The Sum of the Parts: Recycling Antiquities in the Maniera Workshops of Salviati and his Colleagues

FRANCESCO SALVIATI ET LA BELLA MANIERA

Actes des colloques de Rome et de Paris (1998)

sous la direction de Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Philippe Costamagna

et Michel Hochmann

ECOLE FRAN<:AISE DE ROME

2001

Cet ouvrage a ete publie sous les auspices de l'Academie de France et de !'Ecole fran�aise de Rome avec le soutien de l'Istituto italiano di cultura de Paris

et du Service culture} du musee du Louvre

Francesco Salviati et la Bella Maniera : actes des colloques de Rome et Paris, 1998 I sous la direction de Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Philippe Costamagna et Michel Hochmann. - Rome : Ecole fran�aise de Rome, 2001. (Collection de l'Ecole fran�aise de Rome, ISSN 0223-5099; 284) ISBN 2-7283-0627-3I. Salviati, Francesco, 1510-1563 - Congresses. 2. Mannerism (Art) - Italy - Congresses. I. Monbeig Goguel, Catherine. II. Costamagna, Philippe. III. Hochmann. IV. Series.

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LISTE DES ABREVIATIONS

0UVRAGES CITES EN ABREGE

Cat. Salviati, 1998 : Francesco Salviati ou la Bella Maniera , catalogue de J'exposition sous la direction de C. Monbeig Goguel. Rome, Villa Medicis, Paris, musee du Louvre, 1998.

Cheney: I. H. Cheney, Francesco Salviati (1510-1563). Ph.D. (1963), Princeton University, 3 vol., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1963.

M. : L. Mortari, Francesco Salviati, Rome, 1992. Parker : K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ash

molean Museum. II, Italian Schools, Oxford, 1956. Vasari, BB : G. Vasari, Le Vite de' piil eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori

nelle redazioni de! 1550 e de! 1568, ed. R. Bettarini et P. Barocchi, 6 vol. et 3 vol. de commentaires. Florence, 1966-1987.

Vasari, Milanesi : Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' piii eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed achitettori scritte da M. Giorgio Vasari, Florence, Giunti. 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vol., Florence, 1878-1885.

ABREVIATIONS

BMF : Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze. British Museum : The British Museum, Landres. ENSBA : Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. GDSU : Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. GNS : Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, lstituto Nazionale per la Grafica,

Rome. Louvre: musee du Louvre, Paris. Metropolitan Museum : The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Uffizi : Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Nata bene

De maniere generale, seuls Jes numeros d'inventaire des dessins sont precises. Leurs mesures sont donnees en millimetres.

LEATRICE MENDELSOHN

THE SUM OF THE PARTS

RECYCLING ANTIQUITIES IN THE MANIERA WORKSHOPS OF SALVIATI AND HIS COLLEAGUES1

This paper describes some of the multiple ways in which artists in the circle of Salviati, both in Rome and in Florence, shared, reinterpreted, and recycled works from antiquity. In the process , I will suggest some of the motives behind the artists' choice of models and the various purposes which replication served. In several papers presented at the Salviati Congress and throughout the catalogue of the exhibition, evidence of the repetition of poses and figure types in works by affiliated artists was frequently remarked2• A comparison of s imilar or identical motifs and specific figures utilized by different artists within the orbit of Salviati (including Bandinelli, Bronzino, Rosso, and others) permits us to reconstruct workshop processes involving the use of three-dimensional models3• Whether

1 This paper was presented in Rome on March 6, 1998, under the auspices of the Academie de France a Rome, !'Ecole fran9aise de Rome and The American Academy in Rome. I would like to thank Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Michel Hochmann, Philippe Costamagna, Caroline Bruzelius, and other members of the organizing committee for inviting me to participate. Among those who helped me to obtain books and illustrations for the lecture were M. Iozzo, J. Katalan, J. Kliemann, M. Mazzoni, and C. Riebesell. Thanks are due to V. Budny andM. R. Genoni who checked the quotations for the final copy. I would also like tothank the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I was a fellow during thecompletion of this text, and the CASVA Library at the National Gallery, both inWashington, D. C. To the Biblioteca Herziana in Rome, the KunsthistorischesInstitut in Florence, and the Stephen Chan Library of New York University, Imaintain an ever increasing debt for their bibliographic assistance over the years.Some final corrections were made while I was a Clark Fellow at the Sterling andFrancine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. where the librarians weremiraculous facilitators.

2 Cat. Salviati, 1998. 3 I would like to acknowledge the importance for me of A. Nova's article

Salviati, Vasari, and the Reuse of Drawings in their Working Practice, in Master Drawings, XXX, 1992, p. 83-108, for confirming my observations and pointing out new directions for investigating the widespread repetition of figures among maniera painters. The article is critical for any study of the role of workshop practice in the creation of style. The focus of Nova's study was the phenomenon

108 LEATRICE MENDELSOHN

the sources were original antique statues or reliefs , whether replicas, fragments, or bozzetti , their first mode of transmission was by means of drawings. Nearly identical surviving drawings by different artists based on the same statue, using either an original antique or a drawing after the same antique as model, testify to the reliance of painters on a limited, established, and consistent corpus of threedimensional sources. The very differences among individual interpretations of the same model reflect the degree of freedom with which antique sources could be approached and the many variables affecting artists even when their professional lives coincided.

