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4734 results in Western art

Page 43 of 237

Supports in Roman Marble Sculpture
  • Workshop Practice and Modes of Viewing
  • Anna Anguissola
  • Published online:
    01 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 February 2018
  • Figural and non-figural supports are a ubiquitous feature of Roman marble sculpture; they appear in sculptures ranging in size from miniature to colossal and of all levels of quality. At odds with modern ideas about beauty, completeness, and visual congruence, these elements, especially non-figural struts, have been dismissed by scholars as mere safeguards for production and transport. However, close examination of these features reveals the tastes and expectations of those who commissioned, bought, and displayed marble sculptures throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Drawing on a large body of examples, Greek and Latin literary sources, and modern theories of visual culture, this study constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of non-figural supports in Roman sculpture. The book overturns previous conceptions of Roman visual values and traditions and challenges our understanding of the Roman reception of Greek art.

  • Introduction: The Nature of Invention, in Word and Image

  • Yvonne Elet, Vassar College, New York
  • Book:
    Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome
    Published online:
    06 January 2018
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    What extraordinary new mansion is this, rising so swiftly? To what end is there so much labor and sweat all around? Everywhere crowds of febrile workers, iron tools in hand, fall upon the stones. Vast foundations are laid in the open ground, from which an enormous mountain-peak of roofline climbs toward the stars. The clangor from the arduous work wanders through the seven hills of marveling Rome, the winding valleys echoing with the sound.

    Francesco Sperulo, The Villa Giulia Medicea Constructed in Verse (Villa Iulia Medica versibus fabricata), 1–7.

    In early 1519, the humanist and papal courtier Francesco Sperulo went for a walk on the Monte Mario, a wooded hill on the northwest edge of Rome with a breathtaking view of the city (Plate I). There, he tells us, he was inspired to write a poem, which he did as soon as he returned home. The object of his visit and his verse was the construction of the magnificent new villa overlooking the Tiber that we now know as Villa Madama, then being built by Pope Leo X Medici and his cousin and vice chancellor of the church, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. Not only a pleasurable villa suburbana for the Medici, this complex would also be a papal hospitium to welcome foreign dignitaries about to make a ceremonial entry into Rome. It was to be one of the first grand villas of the Roman Renaissance, conceived on a colossal scale unprecedented in modern Rome. The complex was also intended to rival and surpass its ancient prototypes, known from archeological remains as well as evocative literary descriptions of Roman villa life. The new villa, designed and decorated by Raphael and his associates, would present a Rome of revived ancient splendor and power to its important visitors. For Raphael, at the height of his powers, the Medici villa commission was a rare opportunity to conceive architecture and decoration together from the ground up, and a unique chance to design an entirely new, freestanding building and its landscape. As it turned out, it was also his last testament, incomplete at the artist's death in 1520. Although the utopian complex was only partially realized, one wing and some of the gardens were largely completed and lavishly ornamented, creating a novel and extraordinary decorative ensemble integrating landscape, architecture, ancient sculpture, painted and stucco decoration, gardens, and waterworks (Plates II–VIII).

  • Conclusion: Building With Mortar and Verse

  • Yvonne Elet, Vassar College, New York
  • Book:
    Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome
    Published online:
    06 January 2018
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018, pp 170-179

  • Summary

    THIS NARRATIVE OF THE INTERACTIVE INVENTION OF VERBAL IDEAS, architecture, and decorative forms at Villa Madama opens a window into the inextricably linked visual and verbal culture of early modern papal Rome, and into the working processes of Raphael at the height of his powers as architect and visual culture impresario. Like St. Peter's and the Vatican Palace Stanze, Villa Madama was a laboratory for creating a new system of design and a new visual language – a rhetorical visuality – that would parallel humanist attempts to proclaim the renovatio imperii using neo-Latin. As we have seen, the designs for the Medici villa were produced not only on the architect's drawing board, but also in words: ideas were articulated and elaborated in verse by poets, and in prose by the architect himself. Artists, humanists, and patrons collaborated to produce not simply what art historians call a program or iconography, but complex metastructures of word and image that were embodied in the villa project and its realization. This study has shown how at Villa Madama, the verbal and visual modes of ideation were not parallel, but inextricably connected.

