Post on 02-Feb-2023
Jeanette Kohl58
Patrons and artists of the f fteenth and sixteenth
centuries were certainly good keepers of their appear-
ances – in particular in Florence. What Jacob Burck-
hardt labelled the ‘discovery of the individual’ raises a
panoply of intricate questions that are often related to
the era’s representational spearhead – the human face.
These questions touch upon the making and meaning
of authenticity, upon resemblance, moral emulation,
theories of procreation, genealogical implications and
those of family likeness, metaphors of imprinting and
reproducing, and concepts of mimesis.1
The face as index and prompterIn the f fteenth century the rediscovery of the body in
the arts was naturally accompanied by a radical leap in
artistic production and quality, and thus in the repre-
sentation of faces2 – faces of ‘real people’, meticulously
drawn, painted, chiselled and cast. Even the formerly
schematized or idealized faces of long-deceased
saints – as in the multitude of reliquary busts and
other sculptural portraits – were now given seemingly
individual faces. Objects such as the famous reliquary
bust of San Rossore by Donatello (1386/7–1466) break
with the tradition in a quite remarkable way. Here
the sculptor transformed the saint by replacing the
‘sweet’ and often ‘vague’ expression associated with
such busts with one that relates instead to the world
of real faces, thus enabling a more ‘human’ level of
personal identif cation through specif c likeness for
the beholder.3 San Rossore’s image establishes a new
ndoubtedly, the European Renaissance was an era of faces. Like no other
period in history, it epitomizes the crucial role of individual and authentic
likeness for the manifold purposes of human representation. Countless painted
and sculpted portraits show proud patricians in noble attitudes and virtuous demeanour;
young beauties in chaste poses and luxurious dresses; aspiring youths with proud and
cheeky glances; children looking up to their elders; hosts of wealthy and potent families
having their own likenesses inserted into religious scenarios. There are also death masks
and funeral portraits conserving the individual appearance of those to be remembered.
Casting Renaissance Florence: the bust of Giovanni de’ Medici and indexical portraiture Jeanette Kohl
PORTRAITURE
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59Casting Renaissance Florence
Plate 1. Attributed to Antonio Benintendi, Giovanni de’ Medici. c.1512
Painted terracotta, h.38.5 cm
V&A: A.29–1982
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Jeanette Kohl60
form of agency for religious faces in Quattrocento
Florence.4 This tendency towards facial similitude
is apparent in profane and sacred portraiture alike,
in such a way that the borders between both become
utterly f uid.
The corpus of surviving Renaissance portraits
of ers visual evidence of the various aspects of Renais-
sance self-fashioning and its highly gendered and
conventional backgrounds. However, in this era of
‘rebirth’ so entirely associated with artistic creativity
and originality, very few texts zoom in on the numer-
ous images of dead faces or address the question of
indexically generated masks, casting and reproduc-
tion during this period.5 Moreover, literature on the
reproduction of faces and related issues of historical
‘faciality’ in the Renaissance is virtually non-existent.6
The following outlines aim to bridge this gap by
looking at images of Renaissance faces in what has
traditionally been perceived as the ‘periphery’ of
artistic portraiture.
Fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italian art
is not only characterized by a remarkable f xation on
the face: it also ref ects in manifold f xations of the face.
This adherence to faces shows most pronouncedly in
the image concept of the portrait bust and its strong
genealogical implications harking back to Roman
Antiquity. This consciously chosen linkage to ancient
strategies of commemoration was largely motivated
by the impetus to preserve likenesses for the future.
The commemorative function of portrait busts bears
a variety of meeting points between individual and
social persona, and between family image, individual
self-fashioning and collective standards of repre-
sentation. Head and face as the crowning part of the
human body and its main medium of communication
are staged as a ‘beacon’ of morally controlled intellect
and a successful social standing.
The human face can ‘adhere’ in two dif erent
ways: as a dense unit of distinctive features proper to
a unique individual, and as an emotionally regulated
interface of communication between inside and
outside, as a sensitive foil of individuality, which
guarantees the authenticity of reciprocal perception.
Faces are reactively f ne-tuned surfaces of tremen-
dous complexity. This is perhaps one of the main
reasons why they stick so easily to our memories. They
condense reality, often in a symbolic way.7 One of the
foremost thinkers of the Renaissance, Leon Battista
Alberti (1404–1472), in his famous treatise De Pictura,
emphasizes the inescapable power of familiar faces:
We can see how desirable this is in painting when the
f gure of some well-known person is presenting a ‘historia’,
for although others executed with greater skill may be
conspicuous in the picture, the face that is known draws
the eyes of all spectators, so great is the power and attraction
of something taken from Nature.8
Such awareness of the extraordinary signif cance of
the known face as a prompter of memory, recognition
and a focus of attention f nds its artistic equivalent in
the heightened ‘naturalism’ of painted Renaissance
portraiture. In sculpture, it results in a preference for
masks and casts, especially those taken after death.
Individual traces, as they are captured in the plaster
placed on a person’s face, form indexical images
whose precise ‘topography’ suggests the utmost
authenticity and turns such portraits into pieces of
historical evidence.
