As Vasari mentions in his Vite (Lives), towards the middle of the 16th century the fashion for portraits in the form of small coloured wax reliefs became widespread among Italian and European nobility, often made by artists who were also active in the production of bronze medals and who were already used to using wax as a model for their castings.¹ 

The eight small portraits in wax belonging to the Cerruti Collection appeared at an auction in Paris in 1999 together with another four whose present whereabouts are unknown. They were listed in the catalogue as the work of Antonio Abondio (1538-91), a medallist and maker of wax relief portraits from the Trentino region, who worked for a long time at the imperial courts of Maximilian II and Rudolf II in the second half of the 16th century. While his work as a medallist is reliably reconstructed in 20th-century studies, the catalogue of works in wax is far harder to establish due to the absence of signatures and dates on the surviving items.² 

As noted by Andrea Daninos, the works examined here display similarities with a fairly large group of polychrome wax portraits, sometimes including beads, coloured stones and other three-dimensional elements, spread over a large number of museums and private collections. The sovereigns and other important subjects, including two popes, are portrayed in profile or three-quarter profile, either bust-length or half-length. Another common feature is the presence of cases of gilded and embossed copper decorated on the lid and the back with mythological and allegorical scenes, emblems and arabesques apparently drawn from 16th-century German metalwork and sometimes repeated on more than one item.³ To those discussed by Daninos, we can add a female portrait in profile in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (inv. no. 17.190.911a, b), a portrait of a young man in the Art Gallery of Ontario (inv. no. AGOID.29251) and a portrait of Maximilian II in the Galleria Estense in Modena (inv. no. 2526). 

The homogeneity of this group is only apparent, however, as items certainly attributable to Abondio - including the portraits of Austrian Archduke Charles II and his wife Maria Anna of Bavaria (Riggisberg, Abegg Foundation), the Estense portrait of Maximilian II and some of the pieces now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London - are accompanied by other later works and some modern ones. The dating of the copper cases also proves problematic. As Daninos has shown, at least some are the work of the Parisian goldsmith and restorer Alfred André (1839-1919), probably assembled in his workshops out of elements of greater or lesser antiquity together with others produced from scratch to meet the demand of the art market. André was almost certainly responsible for the insertion of rings into the tops of the metal cases.⁴ 

At least three different hands can be identified among the Cerruti portraits. While none of them appears stylistically attributable to Antonio Abondio as his work is now known, some could in any case be period pieces produced by artists familiar with and influenced by his oeuvre. Some of the subjects can be recognised, including Henry IV of France (a), but others cannot. Some are copies of already known works, for example the male figure in three-quarter profile wearing a heavy gold chain and a fur-trimmed overcoat (b), which is based on the portrait of Jobst Friedrich Tetzel created in 1611 by Georg Holdermann (Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, inv. no. Pl.O.745). 

As regards the metal cases examined here, the decorative scenes and rings appear to have been created at the same time, in which case they would be objects produced entirely in André’s workshop, possibly as imitations of earlier models. In particular, the lids of two of the Cerruti items bear the same compositions as works in the Abegg Collection, namely a hunting scene and an Abduction of Europa based on the painting by Titian, which are regarded as 16th-century by Anna Jolly.⁵ 

Comparative study of the existing items and their provenance is the only thing that could shed some light on their complex question of their origin. 

Serena D’Italia 

¹ Vasari 1966-97, vol. I, p. 88; vol. IV, p. 630. 

² For an exhaustive bibliography on the artist, see Dušková 2003 as well as the more recent Jolly 2011 and Schir 2011. 

³ A. Daninos, “Una bella cera? Ritrattini in cera del Cinquecento tra collezionismo e falsificazione”, in Ottani Cavina, Natale 2017, pp. 188, 193. 

⁴ Jolly 2011 p. 61; A. Daninos, “Una bella cera? Ritrattini in cera del Cinquecento tra collezionismo e falsificazione”, in Ottani Cavina, Natale 2017, p. 195. 

⁵ Jolly 2011, pp. 47-62.