A Seated Boy with a Column

One of the Fitzwilliam Museum's collection of rare bronze statuettes, this piece is an early work by this Dutch artist, who helped bring the high renaissance style in sculpture to Germany. Typical of Gerhard's early bronzes, while stylistically ambitious, the bronze is thickly cast, much flawed and repaired, and heavily worked up, with a patchy and uncertain gilding. The function of the bronze is thought to be secular, possibly representing Architecture in a series of figures representing the Arts.