Aleksandra Lipinska, Moving Sculptures: Southern Netherlandish Alabasters from the 16th to 17th centuries in Central and Northern Europe, Leiden, 2015, pp. 259-260, fig. 184

Maeve McGrath, Daniel Neuberger the Younger and Anna Felicitas Neuberger. The Ciroplastic Oeuvres 1621-1680 and 1650-1731, Regensburg, 2016, p. 82, fig. 24 an𝔉d pp. 164-166, no. 6

This🀅 unusually large and beautifully modelled relief by the celebrated 17th-century wax sculptor, Daniel Neuberger the Younger, is a😼 rare survival of early sculpture in this most fragile of materials.

A biblical subject with erotic potential, Lot and his Daughters proved popular among Counter-Reformation artists, who sought pretexts to depict their collectors’ desired female nudity within acceptable bounds. As recounted in Genesis, Lot, having es💟caped from Sodom and newly widowed, took refuge in a cave with his two daughters. Believing that they were the last human beings left on earth, the young women proceeded to intoxicate their father and to lie with him,🍌 producing each a son. The present relief’s frame once included an integral sliding shutter, which would have added to the thrill of beholding such risque content.

The composition reappears in three stone reliefs; a marble in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, and two near-identical alabasters in Schloss Löwenburg, Kassel and in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. Most recently it has been argued (Lipinska, op. cit.) that these are the work of the same sculptor, probably of Southern Netherlandish origin but active in Germany in the middle of the 16th century. It is presumed that the composition is dependent from an unknown, probably Netherlandish, graphic model. A fourth work showing the same arrangement is a bronze relief in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, which corresponds to the present wax in almost all its details. The Vienna relief is documented to have been cast by Balthasar Heroldt the Elder for the Imperial Kunstkammer in o🐎r before 1657 and, given its correspondence in size to the Berlin relief, it and the wax are likely to have been copied from it.

Born into an Augsburg family of wax 🔯modellers, Daniel Neuberger the Younger rose to significant prominence as an artist in mid-17th century Germany, receiving commissions from clients as eminent as Emperor Ferdinand III. Neuberger was renowned among his contemporaries not only for his intricate battle scenes - of which two survive in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna - but also for his talent in imitating other materials in his richly coloured waxes. The latter skill is showcased beautifully in the present relief, which renders the women's precious jewellery, as well as the metal of the amphora, to astonishing effect. A convincing stylistic parallel for the present work is found in Neuberger's wax relief with Susannah and the Elde♏rs preserved in the Wallace Collection, London (inv. no. S460).