Black People in European Sculpture Project

12 (05/01/2022)

African Boy Riding a Billy Goat

African Boy Riding a upon a Billy-Goat

This early sixteenth-century bronze sculpture depicts a boy carrying a great mollusc shell on his shoulder while riding a billy goat. The shell, likely originally used to hold ink, was cast from an actual mollusc specimen. Both the goat and shell were symbolic of sensual desire during the Renaissance.
The marble base dates from the eighteenth-century and is attributed to Luigi Valadier (1726-1785).

Statuette

Base present - may be a later replacement

Height (excluding base): 21.7 cm

Width (excluding base): 22.1 cm

Depth: ?

Bronze

Marble – another colour (not black or white)

Marble – white

Gold

Casting

Gilding

Patination

Monochrome – black

Anonymous: generic/idealised type

Shell

Goat

Main protagonist

Male

Adolescent

Uncertain

Naked

None

None

Working

Neutral/emotionless

Looking outwards (engaging viewer)

No location included/implied

Sixteenth century (1500-1599)

Early 1500s

Inferred from stylistic features

Inferred from dates when sculptor is active

Decorative

Secular Domestic: library/study

43.2

c. 1785: listed in the collection of Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier, the Bailli de Breteuil (1723-1785) and Ambassador of the Order of Malta in Rome (1758-1777).

1943: purchased by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts from J. McCann

In the Renaissance iconography, goats were common symbols of Bacchus, god of wine, and representative of unbridled procreative instincts, and shells were often a symbol for female sexuality, associated with Venus.
The elaborate 18th-century base is attributed to Luigi Valadier (1726-85), the most esteemed goldsmith in Rome, whose clients included the Pope and Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier, a former owner of this bronze statuette.

During Black History Month 2018, this bronze was the focus of an alternative interpretation by University of Birmingham students in English, Drama and American & Canadian studies. They produced labels that interrogated artworks in The Barber Institute of Fine Arts collection which depict, refer to, or have been collected from people of colour. This was a collaboration with the Barber’s Learning & Engagement Team; artist and poet Dzifa Benson; and Dr Asha Rogers, Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature.

Here are two alternative labels:

1. By Sana Haq, BA English Literature:
You see them as one body
But they are in fact two

The boy to the sculptor:
“fingering the muscular quads you cleaved me
tracing my hand over your deceptively smooth and chiseled line work
at night I feel my fingers fanning out creating friction against the inside of the conch
scratching and digging until the debris clogs up my nails
rubbing the hot metally residue in between my sweaty fingertips
I feel his fine goat hairs unduly caress my bronze-husk behind”

The boy to the spectator:
“you think i willingly straddle his rump
and comb my hands through his hefty horns
BUT!
they are stuck to it by sculptors moulding metal
and every night I wait to roll over and walk outside the glass”

What you see is not a symbiotic relationship
The boy is a human
The goat is an animal
But both are made beasts by men.

2. By Dzifa Benson:
African Boy Riding a Billy-Goat
After Andrea Riccio
How time seems to slow to nothing
when you have to be three things
at once – custodian of history’s
deep mythic time, arcane iconography
and a word that causes offence.

Il Riccio’s Strombus Giga overwhelms
his slight shoulders, the hissing
in the gigantic conch eats the air
for the din and drift of unwise things.
The boy’s arm fuses with goat’s horn
tethering the artist to the posterity of a lie.

Boot-lace black asks: Where does it go to graze and chew the cud?
Liquorice black says: They believed goats to be sexually mature at only seven days.
Soot black says: History and language history are that solitary, sacrificial goat.
Obsidian black asks: Whose thin skin of woman born sows panic, warps creation?
Blood black says: yours, not mine, is pulled from the world beyond my figure.

In the conflict between the divine and bestial
Mr Oseji maintains the boy had a soul.
Come closer folks, there is everything
to see here. A record of taste and knowledge
never off duty, in Riccio’s bronze.

Mostly, it’s a lack.