The fruits of sixteen years of discriminating acquisition on the international art market, Robert Smith's is one of the most important collections of European bronzes in private hands today. The collection embraces the Renaissance in Italy and northern Europe in such a way that its components complement and enhance the appreciation of each other. Central to the collection is a group of thirteen pieces that illustrate the legacy of Giambologna in Florence. Also assembled are pieces by independent contemporaries: Alessandro Vittoria and Francesco Segala in the Veneto, and the younger Genoese-born Niccolo Roccatagliata, whose surviving work is of the utmost rarity. A selection of fine early North Italian bronzes serves as an introduction to the collection; the Netherlands and France are also well represented. Many pieces have distinguished provenances, and all have been exhaustively researched. The book comprises not just a catalogue but an important and original contribution to scholarship in its own right. This new and extended version of the first edition retains the entries written by Anthony Radcliffe with a few additions or corrections, and an entry that he drafted on the miniature cannon signed by Orazio Antonio Alberghetti has also been incorporated. New entries have been supplied by Marietta Cambareri, currently Curator of Sculpture in the 'Arts of Europe' section of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by Fabio Barry, Mellon intern for 2004 in the Department of Sculpture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and by Nicholas Penny.

This detailed volume completes the survey of European sculpture and works of art in the collection. Eighty-seven pieces are illustrated and described, including examples in terracotta by Benedetto da Maiano and Riccio, in bronze by Antico and in marble by Bernini.
This sequel to "Medieval Sculpture and Works of Art" by Paul Williamson (1987) completes the catalogue of European sculpture in The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Each object is illustrated in colour, many in numerous views. A special theme explored in the introduction is the variety of ways in which particular images were repeated at different times: the multiple production of relief images of the Virgin and Child in various materials; variations on a popular iconographical theme in the workshop of Tilman Riemenschneider; and the difficulties of identifying contemporary and later terracotta and plaster reproductions of popular portrait busts produced in eighteenth century France.