Massacre of the Niobids

The plaque is taken from a series of sixteen reliefs depicting episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses designed by the sculptor Guglielmo Della Porta, active in Rome from 1537. This series consists of eight oval plates and eight octagonal ones (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), which correspond to those made in lead for the Manifattura di Doccia, although altered into a rectangular format. 

Between July and December 1746, the sculptor and medallist Anton Francesco Selvi is recorded as having executed a series of lead models referred to as “fables,” “Bacchanalian” or “Baccanarino.” This circumstance suggests that he was the maker of the reliefs of the Metamorphoses by Della Porta. The decision to modify their shape could be attributed to the technical requirements of the factory. However, in the Stefano Bardini Museum in Florence there is a lead example similar to ours in subject and format but slightly reduced in size and varied compared to the archetype in the decoration of the naturalistic background, corresponding to the addition of the corners (h 11.8 x 21 cm). This fact suggests that the variant is connected to the popularity these reliefs had over time, thus excluding a direct derivation of our model from the Bardini example. 

The relief with the Massacre of the Niobids, together with others from the same series, was used by the factory for decorating vases, such as the one at the Palazzo Madama Museum in Turin (inv. 1676/C), datable to around the 1750s. In the same years, the factory also produced single porcelain interpretations of this series. In particular, there is the polychrome painted variant of our subject by the chief decorator Johann Carl Wendelin Anreiter von Ziernfeld, which is currently in a private collection.