Six Sculptures, Six Artists, Six Styles, Across Five Centuries

dissfordents (52)in #art • 9 years ago (edited)

I have always, since childhood, been drawn to the visual arts. Particularly toward the sculpture and architecture of the ancient Greek and Roman people. My interest flickers after the 4th century AD, rekindling at the quattrocento taking place in northern Italy just before the Italian Renaissance. Of course, the origins of the Italian Renaissance can be traced almost entirely to one city in Tuscany, the city of Florence, or Firenze to the Italians. Just how and why this rebirth took place, and why in Florence, is the subject of college courses, books, and scholarly articles. But one thing is for certain, all of humanity has been blessed by, and continues to benefit from, what took place in Italy over five-hundred years ago. The arts, religion, philosophy, and politics, would never be the same.

What I hope to zero in on in this short article are six styles of sculpture that correspond to six artistic movements, the earliest of these being the Quattrocento, the artistic changes taking place in Italy from 1400 to 1499. And the latest being the Neoclassical period, starting in Rome (of course) in the mid-18th century, at the time of the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A generation of art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home countries with rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals. Neoclassicism coincided with the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, and continues to the present in some ways. Washington DC is a monument to Neoclassical architecture represented in such buildings as the Jefferson Memorial and Lincoln Memorial, both of them built in the mid 20th century.

Book-ended by the Quattrocento on the left and Neoclassicism on the right are the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, and Rococo. Mind you, these styles were all-encompassing, and not at all limited to the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Indeed, the visual arts were by-products of changes, sometimes upheavals, in religion, philosophy, and politics. Even music went through major changes passing over these fault lines. In other words, the changes taking place in the minds of men manifested itself in what they created with their hands. These lines drawn by art historians are sometimes fuzzy, but for a general overview of sculpture they work fairly well. So lets take a stab at making some artistic styles and time periods more digestible, so when you look at a sculpture such as the one below you can place it into its proper historical context and style.

_{Photo by Jörg Bittner Unna via Wikimedia Commons}

To further aid in understanding, and for the sake of brevity, I will highlight just one artist/sculptor of each period, giving us six artists for six periods. One for the Quattrocento, and that would have to be Donatello. One for the Renaissance, and that could only be Michelangelo. For Mannerism we will use Benvenuto Cellini. The Baroque period belongs to Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The lesser known Rococo period will be represented by Antonio Corradini, and the Neoclassical period by Antonio Canova. Donatello was born c1386. Antonio Canova died in 1822. One could then say that the art of sculpture, from the Quattrocento to the Neoclassical, 436 years, or roughly five centuries, was dominated by men from the Italian peninsula. We cannot say Italy, because Italy did not become a unified nation-state until the mid 19th century. Before that it was the Republics of Florence and Venice, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, and so on.

So let's begin with Donatello as the sculptor representing the Quattrocento. He was born in Florence around 1386 (the exact date uncertain) and lived until 1486, his life spanning eight decades. Donatello must have been a workaholic when one considers the copious amount of life-size sculptures he left behind in marble, bronze, and even wood. He may have studied under Lorenzo Ghiberti, he was definitely a friend of Filippo Brunelleschi, the builder of the Duomo in Florence. Donatello, as noted worked in a number of mediums, doing sacred works and also public statues, including an bronze equestrian statue that survives in Padua, Italy. Picking just one sculpture to represent not just a lifetime of dozens of great examples, but also just one to represent a whole period of art, the Quattrocento, is very difficult, so I am going to make one exception to the rule. For Donatello we will choose two examples. Interestingly, Donatello produced prodigious amounts of work in marble, but our two examples will be in bronze and wood.

David - Bronze - 1430 to1440 - Bargello Museum - Florence
photo credit : https://www.flickr.com/photos/12152206@N03/2207198154

By I, Sailko, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6832143
Penitent Magdalene - White Poplar - 1453 to 1455 - Museo dell'Opera del Duomo - Florence

I chose these two works to highlight the virtuosity of Donatello in different mediums and his versatility in style; the polished bronze of an idealized, young, beautiful, and almost feminine David, juxtaposed against the rough, ultra realistic, even decrepit Mary Magdalene. In these two pieces we can witness the ending of the Quattrocento and see the Renaissance over the horizon. Donatello's David was the first free-standing bronze statue to be cast since the Roman era. Donatello had gone to Rome with his friend Brunelleschi. They excavated ruins, dug up statues together, measured the dimensions of buildings and columns, and brought this mother-load of information back to Florence, helping to jump start the Italian Renaissance.

Michelangelo lived to be eighty-eight years old. He was born outside Florence in 1475 and died in 1564. Like Donatello, his output was super-human. A life-long bachelor, his work was his mistress. An accomplished architect, painter, and poet, Michelangelo will always be remembered most for his sculpture. He designed the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline hill in Rome. He designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. He painted the Sistine chapel ceiling and the Last Judgement on the altar wall. But for our purposes we need to look at his larger than life statue of David, carved from carrara marble. In it we see the heights in sculptural excellence reached by the Greeks and Romans, and lost for a thousand years, ascended to again under the chisel of Michelangelo. The Italian Renaissance is in full bloom.