It is hardly surprising that, in early modern
written sources, comments on the face are usually, on
the one hand, related to questions of similitude and, on
the other, to the ‘inf uence’ and conf uence of charac-
ter traits. For instance, Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae and
Marsilio Ficino’s treatise De vita coelitus comparanda
address the face as both ‘vultus’ and ‘facies’, as does
Alberti. ‘Vultus’ characterizes a person’s counte-
nance – the lively, present and changeable human
face – while ‘facies’ is commonly applied to the face
in a more general category, as a given structure and a
physiological presence.9
Renaissance portraits are usually understood
as documents of personality, ref ecting both the self-
fashioning of the sitter and the creative sensitivity
of the artists, which ideally lead to a vivif cation and
heightened presence of character in an image. The
dif cult task of producing such a lifelike and ‘living’
portrait (in texts as in images) seems to be more
successfully mastered if the artist manages to express
an inner likeness, the ‘aura’ and the ‘motions of the
mind’ of a person – aspects that cannot be expressed
through meticulous naturalism alone.10 However,
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61Casting Renaissance Florence
there were instances in which the physiological
factuality of faces seems to have been deliberately
foregrounded, eclipsing any auratic ‘aria del volto’
(air of the face) that Petrarch describes;11 and others
when the image was required to be both authentic and
reproducible, guaranteeing the multiple presence and
authority of one-to-one likeness. In these instances
sculpted portraits come close to what a modern
observer might perceive as ‘hyper-realism’.
The cardinal as ‘multiple’A signif cant case in point is the impressively lifelike
portrait identif ed as Giovanni de’ Medici (1475–1521)
in the Victoria and Albert Museum (pl.1).12 This life-
size polychrome terracotta bust is one of a number
of similar objects, most of them produced in and
around Florence in the second half of the f fteenth
and f rst half of the sixteenth centuries.13 Giovanni
de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, is depicted as a cardi-
nal, his somewhat plump face based on a life-cast.
His likeness is well known through Raphael’s famous
Portrait of Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and
Luigi de’ Rossi of 1518/19 in the Uf zi Gallery (pl.2).14
Both images show a wily-looking, stout man in
his late thirties or early forties, with a round and f eshy
face, the terracotta displaying an impressive bull neck.
Characteristic are the deep double furrows between
his brows, which lend a brooding and strained expres-
sion to his otherwise puf y round face. His eyes are
narrow and slightly swollen, the nose short and blunt,
Plate 2. Raphael, Portrait of Leo X
with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici
and Luigi de’ Rossi. c.1518–19
Oil on wood
Uf zi, Florence (inv.1912, no.40)
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Jeanette Kohl62
his lips full, but tight, and the pronounced nasola-
bial folds add to his overall ill-humoured, sly look. In
the bust, his eyes are shown as though cast slightly
downwards and to the side. He has short locks of
brown hair showing above the ears, and his chin shows
traces of dark stubble. He wears a dark biretta with a
thin red rim; his cassock is laid in f ne folds (the right
shoulder is broken, with a section missing), with a
white undershirt visible beneath.15 Probably designed
to go above a doorway, the head overhangs the chest,
and the slight forward tilt projects the cardinal’s face
to engage with the viewer below.
The bust, like many other images in wax, clay and
plaster, was probably produced in the workshop of the
Benintendi family in Florence, shortly before Giovan-
ni’s election to Pope in 1513.16 A document of 1516
registers the gift of a bust of Pope Leo X by Antonio
d’Orsino Benintendi to the Signoria of Siena.17 The
same Antonio had also made a full-length ex-voto wax
ef gy of the Pope dressed in real clothes, ‘after his
own imprint and likeness’,18 as well as another ex-voto
in wax for his Medici-successor to the papal throne,
Clement VII (1475–1534). Documents indicate that
Antonio also produced several other portrait busts of
Leo X, which suggests that he and his workshop must
have specialized in Medici portraiture based on casts.
The Benintendi held close political ties to the
Medici around 1500 during the family’s exile.19 The
fact that Antonio was able to reproduce likenesses of
the Pope and distribute them suggests that the family
had some sort of approval for the production and
reproduction of Medici portraits. This assumption is
supported by a document informing us that Andrea
del Verrocchio (c.1435–1488), with whom they collabo-
rated, owned no fewer than 20 masks of members of
the Medici family.20 Nevertheless, it seems likely that
the bulk of authentic facial casts of members of the
Medici family were kept in the workshop of the Benin-
tendi, who could reproduce them on request. The
possession of these indexically generated matrices
must have guaranteed the Verrocchio and Benintendi
workshops an almost exclusive right for this kind of
three-dimensional Medici portraiture.21
Casts are in the f rst instance copies of the face,
its bone structure and f esh. Even if painted and with
their eyes (which were closed in the process of taking
a face mask) depicted as open, the cast terracottas, in
their blatant matter-of-fact look, lack the idealizing
and often beautif ed or vitalized features of many of
the painted or marble portraits. Giovanni de’ Medici
appears with his stout facial features ‘as they were’ –
unidealized, taken from life, and in the cast-based
and thus reproducible medium of what in modern
times would be called a ‘multiple’. Although we do
not know how many of these objects were produced
or circulated, there is evidence of the use of casts to
reproduce several likenesses. Terracotta portrait
busts of the family’s brightest star, Giovanni’s father,
Lorenzo il Magnif co (1449–1492), still exist in at least
f ve versions (pl.3), some probably commissioned by
himself and given away to factionists, others ordered
by friends and supporters of the Medici during his
lifetime and after his death.22 It appears that in the
times after the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, and in partic-
ular after the family’s exile from Florence in 1494, the
production of cast-based images of Lorenzo reached
its peak. Lorenzo was known to have chosen carefully
the recipients and audiences for his likenesses, be
they portrait medals, life-size votive images or busts.23
During the Medici exile, factionists seem to have kept
his images hidden away;24 and it is only logical that
when the Medici tried to re-establish their power at
the turn of the sixteenth century, images of prominent
family members would have played an important role
in keeping alive a Medici presence. This would have
been all the more signif cant as heads and busts based
on facial imprints bore clear genealogical implications
– as with ancient Roman portraits.
