A very exceptional and important porcelain figure of the Roman God created at the Doccia factory in Tuscany between the years 1753-55 will go under the hammer in the next Fine European Ceramic sale hosted by Bonhams on the th of December. It is the first time a work of this scope has landed in the auction room and it has an estimate of 300.000-500.000 pounds.  

Founded in the middle of the eighteenth century by Carlo Ginori, the Doccia factory is still open in Sesto Fiorentino, next to Florence. It was at the end of the 1740's that the factory especialized in the making large scale porcelain figures.

Based on the Roman model of the Farnese marble sculpture of Hercules, which is probably a III century A.D copy of the original Greek sculpture. The Farnesse sculpture was restored in the sixteenth century by Guglielmo della Porta and is now in the National Arqueological museum in Naples. The legend tells that when the legs of the monumental piece were recovered outside Rome, Michaelangelo protested against the substitution of the limbs arguing that Della Porta's finely crafted work was better than the original. The original gesso model of this espectacular piece is still kept at the Doccia factory museum. It was very common for the factory to use bronze models by well known sculptors and then translate them into porcelain. Gasparo Bruschi, the most renown sculptor of the Doccia factory, was commissioned the uneasy task of making the mould from the most famous sculpture of antiquiety in the eighteenth century.  

Porcelain works of this size were very rare and the ones that remain are mostly in museum collections. Rita Balleri, a well known specialist in this field, writer of Omaggio a Venere has added a scholarly text on the Doccia Hercules to her book.

Nette Megens, Bonhams european Ceramics specialist, commented, "It is an unprecedened event that a Doccia figure of this size and importance comes to the market by public sale. It is a truly once in a lifetime chance for an auctioneer to handle an object of this beauty and museum quality."Alfonso Carbajo Agrasar