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Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Statuary Connoisseur

Speranza

It must be said at once that the connoisseurship of Italian statuary presents FAR GREATER difficulties than the connoisseurship of Italian paintings.

Most of these difficulties arise from the fact that a statue has a THIRD dimension.

It presents the problem of ACTUAL, not notional, TACTILITY.

From the 1880s on, valid results could be obtained with painings by comparing one flat photograph image with another.

But if STATUES are looked on as though they were in _two_ dimensions, the results will amost inescapably be wrong.

Not only is a knowledge of the PHYSICAL PROPERTIES of a statue essential, but it is vital to understand the CREATIVE ACT through which a statue is produced.

The early students of Italian painting, whatever their shortcomings, would never have MISDATED pictures by a WHOLE CENTURY.

YET -- with STATUARY, that frequently occurred.

In the BARGELLO, beside the bronze "Davide" by Donatello, stand two other statues, ascribed to Donatello.

One is a marble BAPTIST (the Martelli Baptist), carved about 1460 by DESIDERIO.

The second is a marble BAPTIST carved shortly before 1530 by Francesco da Sangallo.

Both, as we say, are given to DONATELLO.

And the putative works of MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI have included a HELLENISTIC statue, and statues by MUCH LATER sculptors, like Domenic Pieratti, and a seventeenth-century Roman group, the Palestrina Pietà.

Even TODAY, if we go to the Casa Buonarroti in Firenze, you will find that Buonarroti's name has been attached to a female figure by Vincenzo DANTI, and a so-called "Slave" by heaven knows whom.

You might infer from this that STATUES are especially deceiving, and that in our experience would be correct.

A STATUE must be apprehended SLOWLY (always in the ORIGINAL, since a photograph is almost invariably misleading) -- and there are no shortcuts.

Wihuot an understanding of the SCULPTOR's (or strictly, modelator's) mind and soul, as it is revealed in the TOTALITY of his surviving statues, and of his working procedure and technique -- the way in which he made his models and approached the thing -- useful attributions can NOT be made.

And the difficulty of the study is reflected in the fact taht, whereas the connoisseurship of Italian PAINTING was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and reached maturity in 1914, the very  FIRST occasion when the principles of "STYLE ANALYSIS" were applied to Italian sculpture in *1935*!

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The instrument of change was a Hungarian, Jeno Lanyi.

INEVITABLY, Lanyi made mistakes -- he was active as a scholar only for six or seven years -- but his hits were most important than his misses, and as MORELLI had done sixty-five years before, LANYI opened up the study by proving how VULNERABLE to rational analysis many of its sacrosanct assumptions were.

Lanyi's significance cannot be measured in terms of his results.

LANYI returned to the MORELLIAN principle that every attribution must be questioned and each artistic personality defined.

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A good deal of progress has been made since then, but many problems which seem prima facie to be soluble are still unsovled.

Problems like that presented by the bronze "Baptist" ascribed to Donatello, formerly in Berlin, which disappeared after the Second World War.

This "Baptist" was quite large (84 cm high) and was a work of extraordinary individuality and power.

BODE, obsessed like so many historically minded people with literary evidence, reached for the nearest document, linking it to a commission to Donatello of 1423 for a gilt-bronze Baptist for ORVIETO, and as late as 1935 this explanation of it was still entertained as a serious possibility.

BUT IN THE LATEST MONOGRAPH, it was very properly DENIED to Donatello and given a considerably LATER date.

We never studied it in the original, but some reasonably accurate modern bronze casts were made from it, one on the front at BARGA in the Garfagnana, and another in FIRENZE, in the Ognissanti.

THEY TELL ONE NOTHING, naturally, about the facture of the bronze original.

BUT when we last looked at them, it seemed to us, from the way in which the lost bronze by Donatello was constructed (if has three supports, the two feet and the cloak resting on the ground behind), that the original MUST HAVE BEEN BY ***ANTONIO POLLAIUOLO*** who habitually constructed his small bronzes in this rather _eccentric_ way.

We believe that the attribtuion can be confirmed from the modelling of the arms and the attenuated, rather mannered forefingers, which have parallels in the reliefs of "THEOLOGY" and "DIALECTIC", on the Sixtus IV tomb.

From the treatment of the temples, which are shown as indented planes receding sharply from the forehead in a way that recalls the treatment of the shoulders and shoulder blades of the "ERCOLE" in the Bargello; and from the HEAVY DRAPERY which falls free of the spare, ascetic limps in a way that cannot but remind us of the cloak of ERCOLE, in the "ERCOLE ED ANTEO" bronze.

Pollaiuolo's authorship of this beautiful and moving work, "THE BAPTIST", could, we believe, be demonstrated without difficulty, if the original survived.

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