The main function of these likenesses would thus
have given a clear political and genealogical twist to
Alberti’s famous statement that portraiture has the
quasi-divine power, also inherent in friendship, of
making the absent present.25 It would have been a
visually formulated claim to power in a situation of
interrupted rulership over Florence.
Yet, as we shall see, the Medici’s heightened
awareness of the potential that lifelike images
of ered marks only the tip of an iceberg. While
further research is necessary, we may assume that
the ‘authentic’ faces of Florentine Renaissance rulers
and men of importance, based on casts, were used
as political statements. We may also assume that
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63Casting Renaissance Florence
these reproducible likenesses were at times sent of
to allies in the cities of Tuscany. More than 100 years
after Cennino Cennini (c.1370–c.1440) had addressed
taking ‘the ef gy or physiognomy or casting’ of every
great man, the practice boomed.26 The facies as a legit-
imate exponent of man, his face as unaltered physi-
ological ‘document’, had gained representational
status and hence the power of a political argument.
Political power requires presence – usually that of a
living person, and his or her recognizable face as a
trademark. Memoria, one would assume, strives for
the same: to keep the dead alive, among the living. Yet
the Florentines’ penchant for truthful representation
Plate 3. Attributed to the Benintendi workshop,
Lorenzo de’ Medici. c.1490–1510
Painted terracotta, h.65.8 cm
Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington
DC (inv.1943.4.92)
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Jeanette Kohl64
also includes the display of dead faces in representa-
tional contexts on a quite remarkable scale.27
Death on displayGeorges Didi-Huberman has drawn attention to cast
and imprint as alleged ‘side products’ of Renais-
sance artistic production, stressing the fact that their
popularity and blatant indexicality provide a ‘counter
model’ to the Vasarian notions of Renaissance art. In
focusing on the role of ‘ressemblance inanimée’ as
opposed to ‘ressemblance comme animation’, and
of ‘ressemblance indiciaire’ as opposed to ‘ressem-
blance iconique’, Didi-Huberman’s deliberations
form the point or departure for the following ideas.28
Vasari clearly propagated his concepts of idea
and disegno as superior to techniques of casting and
imprinting, although the latter is so typical of the
f fteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His axiom –
that artistic creation was a transfer from idea to form
– largely excludes mechanical reproduction by means
of indexical imprints. Materially generated form-to-
form relations are considered inferior.29 However,
Vasari does not hesitate to address the paradigm
of imprint and cast. On the contrary, he praises the
usefulness of lifelike portraits based on facial casts. In
a famous passage from Andrea del Verrocchio’s Vita,
he explains the importance of masks and casts:
Andrea took much delight in casting in a kind of plaster
which would set hard – that is, the kind that is made of
a soft stone ( . . . ). This stone, when burnt in the f re, and
then pounded and mixed with tepid water, becomes so
soft that men can make whatever they please with it; but
afterwards it solidif es and becomes so hard, that it can
be used for moulds for casting whole f gures. Andrea, then,
was wont to cast in moulds of this material such natural
objects as hands, feet, knees, legs, arms, and torsi, in order
to have them before him and imitate them with greater
convenience. Afterwards, in his time, men began to cast
the heads of those who died – a cheap method; wherefore
there are seen in every house in Florence, over chimney-
pieces, doors, windows, and cornices, inf nite numbers
of such portraits, so well made and so natural that they
appear alive. And from that time up to the present the
said custom has been continued, and it still continues,
with great convenience to ourselves, for it has given us
portraits of many who have been included in the stories
in the Palace of Duke Cosimo. And for this we should
certainly acknowledge a very great obligation to the talent
of Andrea, who was one of the f rst to begin to bring the
custom into use.30
Vasari emphasizes the convenience and af ordability
of the technique of casting, but also its documentary
importance. That these images are regained from
Plate 4. Buggiano, Filippo Brunelleschi’s death
mask. 1446
Gesso, h.40 x w.25 cm
Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence (inv.486)
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65Casting Renaissance Florence
death masks (‘those who died’) appears as a matter of
course, which is why Andrea’s innovative use cannot
be praised enough.31 Vasari’s art theory, on the other
hand, does not assign any particular value to the casting
method. His lengthy and repeated mentioning of the
use of death masks, and his highlighting of its af orda-
bility in the same sentence as the much-quoted passage
in which he describes ‘in every house in Florence . . .