    The previous chapters have presented a rare portrait of collaboration, which emerges as a dynamic working method in which concept and design evolved dialectically. On the work table and in social convivia, humanists, artists, and patrons rehearsed their ideas in verse, prose, and plans. This collective design process was performative: a product of a culture of orality and, at times, of improvisation (or at least, claims to such spontaneous creativity – a pretext Castiglione lampooned in his Book of the Courtier). It was also competitive, as artists and wordsmiths vied to promote their ideas. Their notion of the villa evoked ancient prototypes, both literary and extant, from descriptions by Pliny, Statius, and other authors to the ruins of Hadrian's villa complex in Tivoli. The wordsmiths and architects at Villa Madama sought to realize in verbal and visual terms their vision of an all'antica Roman villa; they selected elements of the classical past and brought them together in a new synthesis, thereby creating a new paradigm of the villa for the early modern Medici papacy. In so doing, they enacted a fascinating chapter in the long struggle for primacy of the arts of word and image.

  • 5 - Metastructures of Word and Image

  • Yvonne Elet, Vassar College, New York
  • Book:
    Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome
    Published online:
    06 January 2018
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018, pp 99-141

  • Summary

    MULTIVALENT CONCEPTUAL PROGRAMS

    We have seen poets working with architects to build the villa with words, but what exactly were they constructing? Historians of art and architecture usually speak of the program for an ensemble or building, typically in the sense of a description of ideological or iconographic subject matter to be expressed in the work. This notion is problematic for several reasons, beginning with the anachronistic term program itself, which first came into use in the eighteenth century, and in a different context. Sixteenth-century writers referred instead to the notion of invenzione, a term drawn from rhetoric and, confusingly, used to designate conceptual, verbal, or visual ideas. Much of the literature about programs or inventions has focused on painting, and occasionally sculpture, the media most closely associated with the visual formulation of text-based narratives. Our limited knowledge of such programs is based on extant written examples. The survival of a number of programs from the mid-sixteenth century coincides with the taste for increasingly complex, recondite imagery, although this obviously varied by patron and the nature of the commission. Contemporary sources earlier in the century are scarce, and varied in their appreciation of such complexity. Paolo Cortesi, writing in 1510, advocated learned and abstruse decorative schemes for the erudite audiences visiting a cardinal's palace. Although Cardinal Giulio knew Cortesi's work, he specifically expressed his wishes that the imagery for his villa be familiar and straightforward – “so that it is not necessary for the painter to add: ‘this is a horse’.” (Of course, this statement needs to be interpreted in the context of the jocular repartée between the Cardinal and his agent Mario Maffei in Rome, with the understanding that what constituted straightforward imagery for Cardinal Giulio could still seem complex by modern standards.) But there is little evidence about the generation of programs or inventions for the first half of the sixteenth century in general, and for the Raphael school in particular, which may partly reflect a culture of orality, and of collaborators working together face to face.

    The notion of a program for architecture is necessarily somewhat different than in representational media; the subject of whether and how verbal ideas could be translated into architectural design has proved to be problematic.

  • 3 - Sperulo's Vision

  • Yvonne Elet, Vassar College, New York
  • Book:
    Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome
    Published online:
    06 January 2018
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018, pp 61-84

  • Summary

    THE CURIAL HUMANIST FRANCESCO SPERULO CLAIMED TO build the Medici villa in verse, constructing the edifice in 407 lines of hexameter, preceded by a prose letter dedicating the work to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. The poet praises his patron and Pope Leo, as well as their Medici ancestors, but most of all he talks about the villa they are just beginning to build on the Monte Mario, describing it as if he can already see it. As we have seen, Sperulo's poem was one of several works written about the Medici villa, and was based on a long and rich literary tradition of villa panegyrics. Yet his poem was highly unusual for its length, its specificity to the actual villa, some of its subject matter, and the very fact of praising an actual building not yet built. Here, we take up the poet's vision of the villa, examining it in the context of literary tradition and Medici dynastic ideology, beginning with a brief synopsis of the poem's scope and structure.

