A bronze sculpture cast in Rome in 1624 has found a permanent home in Fort Worth's Cultural District, marking the first 17th-century bronze to enter the Kimbell Art Museum's collection. The piece, titled Samson and Two Philistines, stands a little over two feet tall and depicts the Old Testament figure Samson raising a donkey's jawbone to strike down an enemy, with two beaten Philistine figures collapsed beneath him.
The sculpture is the work of Italian artist Stefano Maderno, a leading Roman sculptor of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, according to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. Before arriving at the Kimbell, the bronze passed through a noble Italian family collection, a private collection in Rome, and the London art firm Patricia Wengraf Ltd., according to the Kimbell Art Museum. That chain of ownership helps confirm the sculpture's history before it entered public hands in Texas.
Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell, called it one of the greatest seventeenth-century Italian bronzes, per the same NBC 5 report. The sculpture is now on view in the museum's Louis I. Kahn Building, where chief curator Emerson Bowyer arranged for it to sit alongside a terracotta modello for the Triton Fountain by Gian Lorenzo Bernini — Maderno's younger rival in Rome — according to North Texas e-News. Bowyer said the sculpture enhances the Kimbell's presentation of Roman sculptural production in the seventeenth century, the outlet reports.
A Single Pour of Bronze, Never Repeated
Inscriptions around the base of the sculpture record its production date of 1624 and note that the complex, intertwined composition was produced in a single pour of bronze, its surface later refined through hand chasing and hammering, the museum notes. The base also bears the names of Stefano Maderno and Horatio Albritio, also known as Orazio Albrizzi, the founder credited with casting it. Early 17th-century bronze casting was technically demanding, and single-pour statuettes of this complexity were uncommon at the time, per the museum's own account.
Albrizzi was no minor figure. The bronze founder also cast elements of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's famous Baldacchino inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, according to Sotheby's. That connection places him among an elite circle of bronze founders working in Rome during the era.
The Kimbell notes that while 17th-century biographer Giovanni Baglione recorded that Maderno created terracotta statuettes meant to be cast in bronze by collectors, Samson and Two Philistines is the only small-scale bronze after Maderno's compositions that can be securely dated to his lifetime. Many surviving early modern bronzes are posthumous casts, which makes a lifetime-dated example like this one exceptionally rare. The museum also notes that no other known example of this exact composition exists.
Bridging Two Eras of Roman Sculpture
Maderno apprenticed with Niccolò Pippi in Rome between 1587 and 1592 and went on to execute commissions for popes and high-ranking ecclesiastical figures. He is best known for Saint Cecilia, created in 1600 for Santa Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome, a work that influenced the development of Baroque sculpture. The Kimbell describes Maderno as a pivotal transitional figure who bridged the Late Renaissance Mannerist style of artists like Giambologna with the dynamic Baroque movement epitomized by Bernini.
The composition of Samson and Two Philistines draws from Judges 15:16, depicting Samson's battle against the Philistines. As NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reports, the sculpture's base bears its production date alongside the names tying it to both sculptor and founder.
A Small Collection Where Every Piece Counts
The Kimbell's permanent collection holds roughly 375 select works, an institutional policy that favors supreme aesthetic quality over volume, unlike large civic museums that house tens of thousands of items. That scale means every new acquisition carries outsized weight for the Fort Worth institution.
Admission to the Kimbell's permanent collection galleries, where the Maderno bronze is now installed, remains permanently free to the public, even as tickets for special traveling exhibitions run up to $18 for adults. The acquisition arrives as the museum builds toward a busy fall and spring calendar, including Photography's First Century in October and the touring exhibit Treasures of the Pharaohs in spring 2027 — a show Hoodline previously covered before its San Francisco stop.
The Kimbell sits at 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth's Cultural District, alongside the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. It's the same stretch of the city where Hoodline recently reported a shooting outside a nearby hotel, underscoring how tightly packed the district's cultural and civic life can be. The Maderno bronze follows another landmark purchase for the museum, which drew attention in 2023 when it added a rare Olmec jadeite figure to its holdings, per Hoodline.