inf nite numbers of such portraits’, give us a clear lead
as to how common the use of casts taken from death
masks must have been in the Florentine Quattrocento.32
In addition the passage underlines the assumption that
a large number of portrait busts were in stucco and
terracotta – materials that are potentially less durable
than marble or bronze.33 Verrocchio’s occupation as a
popular caster is of course already documented by the
20 masks taken from life listed by his brother Tommaso
in the post-mortem inventory of his estate.34
Still, Vasari’s claim that Andrea was one of the
pioneers of casting is historically inaccurate. In 1406 a
death mask was taken from the Florentine Chancellor,
Coluccio Salutati.35 The f rst preserved wax cast from
a death mask was that taken in 1444 of St Bernard of
Siena, whose ascetic senile features are preserved in
a series of Quattrocento busts in dif erent materials,
all based on the death mask.36 Another prominent
example from this time is Filippo Brunelleschi’s death
mask, taken by his apprentice Andrea Cavalcanti,
known as Buggiano (1412–1461/2), on Filippo’s death-
bed in 1446 (pl.4).37 Interestingly, the mask includes
the face, neck, upper chest and shoulders, making it
a cast ‘al busto’, which already assumes the horizontal
cut through the upper body typical of later Quattro-
cento busts.38
In any event, by Verrocchio’s time there was
already a long-standing tradition of wax preparation
of corpses, of masks and casts, of which Vasari must
have been aware. Even though highly ‘veristic’ or
‘hyper-realistic’, and as such aesthetically related
to ex-voti, Renaissance busts based on casts were
anything but ‘magical’ objects; they were proxies
Plate 5. Bust of an unknown woman.
Late 15th or early 16th century
Bronze, h.38.5 cm
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (inv.26B)
of a dif erent kind. However, artists such as Donatello
and Verrocchio were most certainly aware of the
traditional functions of casts. The scale on which
Renaissance artists made use of them gives proof of
the acceptance of the technique as an important and
integral part of image-making.
Death masks document the striking loss of
‘character’ that the living face possesses. There are no
more motions of the mind. This lends them a precari-
ous status in portraiture, where the living person
and his or her habits, manners and forms of expres-
sion, as well as his or her dignity and/or beauty, are
traditional goals. It is thus rather surprising that there
is a considerable number of sculpted portraits of
children, men and women showing their dead faces
without any attempt at revitalization. One of the
most prominent examples is the bronze bust of an
unknown woman in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello
(pl.5). Based on a plaster cast of the woman’s death
mask, her clothes and nun’s veil, this object from the
Palazzo Medici’s guardaroba irritates by its blatant
juxtaposition of a dead face with closed eyes in an
upright portrait bust.39 The use of three mechani-
cal processes in the creation of this object – f rst the
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Jeanette Kohl66
Left: Plate 6. Head of a woman based on a death mask (Battista
Sforza?). 1470s
Terracotta, diam.50 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv.RF1171)
Below: Plate 7. Head of a Man based on a death mask. 1470s
Terracotta, diam.63 cm
V&A: 66–1882
crude nature of the portrait and its celebratory and
commemorative framework. A very similar object in
the V&A shows the cast of a male death mask, again
with an open mouth and closed eyes (pl.7).45 Both
images date from the 1470s and both show traces
of pigments. The use of colour and the glorifying
framework suggest that they were displayed in an
of cial context and were more than mere models for
marble sculptures or funerary portraits. If the Louvre
roundel does indeed show Battista Sforza, the object
might have been a side product of Francesco Laurana’s
work on the commemorative marble bust now in the
Bargello.46 In that case it is quite possible that the death
mask was taken as a model for the marble portrait and
that its cast was then incorporated into the clipeus for
display of its own.47
The Bargello marble bust clearly betrays its origin
in a death mask: identif ed as Battista Sforza by an
casting in plaster, then in wax and f nally in bronze
– suggests that it lacks any creative intervention. In
contrast, the expensive material of bronze, unusual
for an object of this kind,40 indicates the object’s high
value and importance.41 It would have been easy, and
indeed common, for the artist to open the mask’s
closed eyes to generate the impression of a living sitter
and avoid the uncanny impression that this object
leaves. Why then was he more interested in an exact
replica of the dead face, the body and even the clothes
than in the potential of reanimation that casts and
masks of er?
