• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2863 0

drawings, the models or bozzetti in wax and clay, which were shown to clients to indicate what they could expect for their money, and the more finished modelli in terra-cotta. The shop and its back studios and outhouses were full of equipment of every kind, including plaster models of actual heads, arms, hands, feet and knees, which Verrocchio had made by a secret process of his own. These were used by himself and his assistants for sculpture and painting alike. He kept racks of drawings of male and female heads and made clay models of figures, draped with rags dipped in plaster, for use in sculpting or painting drapery, a practice adopted by Leonardo and others who worked under him. Knowledge of the Verrocchio studio takes us behind the scenes of Renaissance art and shows how its high standards were based on intense discipline, careful preparation and a ruthless use of every mechanical aid that human ingenuity could devise. Behind this, in turn, was a passionate desire to make money as well as to produce the highest art.

It is important to note that Renaissance sculptors did not have to rely on plaster studio casts to emulate the antique. In a sense the antique was always around them, in the shape of arms and legs and heads of broken Roman statues, which were still to be found in Italy in large numbers at the close of the Middle Ages. From the fourteenth century they began to be prized by collectors and artists. Art lovers would pay good prices for heads and torsos and mount them in the courtyards of their city palaces or on the garden terraces of their country villas. Artists studied and copied them. Some were also employed by patrons to mend broken antiques and carve fresh bits to complete the figure, though this was work that well-known sculptors were too proud to undertake. But just as scholars went in search of early manuscripts of classical works in monastery libraries, so artists rummaged through Roman ruins in search of artistic treasure. Whole statues in stone or marble were rare, and bronzes very scarce. The best in any case tended to be Roman copies of Greek originals. One bronze that did survive in a perfect state was the firstcentury A.D. Spinario, as it was called—a nude boy taking a thorn from his foot. This rested on a column outside St. John Lateran in Rome, near the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and was much admired, especially by artists. It may well have inspired Donatello to create his David, just as the Marcus Aurelius undoubtedly encouraged him and Verrocchio to undertake equestrian bronzes. By the end of the fifteenth century, ambitious collectors were prepared to spend heavily on excavations of ancient sites likely to contain statuary. This was how the Apollo Belvedere, a geniune Greek statue, came to light in Rome in the 1490s, followed in 1506 by the Laocoön, one of the greatest masterpieces of antiquity. Both were acquired by Pope Julius II, who reigned 1503–13, and were the prize exhibits of his sculpture collections, which later formed the nucleus of the present Vatican Museum.

According to Vasari, studying the antique forms, not least in the palace of Julius II, was of critical importance to the work of the masters of what we call the High Renaissance, especially Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. The last, in particular, learned from the ancients in all kinds of ways: design or disegno, choice of subject and materials, the actual carving, the finish, the balance between the parts and the whole, above all in developing a sense of monumentality, of grandeur, what the Italians call terribilità, the ability of art to inspire sheer awe. Michelangelo was born in Florence in 1475 and died in Rome eighty-nine years later. He had more than seventy years of active artistic life, without pause or rest, working as sculptor, painter and architect, and writing poetry too. More nonsense has been written about him than about any other great artist: that he was a neurotic, a homosexual, a Neoplatonist mystic, etc. In fact he was nothing more than a very skilled and energetic artist, though