The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (TX) announced on August 28, 2026, its acquisition of the 1624 sculpture Samson and Two Philistines by Stefano Maderno (Italian, c. 1571–1636). A tour de force in both its composition and bronze casting, it is the first seventeenth-century bronze to enter the Kimbell’s collection.
The sculpture is now on view in the Kimbell’s Louis I. Kahn Building. Just over two feet tall, the sculpture is a knotted tangle of three nude male figures, depicting the Old Testament account of Samson—a figure possessed of super-human strength—raising the jawbone of a donkey to strike an enemy Philistine while another lies motionless at his feet.
