Object details
Accession number
S4n3
Primary Creator
German, Bavaria
Full title
Saint Florian
Creation Date
about 1520-1525
Provenance
Purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner from the art dealer Theodor Einstein & Co., Munich with a second statue of Saint George (museum no. S4n1) for a total of 2,460 marks on 16 August 1897 through her husband, John L. Gardner, Jr. (1837–1898).
Dimensions
157.5 cm (62 in.)
Display Media
Polychromed wood (the staff is modern)
Web Commentary
This painted wood sculpture depicts Saint Florian, the patron saint of chimney sweeps and firefighters. Clad in full armor, he hold a banner and a bucket which he uses to pour water onto the burning building at his feet--his customary attributes after the middle of the 15th century.
Permanent Gallery Location
Main Entrance Passage and Lobby
Bibliography
Catalogue. Fenway Court. (Boston, 1903), p. 3. (as "German gothic")
Gilbert Wendel Longstreet and Morris Carter. General Catalogue (Boston, 1935), p. 154. (as German, late 17th or early 18th century)
Charles L. Kuhn. "German Late Gothic Sculpture in the Gardner Museum, Boston" in Wilhelm Reinhold Walter Koehler (ed.). Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter (Cambridge, 1939), pp. 572-73, fig. 10. (as South German, about 1525)
Morris Carter. "Mrs. Gardner & The Treasures of Fenway Court" in Alfred M. Frankfurter (ed.). The Gardner Collection (New York, 1946), p. 57, ill.
Anneliese Harding. German Sculpture in New England Museums (Boston, 1972), p. 83. (as a "19th century imitation of a late Gothic figure")
Cornelius C. Vermeule III et al. Sculpture in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1977), pp. 102-03, no. 134. (as South Bavarian or Austrian, about 1520-1525)
Rights and reproductions
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