British School at Rome: Papers of the British School at Rome (9.1920)

The Roman Medallists of the Renaissance.

37

we may admit that the piece shows some traces of the influence of Lysippus,
as in the lettering and in the composition of the reverse.
More of the quality of Lysippus is to be found in a medal of Diomede
Caraffa (Pl. VII. 2) and in that one of Francisco Vidal which describes
the sitter as Ingenii doctrinae leporisque ac proiitatis principium et culmen
(Pl. VII. 4)1—so close are they to his manner that many would hardly
hesitate to give them to the artist himself. The same is true of the larger
of the two medals which give us the portrait of the medallist Giovanni

Candida (Fig. 3).2 This is a work of
great beauty, broad and sympathetic
in its treatment, and perhaps finer than
anything else attributed to Lysippus.
In the proportion and arrangement of
the lettering with regard to the bust it
differs from that artist’s work, and the
resemblances which it dqes show to it are
easily explained on the ground that the
author of it, perhaps Candida himself,
came under the influence of Lysippus,
if he was not actually his pupil. The
smaller medal of Candida, on the other
hand, shows no trace of the elder artist’s
influence (Pl. VII. 5). On this piece
Candida is a youth of about seventeen
or eighteen years, and he may have made

Fig. 3.—Giovanni Candida.
it himself before he knew the


work of Lysippus.
Giovanni Candida8 was of Neapolitan birth, but came young to Rome,
and had a succesful diplomatic career. He was still quite young when he
went to Flanders, where he is known to have been secretary to the Duke
of Burgundy from 1472 to 1479. His life was henceforth mainly spent in
Flanders or France, so that he can hardly count as a Roman medallist.
But it must have been on one of his diplomatic visits to Rome that he
made the fine medal, so broad and dignified in style, with the portraits

1 Burl. Mag., xiii. (1908) p. 280, Pl. III. 4 and 5. Compare Candida’s medal of Nicolas
Ruter. 2 From a photograph kindly supplied by the late M. Gustave Dreyfus.
s H. de la Tour in Revue Numism. (1894, 1895). Other references in Thieme-Becker,
Allgemeines Lexikon. On Candida at the Court of Burgundy, see V. Tourneur in Rev.
Beige de Numism., 1914 [1919] pp. 381-411 ; 1919, pp. 7-48, 251-300.