Among the factors which account for modifications in the use of the same model by the same artist - and here let us focus on Salviati as the example - are pressures exerted by the patron, local taste, and a desire for variety partly resulting from competition among artists working simultaneously at the same site4 • Salviati's paintings, drawings, and designs for engravings and tapestries reflect the diversity of his commissions, changes in venue, and experiments in different media. All these factors must be taken into account when comparing him to other artists. Nevertheless, if we look beyond the personal predilections and stylistic idiosyncracies that identify his unique hand, the remarkable resemblance of Salviati's figure types, poses, and specific descriptive details to those of his peers confirms his penchant for recycling figures .

In Dolce's 1557 dialogue on painting entitled L'Aretino , « style » or maniera is defined pejoratively as «[that] in which you constantly see forms and faces resembling one another »5• This Venetian critique must be read in relation to the definition of bella maniera in

of self-quotation and the reuse and sharing of drawings among artists . He noted the use of « stock figures » and the process of inserting them into rearranged compositions as a characteristic feature of Mannerism. My interest is rather in an earlier stage of the process, that is, the identification of a corpus of body parts utilized in creating the figures themselves, their composite nature, and the role of antique sculptural sources in fostering repetition as a stylistic quality of painting. This paper is part of larger study on these questions.

4 For example, Salviati and Jacopino del Conte at work simultaneously in the Oratorio of San Giovanni Decollato in Rome.

5 L. Dolce, Dialogo della Pittura di M. Lodovico Dolce, intitolato L'Aretino , in Trattati d'arte del Cinquecento fra manierismo e controriforma, ed. P. Barocchi, 3 vol., Bari, 1 960-1962 , I, 1960, p . 196 , cited in C. H. Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera, Vienna, 1992 [first ed. 1962], p. 1 14, note 35, 44. Smyth was the first to focus on such repetition in Maniera style as a positive characteristic. Reuse of Michelangelo's poses was historically considered the source of the decline of painting in the Cinquecento, yet antique sources were rarely mentioned as a cause for this.

THE SUM OF THE PARTS 109

the 1550 edition of Vasari's Lives6• « Style», according to Vasari, is said to derive from :

frequently copying the most beautiful things and from those most beautiful hands, heads, bodies, or legs, adding them together to make a figure of as many beauties as are possible, and employing them in every work for all the figures ( . . . ) 7•

Although this definition depends on a theoretical context, it identifies the basis of maniera as workshop practice, implying that ingegno or talent is not its sole, or even its primary, determinant. One's' personal style is arrived at by first diligently following traditional practice; it matures through mastery of that tradition. In Florentine terms , style (maniera) not only justifies repetition, repetition is one of its most salient characteristics8 •

Although replication can be achieved through other methods, the use of common figures, poses, and details borrowed from the works of other artists constitutes an effective .way of forging a « public style ». Even in cases of obvious appropriation, criticism that this method automatically results in monotony or banality is not justified. The practice should not be considered evidence of a paucity of invenzione or fantasia on the part of artists working in the bella maniera. Quite the contrary. While the reuse of a stable canon of figures reinforces tradition, deviation from and variations on the same motif can be seen, instead, as a confirmation of artistic freedom (licenzia) and, by extension, in the mid-Cinquecento, as a demonstration of the artist's free will (libero arbitrio)9• When we compare an artist's works to those of his contemporaries , the practice of adapting common sources actually throws into relief the artist's personal or « private style » . In 1586, Armenini, who had been

6 Although it was published only in 1557 after Vasari's first edition of the Lives, L'Aretino was probably known in manuscript form to Vasari through Varchi who had been closely connected with the Venetian circle in the 1 5 30s when the dialogue was created. This informal Venetian academy included Titian and Sansovino and was opposed to the Florentine maniera in theory as well as practice. See however M. Roskill, Dolce's «Aretino» and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento , New York, 1968, p. 63-65, for changes in the second edition of the Lives, seen as a later response to Dolce.

7 Vasari, BB, IV, p. 4. Italian cited in text below, p. 1 3 1 . 8 On another level, repetition i s linked to the formation of memory ·and

memory, in turn, must be accessed in the making of maniera. For Vasari as for Alberti, the ultimate purpose of copying from the best masters is to form a repertoire from which new concetti may be conjured up from the artist's imagination.

