Before the Paragone: Visual Intelligence and the Critical Misfortune of Sculptors in the Trecento (original) (raw)
This article contends that a modern discourse about sculpture as an art originated in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries in Italy. It suggests that sculpture's specificity, e.g. its merits and limitations, came to be defined mainly through a comparison with painting that was at once practical and theoretical. People in Italy at the time understood their encounters with artistic objects aesthetically and strived to acquire knowledge of art. Drawing and visual note-taking played fundamental roles in their connoisseurial training. Connoisseurs and artists alike talked, wrote and polemicized about art. They did so in their own terms, though often they borrowed ancient writers' words, concepts and biases. They also believed that ancient painting had been totally obliterated and could only be read about in books. Conversely, ancient sculpture had survived and thus provided a touchstone against which to measure the skills of coeval sculptors, albeit one that – it is argued herein – condemned them to anonymity.
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The sculptors of the Roman Baroque, including masters such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Alessandro Algardi, and Giuliano Finelli, managed to achieve unprecedented vivaciousness in their works. Yet, the apparent life of these sculptures is persistently obscured by their materiality. Soft, undulating flesh and fluttering draperies are captured in hard and lifeless marble. Taking the manner in which the beholder’s engagement with sculpture plays out in contemporaneous poetry and other sources as a point of departure, this study explores the various ways contemporary viewers dealt with sculpture’s double character, introducing ideas from modern-day psychology along the way.
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Dorothy Glass’s 2005 paper, “Quo Vadis? L’étude de la sculpture romane italienne à l’aube du troisiéme millénaire,” balanced a brief sketch of the historiography of medieval Italian sculpture studies as practiced during the last millennium with suggestions for directions such studies might take in the new one. Many of the issues and approaches she signaled as potentially fruitful have since been integrated into scholarship: for instance, the paired study of iconography and liturgy has led to a richer understanding of the social and ritual functions of religious sculpture, including its role in the creation of sacred space, while investigations of patronage have highlighted, in particular, the role of the laity in the development of medieval Italian art. But as scholars know only too well, history has a way of tracing its own course, and the intervening fifteen years have brought dramatic changes to medieval art history unanticipated by Glass’s essay, including the environmental, ethical, material, and Mediterranean “turns,” new digital (or digitally inspired) tools and methods, and the emergence of long-suppressed questions of racism and bias, historiography, and the academy. This triple session seeks to honor Glass’s many years of contributions to medieval art history by asking, Quo vadimus nunc? We present papers that engage methodologically, historiographically, prescriptively, and even polemically with the study of medieval Italian sculpture today, expansively defined.
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Destrée P., Murray P. (eds), Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, First Edition, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 2015