Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture, New York, 2005, cat.no.34

RELATED LITERATURE

C. Semenzato, La scultura veneta del seicento e del settecento, Venice, 1966.

R. Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, rev.ed🍌., New Haven and London, 1🃏999, pp.65-67, 117, n.5.

S. Guerriero, "Le alterne fortuine dei marmi: busti, teste di carattere e altre 'scolture moderne' nelle collezione veneziane tra sei e settecento," in La scultura veneta de seicento e del settecento: nuovi studi, Venice, 2002, pp. 73-149.

Juste Le Court, or Giusto Il Corte, was an Italian baroque sculptor of Flemish birth. Like many Northern artists, he travelled to Rome and eventually settled in Venice around 1655 where he established a close working realtionship with the architect Baldassare Longhena. He quickly became well-known and won several commissions but his most celebrated work was the decoration of the high altar of S Maria della Salute, Venice. The use of excessജive drama in his depiction of figures recalls  the style of Gianlorenzo Bernini,♌ whose sculptures Le Court would have seen on his visits to Rome.

The exaggerated facial expression, animated treatment of the hair and beard are analagous to Le Court's busts of Heraclitus and Democritus in the Museo de Arte in Ponce (Guerriero,op.cit.,figs.19-20), his busts of Saints Thaddeus and Andrew in the chiesetta di Ca' Nave in Cittadella (Guerriero,op.cit.,figs.22 and94) and his figure of Saint Peter from the high altar of Sant' Andrea della Zirada in Venice (Guerriero,op.cit.,fig.23).

Guerriero refers to the type of dramatic treatment se🌊en in the present bust as caricature and discusses Le Court's "charac🉐ter heads". All stemming from Bernini's inventive work, sculptors such as Le Court and Orazio Marinali seized on the taste for such extreme "baroque" depictions and often produced pairs of contrasting heads exhibiting various moods and attitudes.