Rape of a Sabine

Giambologna’s third great marble group, the Rape of a Sabine, represented the climax of his career as a figure sculptor, combining three figures into a cohesive group, an idea that had obsessed Michelangelo without his ever having been permitted to realize it in marble. Giambologna’s first thoughts are embodied in a bronze group with a standing man and a woman raised in his arms, which he produced in 1579 for Ottavio Farnese, 2nd Duke of Parma and Piacenza (reg 1550–86). ‘The subject’, wrote Giambologna to this patron, ‘was chosen to give scope to the knowledge and a study of art’, suggesting that it was a conceptual rather than a narrative composition. Giambologna’s contemporaries subsequently compelled him to identify the particular episode that was shown in the full-scale marble sculpture, by supplying a bronze relief with an unambiguous narrative to go below it, to act as a sort of visual label.

The development from a group of two to one with three figures is plotted in preliminary wax models (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The three figures are linked psychologically by the directions of their glances, as well as formally by the arrangement of their limbs and bodies. The spiral composition means that the group cannot be fully comprehended from any single viewpoint. Technically, the sculpture is a masterpiece of virtuosity, pushing to its furthest limits the technique of undercutting, which Giambologna had observed in Hellenistic carving, and the use of which distinguishes his work so sharply from Michelangelo’s.