David, After Gian Lorenzo Bernini

This small bronze is a miniature reproduction of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s life-size marble sculpture, David (1624). Bernini's work shows the young David in the act of slinging the stone that will fell the giant Goliath. The harp at his feet alludes to his future fame as a harpist and composer of psalms. This bronze was cast at the Fonderia Artistica of Vittorio Veraldi in Naples, Italy, and possibly also modelled by Veraldi himself. George Gough Booth bought the statuette from Veraldi in the spring of 1914, a souvenir of his trip with his wife Ellen Scripps Booth and their daughters Grace and Florence through France, Italy, and Germany. The bronze is a close, but not an exact, miniature copy of Bernini’s original. There are small but evident differences in the expression of the face, the position of the figure’s legs, and the rendering of the drapery. While Bernini carved David’s sling from marble, Veraldi rendered it in twisted metal wire.

Veraldi’s foundry and shop was one of many that sprang up in Naples in the second half of the nineteenth century, supported by the growing tourist trade and inspired by the Museo Nazionale di Napoli’s decision, in 1860, to begin issuing permits for local artisans to produce copies of works in their collections, which included many masterpieces of classical and Renaissance art. They also looked further afield for examples to emulate, such as Bernini's David, which remains today in the palace for which it was sculpted, now the Galleria Borghese, in Rome. Booth purchased a second, larger figure from Veraldi on the same trip—a bronze Bacchus, based on a Pompeiian original—which is no longer part of the Cranbrook collections.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
January 2024