    THE POET AS MEDICI VATES

    Sperulo attributes almost all of his poem to Father Tiber; the first eleven lines of the poem establish that Tiber is managing the villa's construction, and line 12 through the penultimate line 406 is an extended quote from the river god. His tasks include supplying materials on rafts, encouraging the workers to best the ancients (8–14), and excavating ancient marbles and transporting them to the villa (44). Father Tiber lavishly praises the site (14–21) and extols Cardinal Giulio for using art to elevate a site graced by Nature (22–32). Tiber commences his description of the villa by pointing out ancient marbles that he is placing there (47–77). He then praises at length the Medici ancestors beginning with Giovanni di Bicci (78–204), tracing the family back to the Etruscan king Porsenna, drawing on traditional imagery of the Etruscan origin of Tuscany and the Medici family.

  • APPENDIX I - Francesco Sperulo, Villa Iulia Medica versibus fabricata/ The Villa Giulia Medicea Constructed in Verse: critical edition and translation by Nicoletta Marcelli and gloss by the Author

  • Yvonne Elet, Vassar College, New York
  • Book:
    Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome
    Published online:
    06 January 2018
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018, pp 180-215

  • Summary

    CRITICAL EDITION AND TRANSLATION BY NICOLETTA MARCELLI AND GLOSS BY THE AUTHOR

    TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ON THE CRITICAL EDITION AND TRANSLATION

    Although the manuscript Vat. Lat. 5812 appears to be written in Sperulo's hand, for the sake of clarity, some changes in the orthography have been made as follows:

  • • I distinguish u and v, when it occurs as a consonant (e.g., dedicatory letter, §4: tentauerim > tentaverim; line 13: renouare > renovare, etc.).

  • • For the diphthong ae, I do not distinguish between ae, æ, and ę, as Sperulo does, because this alternation could generate confusion, so all three forms are indicated as ae.

  • • Like many other humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see Ugolino Verino, Epigrammi, ed. Francesco Bausi [Messina, 1998], 177), Sperulo uses the superscript o to indicate the vocative, which in this edition has been signaled only by encapsulating the word(s) in commas.

    • The paleographical abbreviations (e.g. line 31: myrtiq3 > myrtique; line 94: prioR > priorum; line 230: int’ > inter) and suspensions (e.g. the horizontal stroke interlined for m and n) have been silently expanded or written out in full.

    As for punctuation, Sperulo uses many punctuation marks, sometimes in a very modern way, such as exclamation marks (e.g. line 153), although in most cases the original punctuation leads to confusion, if not a complete misunderstanding of the text. Thus, for the sake of clarity and readability, I choose to abide by modern punctuation criteria, also adding quotation marks to speeches.

    A similar solution has been applied to capital letters, both for proper names (whether real or mythological) and for adjectives (e.g. line 87: eois > Eois), while titles, such as Dux, Cardinal, and Rex, are edited with lower case. Capital letters at the beginning of each line are given in lower case for the sake of clarity.

    Latin words with particular or unusual orthography are explained in the footnotes.

    Editing a text preserved in only one manuscript sometimes can be a challenging process, because we cannot possibly solve textual problems with the help of other witnesses, and eventually they may be insoluble. Luckily, this has not been the case, but, though this illuminated and lavish manuscript has been copied very accurately in terms of text coherence, some misspellings or mistakes inevitably occurred. I have proceeded with corrections, explaining in the footnotes my interventions.

Page 43 of 237