The bronze bust of a woman, which in its almost
brutal display does not even pretend to bring the dead
back to life, is not a singular case. The cast of the death
mask from a young woman in the Louvre shows her in
a state of complete depletion (pl.6).42 Whoever took
the death mask did not bother to close the mouth
and f x her face to correct the unpleasant and
awkward look of the dead facial features with
the dropping chin. It is all the more astonish-
ing that such an image would be incorporated
into a clipeus, obviously destined for a dignify-
ing representational purpose.43 It is probably an
image of Battista Sforza, second wife to Federigo
da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, who died in
1472 at the age of 25 after giving birth to her eighth
child, the long-awaited son and heir.44 The facial
features are inserted into a f uted shell forming a
tondo that is framed by a laurel wreath. One cannot
help but be puzzled by the odd contrast between the
ost
ad
ath
in
k
a
not
he
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67Casting Renaissance Florence
inscription on its base, it lacks the spiritedness of other
Renaissance portraits. Battista Sforza’s face is charac-
terized by a narrow and somewhat pointed nose,
slightly parted narrow lips and sunken eye sockets,
with the eyelids only slightly apart. This is anything
but a fresh young beauty, and again the question
remains: why did the artist not create a lively and more
enchanting image? Even though Laurana (c.1430–
1502) is known for his schematism, the bust lacks all
of the idealizing beauty and glamour associated with
the female marble portraits by the artist, such as the
bust of an unidentif ed sitter in Vienna, with its wax
applications and painted ‘make-up’.48 While his other
busts are strongly inf uenced by a Petrarchist ideal of
ambiguous feminine aloofness, the bust of Battista
clearly shows a woman bearing the stamp of death,
far from the Renaissance ideals of virtuous lifelike
beauty. It is quite possible that the unusual choice of
leaving the signs of death present in an of cial marble
bust was motivated by the wish to honour her prema-
ture death after giving birth to the duke’s only heir.
This would also explain the inscription on the base,
which is rather unusual for female marble portraits of
the time.49
Waking the deadAs has been shown, the use of casts from death masks
in bust portraiture was a widespread practice in the
f fteenth and f rst half of the sixteenth centuries –
much more so than is commonly assumed.50 Usually
the cast is worked into a freely modelled bust, or
rather (in the case of terracotta sculpture) the clay bust
is built around the cast. Before the object is f red, the
artist can make alterations and additions in the still-
malleable clay. This includes the ‘opening’ of the eyes
by altering the upper lid, as well as the addition of the
ears, which would not have been cast.51 This stage of
production was also used to retouch or eliminate the
obvious signs of death on the cast.
A case in point are the two portraits of King Henry
VII (1457–1509): his funerary ef gy in Westminster
Undercroft Museum and the bust in the V&A (pls 8
and 9). Both images are attributed for good reasons
to Pietro Torrigiani (1472–1528), Michelangelo’s
Florentine antipode. While the king’s ef gy shows a
rather gaunt face with saggy skin, the bust gives us
an impression of the king at a younger age, with a full
face, long wavy hair and clearly more ‘alive’ than in
the ef gy. As demonstrated by Phillip Lindley and
Carole Galvin in their detailed study, the portrait bust
must have been made by reworking the very same
cast as that used for the ef gy, and it must therefore
be posthumous.52 Torrigiani retouched the cast from
the death mask by f eshing out its gaunt appearance
and modifying its direct gaze into a pensive sideward
glance of the eyes. While the ef gy displays the actual
and factual likeness of King Henry VII, the artist used
the death mask as a basis for an artistic reconstruc-
tion, or rather reinvention of the king’s past likeness
in his prime age. The role that the facial cast assumes
here is more than that of a mere model for painters
and sculptors in stone or bronze. It becomes an active
part of the representational object itself, in order to
evoke the prime of life.
As I have shown elsewhere, there is a multitude of
similar portrait busts in stucco and terracotta, which
Plate 8. Pietro Torrigiani, Head of the ef gy of Henry VII. c.1509
Plaster and wood, h.c.40 x w.c.27 cm
Westminster Undercroft Museum, London (inv.1014)
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Jeanette Kohl68
do not hide their use of casts after death masks.53 The
terracotta bust of a cleric in San Gimignano (pl. 10), as
well as those of Machiavelli in the Palazzo Rucellai, of
a cleric in the Detroit Institute of Arts, of an unknown
Florentine citizen in the National Gallery in Prague, of
the so-called ‘Palla Rucellai’ in Berlin and the bust of
Raf aello Maf ei in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, all make use of death masks.54 In all of them
the underlying casts are vivif ed – yet only to the point
where they make sense as representations of individu-
als to be commemorated as living subjects. Their eyes
are opened, yet we look into the facial features of
corpses. The San Gimignano bust, which perhaps is
a portrait of the Blessed Bartolo Buompedoni, sits on
the borderline of this species.55 On the one hand, the
cast was ‘revived’ through the application of colour,
up to f ne traces of beard stubble on the chin; on the
other, the extremely emaciated facial features with
the toothless mouth and the sunken lips were left
unaltered – in this case possibly to stress the Blessed’s
asceticism to the death.
What is important for the questions raised in
this essay is the fact that the various uses of facial
casts played a much more decisive role in Florentine
Quattrocento and early Cinquecento portraiture than
is commonly assumed. Life and death masks were
Plate 9. Pietro Torrigiani, Bust of King Henry VII. 1509–11
Painted terracotta, h.60.6 cm
V&A: A.49–1935
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69Casting Renaissance Florence
more than subsidiary and preparatory tools – they
started to have a life of their own and gained visibility
in portraiture in manifold ways. The factual, in many
instances, was preferred over both idealization and
a pronounced spirited liveliness in portraiture. This
is the other side of Renaissance sculpted portraiture,
and it was no less prolif c than the elaborate marble
and bronze portraits. Hence there is no reason to
doubt Vasari’s statement that one could see them in
every household – while, at the same time, we now see
that not all of them followed the ideal of a heightened
liveliness. In any event, it is striking to what extent the
index of the actual ‘facial topography’ was deemed to
be worthy of representation.
