Vatican Museums

From the fifteenth century onwards the memory of Rome and her greatness, always latent in the figurative art of the Western Middle Ages, became a key component in European art. At around the middle of the sixteenth century, the theme of heroic virtus, long present in the humanistic repertoire, found particularly convincing expression in the glyptic arts, medals and minor bronze statuary. These two reliefs in silver by Guglielmo Della Porta, belonging to a famous series inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, are works of antique composition expressed in pure Mannerist style. Previously attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, they have long been at the centre of a complex critical debate that instead regards them to be the work of Della Porta himself or of a Flemish student working under his guidance.