Jeanette Kohl: Casting Renaissance Florence. The Bust of Giovanni de'Medici and Indexical...

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

VA005_P0058EDcarvings.indd 58 04/01/2013 15:16

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


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,



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)


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



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


Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington

DC (inv.1943.4.92)


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)



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


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



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)


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


V&A: A.49–1935



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


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



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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