The bass-relief presents on the back a label with an inscription in French that, even if full of gaps, give us important and precise infos on its history: D’aprez [Mic]hel Ange par Jean Bap[tis]te Boucher[on] ancien professeur des bea[ux Arts]. Turin, [181]4 all’age de 72 ans.

So we obtain both the attribution to Giovanni Battista Boucheron both the time period 1814, which match with his age there reported, 72 years old, because he was born in 1742. The artist, who followed his father in the art of silversmith and move to Rome to improve his technique, received important public recognitions in his home town, Turin, so that in the 1763 Charles Emmanuel III elected him “royal goldsmith” and, under Victor Amadeus III in 1775, he became the director of the Royal Goldsmith Laboratory. In the inscription, however, is mentioned is second career, that is when, in 1778, still under Victor Amadeus III, he became professor and secretary of the new born Royal Academy of Painting and Scultping. Thanks to the label, too, we get to know the work Boucheron was inspired from, the Deposition (or Lamentation) by Giovanni Della Porta, of which an alabaster exemplar exists in the Sforzesco Castle in Milan, coming from the Torre and Tasso from Venice collection, and a metal casting is in Michigan, coming from the John Pierpont Morgan collection. Here is given to Michelangelo, an erroneous attribution that circulated from ancient times, until the discovery of the preparatory drawings by the Piedmont artist, held in the Dusseldorf Museum Kunstpalast, re-established the right autorship.