Mother Ape 1595–96 Camillo Mariani Italian A tailless barbary ape performs a mother’s balancing act. With her long arms she originally clutched two baby apes to her shoulder. The arm and leg of one of them can still be seen dangling along her left side, and its head originally lolled back against hers. The remains of four digits and of a footpad, as well as various surface gouges in the bronze, permitted Richard E. Stone to reconstruct the position of the missing second baby: it climbed up along the mother’s right side, resting its right paw on her knee and reaching its arms around her to grab

Mother Ape 1595–96 Camillo Mariani Italian A tailless barbary ape performs a mother’s balancing act. With her long arms she originally clutched two baby apes to her shoulder. The arm and leg of one of them can still be seen dangling along her left side, and its head originally lolled back against hers. The remains of four digits and of a footpad, as well as various surface gouges in the bronze, permitted Richard E. Stone to reconstruct the position of the missing second baby: it climbed up along the mother’s right side, resting its right paw on her knee and reaching its arms around her to grab the arms of the first baby.[1] One of the mother’s legs extends downward, as if to test water in a pool beneath; she has bent the other up against her body to steady herself. While the babies cavort, she carefully controls her charges, as her concentrated expression makes clear. The texture of the fur, the details of the clenched paws, and the postures of the apes all make this one of the most vivacious and naturalistic of Renaissance animal statues. A wide hole in the mother’s left shoulder provided an opening for a fountain to spout upward. Calcium deposits attest that water coursed over the sculpture’s surface for long periods of time. Until documents linked this statue unexpectedly to the Venetian sculptor Camillo Mariani, it was thought to be a Florentine production by Giambologna, as it is clearly related to three bronze apes on a fountain in the Boboli Gardens, Florence, that had already been attributed to that Flemish-born master. The documents?—??published by Eike Schmidt and Clara Tarca in 2002?—??instead linked the Museum’s bronze and the three Boboli Gardens apes to a 1596 commission for the Villa Miralfiore in Pesaro.[2] The history of the bronze group has been pieced together as follows. After an active career in his native city of Vicenza and in the Veneto, Camillo Mariani spent two years in Pesaro before moving permanently to Rome. On May 13,

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