Two Busts of Soldiers in Niches

Copy of a niello print from the Durazzo Collection, (n. 3009) the original of which is now in the Cabinet Rothschild at the Louvre.

This piece depicts a pair of pseudo-classical warriors, face to face and wearing extravagantly fanciful helmets of a tyoe seen in a group of related niello prints.  Like most of these design, the original print is probably Florentine and datable to the late fifteenth century.

The nielli of the Durazzo collection were reproduced in engravings by the owner himself, between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, in Venice - as also specified by Malaspina in his catalog of 1824 - constituting a series that was circulated and collected by amateurs. Bartsch describes these copies in his volume published in 1811, a date that therefore constitutes the termus ante quem for the execution. For the attribution to Maso Finiguerra, disputed by some scholars, see the summary in Zucker in The Illustrated Bartch,1993.