We can only conjecture what might have been
the reasons for the Florentines to cast the members
of their civic and religious elite on such a large scale.
There was of course a tradition of the cult of relics
and their display in face-giving head- and bust-
reliquaries, which might have created a heightened
awareness of the role of both authenticity and facial
representation and of the way in which they might
work together. There was also a strong awareness
of realistic antique portraiture and their eminent
role in lineage and representation. Furthermore,
there was the Florentine penchant for preservation,
paired with the merchants’ predilection for facts. There
was, last but not least, the tradition of ex-voti and veris-
tic wax sculpture produced by the fallimagini, such as
the Benintendi. All of these aspects must have played
a role in the amazing ‘casting’ of faces in Renaissance
Florence. There was probably also one further reason.
The overwhelming presence of authentic individual
faces in the sculptural production of the Renaissance
appears to be not only rooted in the Burckhardian
‘discovery of the self ’; it can also be read as a symptom
of crisis, as a result of the growing awareness that this
‘self ’ was at risk, and thus as an act of facial self-assur-
ance of a republican elite fearing extinction in precari-
ous, pre-absolutistic times. Antique precedents of
facial casts, the Roman patricians’ right of images (ius
imagini) and their core role in genealogical contexts
provided an easily recognizable cultural and histori-
cal point of reference in times of crisis – and, with that,
the authenticity of likeness gained face-value. The
indexical, immediate and ‘true’ nature of the facial
cast in this perspective must also have represented a
welcome preservation technique of authenticity in
times of profound visual paradigm shifts and artful
illusionistic media innovations.
Notes
1. For the intricate set of questions around various forms of ‘likeness’ and similitude in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see the introduction, ‘Ähnlichkeit als Kategorie der Porträtgeschichte’, in Gaier, Kohl and Saviello 2012, pp.11–28.
2. Among several exhibitions in recent years focusing on the face in the Renaissance, I mention only two: Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery, 2008–9, and Gesichter der Renaissance/Renaissance Faces. Masterpieces
of Italian Portraiture at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011–12; see London 2008 and Berlin and New York 2011–12 respectively. The London exhibition focused on paintings and used the term ‘face’ much in the sense of a general synonym for ‘portraiture’, without actually unfolding its implications and meaning in art and cultural history.
3. See Urte Krass, ‘Heilige im Reich der Unähnlichkeit. Zum Phänomen des mit Porträtzügen beliehenen Heiligenbildes in der ersten Hälfte des Cinquecento’, in Gaier, Kohl and Saviello 2012, pp.147–65
4. Anita Moskowitz, ‘Donatello’s Reliquary Bust of San
Plate 10. Bust of an unknown cleric. c.1490s
Painted terracotta, h.50 cm
Museo Civico, San Gimignano
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Jeanette Kohl70
Rossore’, Art Bulletin (1981), vol.63, no.1, pp.41–8; Jeanette Kohl, ‘Gesichtsgebung. Ähnlichkeit und Aktualität in Donatellos Büstenreliquiar des San Rossore’, in Kristin Marek and Martin Schulz (eds), Kanon Kunstgeschichte, 4 vols (Munich/Paderborn, forthcoming)
5. See in particular Didi-Huberman 1999, pp.58–69; for the French version, see Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris, 2008)
6. For the application and def nition of the term in a media theoretical perspective, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia II: A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis/London, 1987 [f rst published 1980]), pp.188–210; see also Stimili 2005.
7. For a recent approach to the multifaceted dimensions of what faces are, and can be, see Sandra Kemp, Future Face. Image. Identity. Innovation (London, 2004). See also: Jeanette Kohl and Dominic Olariu (eds), EN FACE: Seven Essays on the Human Face, Kritische Berichte (1/2012)
8. Alberti/Grayson 1972, p.101; for the Latin original, see p.989. Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiarum Libri IV, Operae (Basilea,
1540); see also Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford, 1971), p.172. This is conf rmed in Cicero, who states that vultus (countenance) cannot be found in any other living creature than man and that it expresses character; Cicero, De legibus, I.9: ‘is qui appellatur vultus, qui nullo in animantem esse praeter huminem potest, indicat mores’.
10. See Frank Zöllner, ‘The Motions of the Mind in Renaissance Portraiture. The Spiritual Dimension of Portraiture’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (68, 2005), pp.23–40
11. See the detailed discussion of the term in Stimili 2005, pp.64–5.
12. Boucher, Broderick and Wood 1996; see also Los Angeles 2008, pp.100–101
13. An exhibition bringing together this astounding group of painted terracotta portraits of the Renaissance would certainly be worthwhile. See also Jeanette Kohl, ‘Sichtbar sein. Materialität und Facialität frühneuzeitlicher Porträts’, Trajekte 17 (Zeitschrift des Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung: Ausdruck. Erscheinung. Af ekte), (October 2008), pp.17–24
14. For a recent interpretation, see Nelson H. Minnich, ‘Raphael’s Portrait “Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi”. A Religious Interpretation’, Renaissance Quarterly (2003/4), vol.56, pp.1005–52.
