The plaster reproduces in reduced size the so-called Dancing Faun, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original kept in the Tribune of the Uffizi Galleries. Since its earliest years of activity, the Doccia Manufactory produced true-to-scale porcelain reproductions of ancient marbles preserved in the Florentine Medici collections, such as the Venus de’ Medici, the Arrotino, and Cupid and Psyche.
The execution by the Ginori Manufactory of the true-to-scale porcelain reproduction of the Dancing Faun is documented in 1748, most likely by the head modeller Gaspero Bruschi.
In the eighteenth-century Inventory of models of the manufactory, five versions of this iconographic type are recorded, varied both in size and in materials (plaster and terracotta).
The production at the manufactory of reduced-size versions of this sculpture can be attributed to the genre of souvenir with an antiquarian taste, widely popular throughout the eighteenth century following the rise of antiquarian interest strongly influenced by travelers of the Grand Tour.
Our specimen shows ‘cut’ breaks, so called because they were intentionally made by the artisans active at Doccia in order to use the various parts in creating plaster molds in sections, necessary for its translation into porcelain.
This type of breakage is also found on a smaller terracotta example, also preserved at the Ginori Museum (inv. 1662), but not modelled in the manufactory, as is evident from the observation of the sections into which the figure was segmented.
The presence of several porcelain versions of the Faun in various sizes confirms what is indicated in the aforementioned Inventory of models. Among these, notable is the one derived from a larger model compared to our specimen, currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (1987.293), while smaller ones, made both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are kept at the Ginori Museum (inv. 950, 5159).
