme difficulty of distinguishing Guglielmo's documented works from those made by his main collaborators, which were of the highest quality, the so-called "la gran scuola di Guglielmo" (Guglielmo's great school).
Based on these precedents, we can observe a small series of plaquettes in bas-relief representing the Pietà, some of which, like ours, are of the highest quality of execution, both in the high degree of finishing with a very high quality chiselling, and in the gilding and, naturally, in their sculptural representation of an undoubtedly Renaissance inspiration.
In Spain there are works related to our Pietà executed on silver, such as the one made before 1581 by Rodrigo de León, today housed in the treasury of Cordoba Cathedral. There is also a bronze peace-holder attributed to Sebastiano Torrigiani in the Riddick collection with the same motif. However, of all the examples related to the Pietà motif, the one with the closest affinities to ours, almost identical in both approach and execution, is the relief of a tabernacle given to Jacob Cornelis Cobaert in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, executed before 1585.
Della Porta's drawings on the subject preserved in Berlin (see W. Gramberg 1964, Die Dusseldorfer Skizzenbucher des Guglielmo della Porta 3 volumes Berlin) allow us to link the execution of these plaquettes with his workshop without any doubt, and the degree of quality in the execution and the painstaking chiselling support the hypothesis that this work is by Jacob Cornelis Cobaert.
Various archives such as that of Torrigiani mention a Pietà by Cobaert made for the collector Simonetto Anastasia in 1585. Another reference is given by Giovanni Baglione to another Pietà by Cobaert, and Antonio Gentilis is also known to have owned a Pietà by this artist.
The composition should have been successful in Spain, as we find it in a polychrome wooden relief by Domingo de Bidarte, today in the cathedral of Pamplona, and another in the art museum of Igreja dos Clerigos in Portugal. The model was also repeated in other media such as wax or terracotta.