15. See Boucher, Broderick and Wood 1996, p.32 and passim, for a detailed description and analysis of the colours, materials and production process. For detailed information on materials and conservation, see also Alexandra Kosinova, ‘The Conservation of the Portrait Bust of Giovanni de’ Medici (later Pope Leo X)’, Conservation Journal (Autumn 1995), vol.17: www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-17/the-conservation-of-the-portrait-bust-of-giovanni-demedici-later-pope-leo-x/ (consulted 8 April 2012).
16. Gentilini 1996, p.30 and n.75; Boucher, Broderick and Wood 1996
17. Antonio – like his father Orsino, who had collaborated closely with Andrea del Verrocchio – had been in the
business of fallimagini (artists producing waxen votive images famed for their striking realism) for a while. The document tells us that an apprentice of Antonio brought the bust of the Pope to Siena as a gift to the Signoria; see Gentilini 1996, p.31, doc.II. For questions of representation and symbolic presence related to Florentine ex-voti (or boti), see in particular Aby Warburg, Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum (Leipzig, 1902), and Hans Belting, ‘Repräsentation und Anti-Repräsentation. Grab und Porträt in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Hans Belting, Dietmar Kamper and Martin Schulz (eds), Quel Corps? Eine Frage der Repräsentation (Munich, 2002), pp.29–52, esp. p.32.
18. ‘ad eius propriam improntam et similitudinem’. For the wax ex-voto and its description, see Piero Morselli, ‘Immagini di cera votive in S. Maria delle Carceri in Parto nella prima meta del 500’, in Andrew Morrogh et al. (eds), Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth (Florence, 1985), vol.2, pp.327–40, esp. p.328 (the documents on pp.335–7); see also Boucher, Broderick and Wood 1996, p.38 and n.25.
19. For the relationship between the Benintendi and the Medici, see Gino Masi, ‘La ceroplastica in Firenze nei secoli XV–XVI e la famiglia Benintendi’, Rivista d’arte (1916), vol.9, pp.124–42.
20. The inventory drawn up by Andrea del Verrocchio’s brother Tommaso, after his death in 1495, lists ‘ventj maschere ritratte al naturale’ for which the Medici had not yet paid. For the document, see Passavant 1959, p.221, doc.IX
21. As suggested in Gentilini 1996, pp.30–3122. The examples are discussed in Luchs 2000.23. See Alison Wright, ‘A Portrait for the Visit of Galeazzo
Maria Sforza to Florence in 1471’, in Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann (eds), Lorenzo the Magnif cent: Culture and Politics (London, 1996), pp.65–92, esp. pp.75 and 80
24. Possibly in drawers and chests; see Luchs 2000, p.7 and n.925. Alberti/Spencer 1956, p.6326. ‘la ef gia, o ver la f losomia, o vero inprenta’; Franco Brunello
(ed.), Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte (Vicenza, 1982), pp.198–201; trans. from Cennini/Thompson 1960, p.127. It even became common to distribute the authentic likeness of new saints, such as St Bernard of Siena, by means of their facial imprint; see Urte Krass, Nah zum Leichnam. Bilder neuer Heiliger im Quattrocento (Berlin, 2012).
27. For a more detailed discussion, see Jeanette Kohl, ‘Gesichter machen. Büste und Maske im Florentiner Quattrocento’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft (2007), vol.34, pp.77–99, including a discussion of the literature on death masks.
28. Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Ressemblance mythif ée et ressemblance oubliée chez Vasari: La légende du portrait “sur le vif ”’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome – Italie e Méditérranée (1994), vol.106, no.2, pp.383–432. For the role of life and death masks in the Renaissance, see also Pohl 1938.
29. Didi-Huberman 1999, p.6230. Vasari/De Vere 1912–14, vol.3, pp.274–5. See Vasari/Milanesi
1878–85, vol.3, pp.372–3 (1878), for the original Italian.31. ‘coloro che morivano’. Milanesi points out in a reference
to the passage that Andrea ‘Fu de’ primi, ma non il primo’ (was ‘one of the f rst, but not the f rst’); Vasari/Milanesi 1878–85, vol.3 (1878), p.373, n.2.
32. ‘in ogni casa di Firenze . . . inf niti di detti ritratti’; Vasari/Milanesi 1878–85, vol.3 (1878), p.373
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71Casting Renaissance Florence
33. Lesser durability and certainly changes in taste are possible explanations for the loss of many of these busts, a number of which are still preserved in museums, although few are on display. Pohl 1938, p.27, states that it is safe to assume that practically all of the naturalistic individual portraits of the dead lying in state in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento were made with the help of casts taken from their bodies – and such a practice is indeed attested to for the recumbent f gure of the Cardinal of Portugal on his tomb in San Miniato al Monte in Florence. Thus the same may apply for the majority of the extant marble busts. For the casts made for the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal, see Paul Schubring (ed.), Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV (Jena, 1914), p.92.
34. The item relating to the 20 masks is listed as no.14 of 15 items; see Passavant 1959, p.221, doc.IX.
35. Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario (Rome, 1911), vol.4, p.474, doc.XVI
36. For the mask of St Bernard of Siena, see Pietro Misciatelli, ‘La maschera di San Bernardino da Siena’, Rassegna d’Arte Senese (1925), vol.18, pp.37–42.
