Giulio Dalvit

This week, Assistant Curator Giulio Dalvit celebrates the 50th episode of Cocktails with a Curator by considering a marble bust by the fifteenth-century artist Francesco Laurana. The bust has no wrinkles or defects and almost seems composed not of flesh but of perfect geometrical shapes. While some have suggested it is an ideal portrait of feminine beauty, it is traditionally identified with the Italian noblewoman Ippolita Maria Sforza or with her daughter, Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, Assistant Curator Giulio Dalvit examines the beguiling marble bust of The Comtesse du Cayla by Jean-Antoine Houdon. This beautifully intimate portrait showcases the artist’s virtuoso rendering of surfaces and volumes—it is almost impossible to imagine that the grapevine-girdled Comtesse began as a single block of marble. This week’s complementary cocktail, the Frosé, evokes summers in the south of France, where her family owned vast estates.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, we welcome the Frick’s new Assistant Curator of Sculpture, Giulio Dalvit. In his premiere episode, he discusses one of the important bronze statuettes in the collection, a Hercules by Antico. A celebrated artist of great technical virtuosity, Antico worked primarily for the powerful Gonzaga family in Mantua in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.