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Image and thing: the distribution and impact of plaster casts in Renaissance Europe
In fifteenthcentury Florence, painters such as Neri di Bicci made plaster copies of three-dimensional works by others that came through their workshops for painting and used casts after body parts and sculpture for study purposes (fig. 1).2 Plaster models, with their plain and monumentalizing surfac...
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Published in: | The sculpture journal 2017-01, Vol.26 (1), p.83-92 |
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Main Author: | |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
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Citations: | Items that cite this one |
Online Access: | Get full text |
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Summary: | In fifteenthcentury Florence, painters such as Neri di Bicci made plaster copies of three-dimensional works by others that came through their workshops for painting and used casts after body parts and sculpture for study purposes (fig. 1).2 Plaster models, with their plain and monumentalizing surfaces, were ideal tools to study the rendering of sculptural volume, so important for the pictorial style of many Italian art centres in the period. The same document indicates the existence of either a house or a large study named 'of the reliefs'.4 While Squarcione's case was certainly exceptional, evidence from workshop inventories shows that from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards many painters, among them Benozzo Gozzoli, Andrea del Verrocchio, Filippino Lippi, Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto and Giulio Romano, owned moderate quantities of casts, including body casts and casts after ancient and contemporary sculpture. The immense financial value of gems accounts for the demand among buyers for three-dimensional to-scale reproductions.7 Giovanni Ciampolini, a dealer and collector through whom Lorenzo de' Medici acquired many of his antiquities, reassured Lorenzo in a letter accompanying a cast of the famous Phaeton intaglio that the original was 'a quite beautiful object and quite different from what the cast shows'.8 Once a gem had changed hands the new owner may have handed over such casts to artists for reproduction in different media, or to other collectors. In this case, the motivation for making a cast may have been to retain a record of a visual invention that was leaving... |
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ISSN: | 1366-2724 1366-2724 1756-9923 |
DOI: | 10.3828/sj.2017.26.1.8 |