37. Poggi 1930; Pohl 1938, pp.30–31; Schuyler 1976, pp.21–238. The form of the bust might have been determined by its
possible function as a prototype for the representational marble bust portrait, which the same ‘il Buggiano’ was to create for Santa Maria del Fiore. See Poggi 1930, p.538 (with a transcription of the of cial commission). Pohl 1938, pp.30–31, rejects this assumption.
39. Inv.26B. Clear traces of the stand on which the death mask was mounted can be found on the bust’s left shoulder. The woman is shown in the dress and headgear of an ordained nun. See Gottschewski 1907; Pohl 1938, pp.39–40; Florence 1985–6, pp.343–7, cat.XVIII (Marco Collareta)
40. Gottschewski 1907, p.15, relates the object to an entry in one of the Medici inventories mentioning a ‘testa col busto di Mna. D’Imola’ made of gesso, which he thinks is an image of Caterina Sforza, wife of Giovanni de’ Medici. It seems much more likely that the image in question is one mentioned as ‘Ginevra, moglie di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici vecchio – una testa di bronzo’, depicting Ginevra Cavalcanti, who was Pierfranceso’s mother, not his wife, as wrongly mentioned in the inventory; see Florence 1985–6, p.343.
41. Marco Collareta notes ‘a disturbing ambiguity between the real and the absurd’ (‘un’inquietante ambiguità tra il vero e l’assurdo’), in Florence 1985–6, p.343. Didi-Huberman 1999, pp.62–3, discusses the problems of attribution and ‘style’ related to an object generated strictly in a mechanical way.
42. Musée du Louvre, inv.RF1171. See Pohl 1938, p.36; Kruft 1995, p.129; Agnes Cascio, ‘L’empreinte de la mort. Étudier e restaurer un masque funéraire’, Technè, Terres cuites de la Renaissance: matière et couleur (forthcoming 2012)
43. The practice of having portraits of ancestors painted onto shields is described by Pliny the Elder. Such images were hung in public places or temples. They were also part of
sarcophagi decorations. See James Hall, A History of Ideas and Images in Italian Art (London, 1983), p.78
44. See Maike Vogt-Lüerssen, Frauen in der Renaissance – 30 Einzelschicksale (Norderstedt, 2007), pp.74–85
45. V&A: 66–1882; http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O122354/roundel-head-of-a-man-in/ (consulted 15 April 2012). See Eric Maclagen, ‘The Use of Death-Masks by Florentine Sculptors’, The Burlington Magazine (1923), vol.43, pp.303–4; Jan Chlíbec, ‘A Renaissance Florentine Bust from the National Gallery in Prague in the Context of the Period Production of Death Masks’, Bulletin of the National Gallery in Prague (1995/6), vol.5/6, pp.122–9
46. The bust has been in the possession of the Medici since the sixteenth century. Kruft 1995, pp.130–31, suggests that it might have been moved from Urbino to Florence in 1516/17 by Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino.
47. A possible use on a tomb monument is mentioned in http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O122354/roundel-head-of-a-man-in/
48. For the Laurana busts, see Chrysa Damianaki, The Female Portrait Busts of Francesco Laurana (Rome, 2000), p.66; Kruft 1995, pp.132–66 and 369–90.
49. For a discussion of female busts, see Jeanette Kohl, ‘Icons of Chastity, Objets d’amour. Female Renaissance Portrait Busts as Ambivalent Bodies’, in Julia Hairston and Walter Stephens (eds), The Body in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore, 2010), pp.123–41.
50. There are many objects based on death masks that have never been subject to a systematic analysis. For a more detailed discussion of such objects, see Kohl 2012. See also Pohl 1938, pp.45–67; Schuyler 1976, pp.114–45; Chlíbec 1995–6.
51. For a detailed description of production techniques, see again Boucher, Broderick and Wood 1996, pp.32–9.
52. The faces were scanned and compared against an underlying grid of optical reference points; see Galvin and Lindley 1988, pp.895–9, f gs 12–15 (republished in Lindley 1995, pp.170–87, esp. pp.175–6); they date the portrait bust to between April 1509 and November 1511 (Galvin and Lindley 1988, p.902; Lindley 1995, p.187).
53. Kohl 201254. For the bust of Raf aello Maf ei, see Rolf Bagemihl,
‘Cosini’s Bust of Raf aello Maf ei and its Funerary Context’, in Metropolitan Museum Journal (1996), vol.31, pp.41–57, and Kohl 2012.
55. The object, which has been dated to the later Quattrocento, was previously in the Ospedale di Santa Fina and is now in the Museo Civico in San Gimignano. See Mostra di opere d’arte restaurate nelle provincie di Siena e Grosseto, exh. cat., Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, vol.3 (Genoa, 1983), pp.148–50, cat.40 (Francesca Fumi Juculano[?]), as Florentine, end of the f fteenth century. For a lost bust of Niccolò Machiavelli, formerly in the Accademia La Colombaria in Florence, incorporating an unaltered cast after a death mask, see Gentilini 1996, pp.17–31, f g.30, p.30 and n.75.
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