photo credit: Jörg Bittner Unna

You may remember I said the lines that art historians draw between styles can be fuzzy? Well the line between the Renaissance and Mannerism is one of those. Consider, Mannerism is a style that followed the Italian High Renaissance and lasted until about end of the 16th century when the Baroque period began to blossom. Where the Renaissance emphasized proportion and balance and idealized beauty, Mannerism exaggerates these qualities, sometimes resulting in compositions that are unnatural in appearance, or overly idealized. Benvenuto Cellini was also born in Florence in 1500 (are we seeing a pattern here?) and lived until 1571. He spent many years in Rome, was an accomplished musician, managed to get thrown in prison, wrote the first real autobiography, ever, and still managed to cast the greatest free-standing bronze sculpture in the Mannerist style. It can be seen today in Florence in the same place it was commissioned by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici to fill in 1554. It stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi located in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Benvenuto Cellini cast the now infamous statue of Perseus with the Head of Medusa seen below. We must take note of the change in subject matter here. From the middle-ages well into the Quattrocento the subject matter for artists was limited to the sacred. Subjects were taken from the Christian bible. Here we have Perseus and the head of Medusa, characters from pre-christian pagan literature; an example of ancient Greek and Roman literature being rediscovered in Cellini's time. Many of the ancient manuscripts that were housed in Constantinople, which fell to the Muslim armies of Mehmet in 1453, found their way into Florence, where scholars began to reacquaint themselves with the ancient Greek and Latin writers.

By Jastrow (Own work) [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Gian Lorenzo Bernini IS the Baroque period. Born in the Kingdom of Naples in 1598, he lived to be 81 years old, dying in 1680. Like Michelangelo before him, Bernini was an architect and a sculptor, and a complete workaholic. I encourage anyone reading this to read up on this man. He worked every minute of every day for 81 years. We will look at two of his works. I know, I said one per customer, then made an exception for Donatello, and now another for Bernini. The reason for this is so that the reader can compare three different versions of David by three different artists, working in three different styles, spanning almost 200 years, Donatello's in 1440 to Bernini's in 1624 with Michelangelo's in between. The other work by Bernini will be Apollo and Daphne. I choose these two to again call attention to the sacred and the pagan as subject matter. Apollo and Daphne were commissioned by a Catholic Cardinal, as was the David statue. This would be the Cardinal, Scipione Borghese. The story of Apollo and Daphne comes from The Metamorphoses by the Roman author Ovid, whereas the story of David and Goliath is found in the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament Bible. The classical poses of Michelangelo and Donatello are not enough for Bernini. Where Donatello's and Michelangelo's David's both stand, almost at attention, static, Bernini has his David caught in the act of casting a stone at Goliath, biting his lip, his eyes fixed on his target. It is all action, as is his Apollo and Daphne. In that work we see the moment in the myth where the young girl, resisting the god's advances, transforms into a laurel tree, her fingers becoming tree branches as Apollo's hand touches her torso. Bernini is the master of movement.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/antydiluvian/93251136
Bernini's David - 1624 - Borghese Gallery, Rome

photo: http://www.atlantedellarteitaliana.it/artwork-3878.html
Bernini's David - 1624 - Borghese Gallery, Rome

Apollo and Daphne - Bernini - c. 1625
Photo: © Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Galleria Borghese

We come to the Rococo period represented by Antonio Corradini. Born in 1688 in Venice, he died in Naples while working on the Sansevero Chapel in 1752. That is where he worked on the work highlighted here, Veiled Truth, an allegorical figure, another innovation. The Baroque period and later the Rococo experimented with many visual effects and optical illusions. The illusion of thin material draping over a figure carved in stone is on of these, and Corradini was a master of it. The reader can also see two other works equal to Corradini in the effect. The Veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino (1720–1793) and The Veiled Virgin by Giovanni Strazza (1815–1878).

photo credit: http://www.atlantedellarteitaliana.it/
Detail of Antonio Corradini's Veiled Truth - Marble - 1750

photo credit: http://www.atlantedellarteitaliana.it/
Antonio Corradini's Veiled Truth - Marble - 1750

This brings us to Neoclassicism, the last of our periods, and it will be represented by Antonio Canova. Born in Venice in 1757, he also died there in 1822. He carved the "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss" sculpture seen at the beginning of this article.
I will end this with a comparison between two versions of the Three Graces, the mythological three charities, daughters of Zeus – identified on some engravings of the statue as, from left to right, Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia, who were said to represent youth and beauty (Thalia), mirth (Euphrosyne), and elegance (Aglaea). The Graces presided over banquets and gatherings, to delight the guests of the gods.
One of these groups is housed in the Vatican Museums and is a Roman copy of a Greek original, dated to the 2nd century. It appears as the last of the next three photos. The group carved by the Neoclassical artist Canova appears below in the first two images. The group is housed in the Hermitage Museums in Russia, and was sculpted from 1814 to 1816.
The similarity between these two sculpture groups of the subject, The Three Graces, is no coincidence. The Neoclassical period was the logical conclusion to the Renaissance. The Greco-Roman ideal had been the guiding light to artists for over four-hundred years at this point and throughout the 19th and early to mid 20th century, remained in full force, mostly in public buildings, Capitols, and public sculpture. It is very evident in Washington DC and can be seen in everything from the Washington Monument, a nod to the obelisks of Rome, to the Columbus Doors on the Capitol Building, a nod to the Baptistry Doors in Florence, and to the Jefferson Memorial, a nod to the Roman Pantheon.

phote credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Graces_(sculpture)
The Three Graces by Antonio Canova - 1814-1816 - Hermitage Museum

photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Graces_(sculpture)
The Three Graces by Antonio Canova - 1814-1816 - Hermitage Museum

photo: http://ancientrome.ru/art/artworken/img.htm?id=5411
Marble. Roman copy of the first half of 2nd century CE after a Hellenistic original.

Six Sculptures, Six Artists, Six Styles, Across Five Centuries

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