Charles Avery

Joseph [also known as Giuseppe] de Levis applied his distinctive signature (be- tween 1577 and 1605) to a whole range of fantastic, Mannerist, bronze artefacts, some 45 in all. They range from large church-bells – some still in situ – and miniature table-bells, to mortars, inkstands, perfume-burners, door-knockers, firedogs, statuettes, and even a portrait-bust. Joseph’s sons and nephews continued the family business into the seventeenth century, signing a similar range of artefacts in an early Baroque style, including two rare mortars that are cast with Hebrew letters and ornament, as well as other intriguing Judaica. Round this core of guaranteed work a corpus of reasonable attributions may be made on stylistic and circumstantial grounds, giving a total of some 140 items. This provides a unique cross-section of the production of a hard-working and resilient renaissance foundry. Frequently inscriptions and coats-of-arms specify Joseph’s wide-ranging clientèle, from civic and church authorities, to guilds and confraternities (all-important in society at the time), nobility, merchants and connoisseur-collectors. Bronzes by the De Levis dynasty are now dispersed among museums in Europe, the USA and Israel, and in Old Master collections, notably that of the late Robert H. Smith, whose foundation purchased in 2002 the eye-catching Ewer from the Salomon de Rothschild Foundation in Paris for £276,000. This well illustrated catalogue raisonné is therefore important both art-historic- ally and from the perspective of the Jewish Diaspora in Renaissance Italy.

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