Renaissance sculpture
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Stones of Zadar
The Capital of Venetian Dalmatia
The book investigates the transformation of the architectural and visual language in Zadar eastern Adriatic town at the dawn of the early modern era when the mighty mediaeval commune was being transformed by the emerging governmental structures of the Republic of Venice. These events coincided with the Ottoman Empire's takeover of the hinterland of Dalmatian cities transforming Zadar into a city on the brink of two worlds.
A highly autonomous mediaeval commune was a lively trans-Adriatic artistic centre a network of builders painters and sculptors from Dalmatia Venice Marche and Lombardy so with the early adoption of humanist concepts by the local elite this practice continued. However the transformations the governmental structure and economic policies steadily limited its community autonomy and commercial sources. The crisis worsened in the 16th century when the local elites lost a large portion of their revenue from the fertile hinterland captured by the Ottoman Empire.
This launched an ongoing militarisation of social structures and fortifying the town. These events were reflected in the fields of architecture and art. The process of adopting a new architectural and artistic language began in the second half of the 15th century as demonstrated by motifs in architectural decoration and sculpture with impulses from important Dalmatian sculptural and stonemasons’ circles as well as Venetian models from the circles of Pietro Lombardo and Mauro Codussi. When the new classical language of architecture began spreading in the middle of the 16th century it expressed mostly in the renovation of administrative structures with occasional departures from the stylistic canons of artistic centres.
Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 1471–1572
On Michelangelo’s first day in Rome in June 1496 Cardinal Raffaele Riario asked him if he could create ‘something beautiful’ in competition with the antique. The twenty-one-year old sculptor responded to this unique challenge with the statue of Bacchus now in the Bargello museum. This statue as well as the Sleeping Cupid which first brought Michelangelo to Riario’s attention have long been shrouded in mystery and the Bacchus as well as its patron have long suffered from critical censure.
Through a comprehensive analysis of overlooked and previously-unpublished sources this study sheds new light on the Sleeping Cupid the Bacchusand a fascinating period in the history of Renaissance Rome when the careers of Riario Galli and Michelangelo were closely intertwined. It considers the rise of the Riario dynasty starting with the election of Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 Riario’s partnership with Jacopo Galli in the reconstruction of the palace now known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria the attempted sale of Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid in Rome as an antiquity Riario’s patronage of the Bacchus and the Bacchus’s displayin the house of the Galli up until its sale to the Medici in 1572. Taking a broad interdisciplinary perspective it offers a fundamental reassessment of Cardinal Riario’s career as a patron of Jacopo Galli’s role as an intermediary for both Riario and Michelangelo and of Michelangelo’s collaboration with Riario and Galli.
The Allure of Glazed Terracotta in Renaissance Italy
This book explores the role of glazed terracotta sculpture in Renaissance Italy from c. 1450 to the mid-1530s. In its brightness and intense colour glazed terracotta strongly attracted the viewer’s gaze. Its pure and radiant surfaces also had the power to raise the mind and soul of the faithful to contemplation of the divine. The quasi-magical process of firing earthenware coated with tin-based paste promoted initially by imports from the East was seized upon by Luca della Robbia who realised that glazed terracotta was the ideal vehicle for the numinous. He began to create sculptures in the medium in the 1430s and continued to produce them for the rest of his life. After Luca’s death his nephew Andrea della Robbia inherited his workshop in Florence and continued to develop the medium together with his sons. The book considers some of the large-scale altarpieces created by the Della Robbia family in parallel with a number of small-scale figures in glazed terracotta mostly made by unidentified sculptors. The captivating illustrations integrate these two categories of glazed terracotta sculpture into the history of Italian Renaissance art. By focusing on a specific artistic medium which stimulated piety in both ecclesiastical and domestic contexts this book offers new ways of thinking about the religious art of the Italian Renaissance. The links it establishes between lay devotion and the creation of religious images in glazed terracotta invite reassessment of habitual distinctions between private and public art.
Jerusalem in the Alps
The Sacro Monte of Varallo and the Sanctuaries of North-Western Italy
The Sacro Monte (Holy Mountain) at Varallo is a sanctuary in the Italian Alps west of Milan. It was founded in the late fifteenth century by a Franciscan friar with the support of the town’s leading families. He designed it as a schematic replica of Jerusalem to enable the faithful to make a virtual pilgrimage to the Holy City if they could not undertake the perilous journey to visit it physically. The Sacro Monte consists of a sequence of chapels containing tableaux of life-size painted terra-cotta figures with fresco backgrounds recounting the life and Passion of Christ. A century later in the era of the Counter-Reformation a ‘second wave’ of Sacri Monti was constructed in the north-western Alps modelled on Varallo but dedicated to other devotional themes like the Rosary or the life of St Francis. All these sanctuaries like Varallo were the result of local initiatives initiated by the clergy and the leaders of the communities where they were situated. Like Varallo they were the work of artists and craftsmen from the alpine valleys or from nearby Lombardy. Long dismissed as folk art unworthy of serious critical attention the Sacri Monti are now recognised as monuments of unique artistic significance. In 2003 UNESCO listed nine of them in its register of World Heritage Sites. This book studies their development as the products of the religious sensibilities and the social economic and political conditions of the mountain communities that created them.
Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent
This volume honours F. W. (Bill) Kent (1942–2010) internationally renowned scholar of Renaissance Florence and founding editor of the Europa Sacra series. Kent belonged to an energetic generation of Australians who in the late 1960s tackled the Florentine archives and engaged key issues confronting historians of that ever-fascinating city.
With his meticulous archival findings and contextual interpretations spanning a scholarly career of more than forty years Kent engaged with indeed drove the scholarly response to many of the issues that have shaped not just our current and emerging understanding of Florence and other urban centres of Italy but along with that a more nuanced view of the role of frontier towns and the countryside.
Interdisciplinary in scope and grounded in visual literary and archival materials the essays presented here explore a variety of facets of the society of Renaissance Italy confronting and extending themes that have been emerging in recent decades and exemplified by Kent’s work. These themes include the role of kinship and networks power and agency in Laurentian Florence gender ritual representation patronage spirituality and the generation and consumption of material culture.