Descrizione
This publication puts Bandinelli’s portrait (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) in context by looking broadly at the practice of drawing by Renaissance sculptors, including such luminaries as Donatello, Verrocchio, Michelangelo, Cellini and Giambologna. The book surveys two centuries of material, considering rough sketches and more finished sheets, isolated studies and sequences of ideas. Comparing designs on paper to related three-dimensional works by the same artists, the book directly confronts the question of the importance drawing held for sculptors in the period. The authors pose new questions about the creative process and the relation between the arts in Renaissance Italy. A focus of the book will be Bandinelli’s own drawings and the development of his practice across his career and his experimentation with different media. The broader question considered, however, is when, how and why sculptors drew. Every Renaissance sculptor who set out to make a work in metal or stone would first have made a series of preparatory models in wax, clay and/or stucco. Drawing was not an essential practice for sculptors in the way it was for painters, and indeed, most surviving sculptors’ drawings are not preparatory studies for works subsequently executed in three dimensions. When sculptors did draw, it often indicated something about the artist’s training or about his ambitions. Among the most accomplished draftsmen were artists like Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Cellini, who had come to sculpture by way of goldsmithery, a profession that required proficiency in ornamental design. Artists who sought to become architects, meanwhile – the likes of Michelangelo, Giambologna and Ammannati – similarly needed to team to draw, since architects had to provide plans, elevations and other drawings to assistants and clients and had to imagine the place of individual figures within a larger multi-media ensemble. Certain kinds of projects, moreover – fountains and tombs, for example – required drawings to a degree that others did not. Sections on the Renaissance goldsmith-sculptor and sculptor-architect will allow comparison of the place drawing had in various artists’ careers.
With essays by: Michael W. Cole, Davide Gasparotto, Alina Payne, Oliver Tostmann, Linda Wolk-Simon.
