The Frick Collection Gathers Nearly Forty Sienese Bronzes for a First Survey

At a Glance

• Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450-1500 is on view at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, from Thursday, October 15, 2026, through Monday, January 18, 2027.
• The exhibition gathers nearly forty works by sculptors including Donatello, Vecchietta and Francesco di Giorgio, many never before shown outside Tuscany.
• Giulio Dalvit, the Frick's Associate Curator, organized the show and authored the catalogue with an international team of contributors.
• Louis Vuitton is Principal Cultural Sponsor.

Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450-1500 opens at The Frick Collection on Thursday, October 15, 2026, and runs through Monday, January 18, 2027. It is the first exhibition to treat Siena as a center of bronze sculpture in the Italian Renaissance. Nearly forty works are gathered, among them statues, reliefs, candelabra and medals by sculptors including Donatello, Vecchietta and Francesco di Giorgio. Many have never left Tuscany.

Giulio Dalvit, the Frick's Associate Curator, organized the exhibition and wrote the catalogue with an international group of contributors. The show fills the three rooms of the museum's Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries.

"Between 1450 and 1500, almost nowhere in Italy did local artistic traditions rely so heavily on a single medium as Siena's did on bronze," Dalvit said. "Yet, the Tuscan city has been celebrated chiefly for its paintings."

The familiar Renaissance story centers on Florence. Siena, some forty miles south, followed a course linked to its rival and consciously its own, and its place on the Via Francigena pilgrimage route made it a crossroads for artists and ideas. After Florence defeated Siena in the 1550s, the city was cast as a relic of the medieval past. The exhibition argues otherwise.

Bronze was costly, technically demanding and endlessly reusable. In times of war, sculptures were melted down and recast for utilitarian ends, so few survive. The Frick says it has assembled virtually every Sienese bronze from the period that could safely travel.

The first room places bronze in fifteenth-century Siena, in churches and households and on the battlefield. A bell cast in 1454 for a church connected to the Santa Maria della Scala hospital complex anchors it, alongside a flagpole-torchère, a horse ring and drawings of cannons made for the Orsini family.

A small second room belongs to Donatello and his Sienese stay of 1457 to 1461. Political turmoil and anti-Florentine sentiment kept him from producing a single new work in the city, so he is represented by the tomb slab of Giovanni di Bartolomeo Pecci, Bishop of Grosseto, cast before his arrival and sent to Siena for installation. It is one of only eight signed works by Donatello in existence. This is its United States debut.

The third and largest gallery moves from funerary sculpture to portrait medals, portable reliefs and freestanding statues. The unfinished monument to the jurist Mariano Sozzini the Elder, on loan from the Bargello in Florence, is the only bronze effigy of a layman to survive from fifteenth-century Italy. Eight medals made by or attributed to Francesco di Giorgio carry rulers, humanists and bankers on the obverse and mythological subjects on the reverse. Vecchietta's Resurrection of Christ, a gift from the dealer Joseph Duveen to Henry Clay Frick, was a major source of inspiration for the show.

Among the statues, a Hercules from Berlin newly attributed to Francesco di Giorgio stands beside a closely related Frick statuette and a monumental Hercules from Dresden. A Frick David with the Head of Goliath, attributed to Giovanni di Stefano, is paired with a smaller David attributed to Francesco di Giorgio, lent by the Capodimonte in Naples.

Italian lenders include the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Perugia, the Museo Diocesano Albani in Urbino and the Museo Civico in Siena. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Skulpturensammlung in Dresden also lent.

Louis Vuitton is Principal Cultural Sponsor. Leadership support comes from an anonymous donor in honor of Ian Wardropper and from Margot and Jeremiah M. Bogert, Elizabeth M. and Jean-Marie R. Eveillard, and The Christian Humann Foundation. Major support is provided by Clémence and William von Mueffling, Fondazione Bracco, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation, The Eric & Jane Nord Family Fund for Exhibition Programming, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

The Frick Collection is at 1 East 70th Street, New York. Hours are Wednesday through Monday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Timed tickets are recommended at frick.org/tickets, and only children ages 10 and older are admitted. The catalogue, nearly 400 pages in hardcover, is sold in the Museum Shop and at shop.frick.org.