Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Architecture
Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral Details
Review "No better guide is available than the fine catalogue that tells the story by way of scholarly but very readable essays and sumptuous illustrations"—Marco Grassi, The New Criterion"Delivers impressively sensitive images that capture the subtle textures and gestures of the sculptures"—Canadian Art"The copiously illustrated catalog is excellent"—Christopher Knight, LA Times"Superb catalog"—Barrymore Laurence Scherer, The Wall Street Journal"No better guide is available than the fine catalogue that tells the story by way of scholarly but very readable essays and sumptuous illustrations"―Marco Grassi, The New Criterion"Delivers impressively sensitive images that capture the subtle textures and gestures of the sculptures"―Canadian Art"The copiously illustrated catalog is excellent"―Christopher Knight, LA Times"Superb catalog"―Barrymore Laurence Scherer, The Wall Street Journal Read more About the Author Timothy Verdon is Director of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and Professor of Art History at the Stanford University Florence Center. He is Canon of Florence Cathedral and Director of the Office for Church Heritage of the Archdiocese of Florence. His publications include Francesco d’Assis negli Affreschi di Giotto, and the three-volume La cattedrale e la città:saggi sul Duomo di Firenze. Atti del VII centenario del Duomo di Firenze, for which he was co-editor.Daniel M. Zolli is a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s History of Art and Architecture Department, where he is completing a dissertation on Donatello’s workshops.Amy R. Bloch is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). She has published essays on Ghiberti, Donatello, and the decoration of the Florence baptistery, and her book on Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.Marco Ciatti is Superintendent of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, an institution of the Italian Ministry of Culture and world leader in the field of art restoration. He is also director of the Opificio’s Conservation Laboratory for Easel Paintings and Textiles and teaches history and theory of conservation.Stefano Nicastri is an architect and art historian who has collaborated for many years with the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione in the areas of Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture. Read more
Reviews
Anyone who is a devotee of Donatello or an aficionado of early Renaissance sculpture in general should make every effort to see this excellent exhibition at the Museum of Biblical History in New York (from February to June 2015). It is a unique opportunity to see some of the sculpture that was created in the first half of the fifteenth century as decoration for the magnificent Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, including nine pieces by Donatello himself, along with pieces by Giovanni D’Ambrogio, Nanni di Banco, Luca della Robbia and others. The architectural models of the Cathedral’s dome and lantern by Filippo Brunelleschi, their designer, are also featured. None of these sculptures has ever been seen in the U.S. before; indeed, most of them have never left Italy, and it is unlikely that they ever will again. They are currently in New York only because the Cathedral Museum, where they are permanently housed—among the world’s largest collections of monumental Florentine sculpture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—is temporarily closed owing to an ambitious expansion that will greatly increase the available exhibition space. One understands why great space is required to display these objects at their best: some of them are larger than life-size, and most of them were created to be placed on the Cathedral’s exterior or on its bell tower at a considerable height above the viewer. The installation in New York is thus a bit crowded, but the curators have gone to great lengths to overcome any feeling of cramping by placing the statues on bases higher than usual (to suggest their elevation when they were on site), by separating sections with a series of translucent curtains, and by providing exemplary lighting.Those unable to see the exhibition in person can take comfort in the knowledge that the catalogue is superb. It has been edited by the exhibition’s curator, the Yale-trained art historian Msgr. Timothy Verdon, who is both the Canon of the Cathedral and the director of its museum (and who also curated and edited the catalogue of a concurrent exhibition, at the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea”—see the review on this website). Dr. Verdon provides a brief but comprehensive overview of the construction of the Cathedral complex from its initiation in 1059 to its final decoration over half a millennium later. His general introduction to the works on exhibit follows their arrangement in the catalogue and makes for a very clear exposition, especially since the catalog illustrations are reproduced in smaller format in the body of the text, which eliminates the need to flip back and forth between essay and catalogue. The Harvard researcher Daniel Zolli contributes a thorough and impressively informed examination of Donatello’s commissions for the work, and Amy Bloch, a professor of art history at SUNY Albany, writes a fine essay on Lorenzo Ghiberti, examining not only his contributions from the early workshop to the famous “Gates of Paradise” on the Baptistery, but also the way his themes and aesthetic were profoundly influenced by his intimate acquaintance with the Florentine humanists, whose learned pursuits are always at the background of the artistic endeavors. These essays are illuminating and informative and very well written. They and the catalogue section are accompanied by some seventy-five finely chosen comparison illustrations, many of them full-page. All twenty-three of the catalogue items are reproduced full-page, and each is discussed in a two- or three-page signed and well annotated entry by one of the contributors. These are also all clearly written and accessible to the general reader, although they can be somewhat technical at times, and some of the specialized terminology used is esoteric, e.g. “impost,” “archivolt,” “trabeation,” etc., so it would be convenient to have a little architectural dictionary at hand while reading, or at least easy Internet access. The final text is a short exposition by Fr. Verdon of what the new museum space will look like, complete with several architect’s renditions. (One spectacular feature of the new facility will be the space to present a scale reconstruction of the medieval façade of the Cathedral, which was dismantled in 1586 but is known from a contemporary drawing, opposite which will be a hundred-foot-long wall with the three bronze doors of the Baptistery and their cinquecento statuary groups.) In addition to the catalogue reproductions and the companion illustrations, there are more than forty-five full pages of blown up details; this is a more than generously illustrated catalogue, with hardly a page without some image of one sort or another. A previous reviewer has decried the black background on which the statuary has been photographed, claiming that this “abstracts” the objects, robs them of any sense of spatial character, and makes them look like images in a bird book. I am not sure what that actually means, although I must confess that I have far more experience with the photographic reproduction of paintings than of sculpture. It is apparent that some kind of neutral, in fact artificial, background is required for objects that have long since been removed from their original locations and displayed in a museum; they have indeed been “abstracted” from their original spatial environment—but perhaps that is not what the reviewer meant. In any case, I personally have no objection to the black background; I have not felt that the sculptures have been disadvantaged or that I myself have been visually deprived in any way because of it. The book concludes with a short but focussed selected bibliography and a good comprehensive index. Exhibitions of sculpture can be larger, but hardly much better, and this is an outstanding catalogue (and Amazon’s price must make it one of the best art book bargains of the season). Very highly recommended.
