The Hours of Night and Day: A Rediscovered Cycle of Bronze Reliefs by Giovanni Casini and Pietro Cipriani

Created around 1730, this group of reliefs adds fundamentally to our understanding of bronze sculpture in the period between the late Baroque and the Enlightenment. The sculptor Pietro Cipriani, who collaborated on the reliefs with the painter Giovanni Casini, emerges as a key Florentine bronze artist of the early 18th century. The works help confirm that the rich tradition of bronze sculpture in Florence - initiated by Giambologna and influential across Europe - continued for one generation longer than scholars previously believed. The reliefs also show that the last major exponent of this tradition was Pietro Cipriani. The Hours of Night and Day sculptures beautifully encapsulate early 18th-century European ideas about the cyclical nature of time and about the characteristics of particular moments.

Eike D. Schmidt is the James Ford Bell Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, and Head of the Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical sculpture. David Ekserdjian is Professor of Art History and the Head of the Department of the History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester, England. He has published extensively on bronze sculpture, the history of collecting, and Renaissance painting, prints, and drawings, with a particular specialisation in the artists Correggio and Parmigianino. Rita Balleri is a research associate at the University of Florence. She has published several articles and catalogue entries on Doccia porcelain and has collaborated with the Doccia Museum in Florence on various research projects and exhibitions. Her doctoral dissertation on the models for Doccia porcelain (2011) was the basis for her recent monograph, Modelli della Manifattura Ginori di Doccia: Settecento e gusto antiquario (2014).