Phalaris and the Bull of Perillus
Giovanni Battista Caccini (Italian, 1556-1612)
1590–1600
- Medium
- Terracotta with traces of polychromy
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- 68.6 × 87.6 cm (27 × 34 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Kate S. Buckingham Endowment
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions violence, death or gore. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This classical subject tells the cautionary tale of the sculptor Perillus, who offered to make a bronze bull in which the tyrant Phalaris could roast his enemies. Perillus was rewarded by being the contraption’s first victim. In the Renaissance this story was interpreted as a moral fable of how bad advice rebounds on the giver, and it is here presented against the backdrop of a large, contemporary piazza. The relief is attributed to Giovanni Caccini on the basis of its stylistic relationship to his best-known work, the bronze panes of the doors of Pisa Cathedral.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