9 I have treated this subject at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in College Park, Maryland, March 1998, in a lecture entitled : Artistic License, Free Will, and Monstrous Figures : Cilia's Critique of Poetic a nd Historical Painting.


in close contact with Salviati in the 1550s, recommended and defended copying from other artists with the following words :

Non occore dir qui, che questo mio dire non sarebbe altro, ch'un vol er inferire che si pigliassero le medesime figure d' altri et che non si sapesse poi far altro che quell'istesse, percioche questa sarebbe risposta troppo sciocca, poiche in u na figura di u no che habbia ferma maniera , somigliante a quella ch'egli ha imitato, ancorche porra le medesime membra, nondimeno le figure saranno diverse da quelle10•

In short, an artist who already possesses a decided or strong style (ferma maniera) will necessarily be different from the artist from whom he copies, « even when he uses the same limbs »1 1 • In subsequent passages Armenini focused on drawings from prints and their use by superior artists to produce una bella maniera 12 :

( ... ); ma vi erano ancora di molti schizzi cavati da piu disegni di stampe, ch'erano invenzione d'Italiani et di Tedeschi si come ci era ancora u n numero infinito di pilli , di partimenti , di statue , di grottesche, pur cavate dalle antiche con altre cose tali , che sono sparse , et occulte per Roma, et non ignote a noi, dove che esso nel ritrarle , le veniva tuttavia mutando quando u na cosa, et quando u n'altra, et a quelle ch'erano rotte, o non molto gagliarde , gli aggiungeva, l i levava, et le aricchiva, et in somma le riduceva in modo tale, con quella sua l eggiadra maniera, ch'era cosa difficile da' ben

10 De' Veri Precetti della Pittura di M. Gia. Battista Armenini da Faenza, libri tre [. .. ] In Ravenna : Apresso Francesco Tebaldini , ad instantia di Tomaso Pasini Libraro in Bologna, Ravenna, 1587, I , 8, p. 68 (italics mine). I have used copies of the princeps in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C. and the Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum. In addition, I have been aided in my translations by the English version edited by E. Olszewski, Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, New York, B. Franklin, 1977. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated; ancient spelling and punctuation have been modernized where appropriate.

11 At the end of Book I, Armenini gives more specific advice to artists who «lack inventiveness» because of «weak intellectual capacity». He writes that : «one can and must use the inventions of others as long as one is careful to adapt them with some changes and make them appear as if they come out of and are created by one's own mind. This is done by making sure that other parts are different and conform to one's own style as closely as possible, with the intent of surpassing the borrowed inventions in quality and form( ... ) the original form of any figure is altered greatly by a small change in any member, by reversing members, by slightly changing the head, raising an arm, removing or adding drapery in another part of the work or by presenting them differently, reversing the drawing or blurring it for the sake of expediency, or by imagining it in relief. All these devices result in its no longer seeming to be the same figure»; see ed. Olszewski, id. , p. 149 for the complete passage in English; id. , 1587, ed. princeps, I, 9, p. 78.

12 This passage can be related to remarks made during the Rome conference on Salviati by D. McTavish (infra, p. 429-453) on the difficulties of attributing drawings based on the same models to different artists.


prattiche a conoscere di dove egli cavate l e havesse , sl che s i conchiude alla fine, che presa che si h a l a bella maniera si puo servire con facilita delle cose altrui, et con poca fatica adoperarle; come su.e proprie, et farsi honore senza riportarne biasimo da niuno13•

Armenini enumerates the many ways that an artist can vary his sources by «adding, taking away and embellishing » , whether they be Italian or German prints or the infinite number of examples from antiquity which, he tells us, «are not unknown to us in spite of their being scattered and hidden in Rome » . By these means an artist can with little effort make them his own, «Without incurring the blame of anyone »14 • No stigma is attached to such borrowings as long as the artist's own maniera prevails 15•

In a brief paper one cannot examine all the possible examples of shared and reutilized sources. Nevertheless, using only a few, it is possible to reconstruct the processes involved, always remaining conscious of the problems attendant upon evaluating and attributing drawings made after models, including the need to distinguish preparatory drawings from those made after existing (or lost) paintings .

We know that Salviati was a student in Bandinelli's workshop for a short time. Two well-known engravings depict Bandinelli's so-called «Academy» in Rome. One by Enea Vico dated 1531 (fig. 1); another by Agostino Veneziano differs only in details 16• In both scenes, young apprentices supervised by older artists are drawing by candlelight from small-scale, three-dimensional replicas . I say

13 Armenini, 1587, ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, I, 8, p. 65 . 14 Id. , I, 8, p . 65. 15 This is in contrast to Michelangelo's joke about the artist who Barocchi

calls « il pittore antologico » because he stole so many limbs from others that on the day of judgment when all missing limbs are returned to their original bodies, his figures were left limbless : « ( . . . ) al dl del giudizio, che tutti i corpi piglierannno le lor membra, come fara quella storia, che non ci remarra niente : avvertimento a coloro che fanno l' arte, che s' avezzino a fare da se », Vasari , BB., VI, p. 1 19, La Vita di Michelangelo .

16 Both evidently depend on a drawing by Bandinelli . Examples from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York: Enea Vico, Inv. 17 .50. 16-35 and Agostino Veneziano, Inv. 49 . 9 7 . 144. The Vico inscription reads « Baccius Bandinellus invent., Enea Vigo Parmegiano Sculpsit » and « Accademia 1531 »; see The Illustrated Bartsch, 30. Formerly volume 15 (part 3), Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Centu ry. Enea Vico, ed. J. Spike, New York, 1985, p. 68-69. See also the·

·engraved self-portraits of Bandinelli of 1 531 and 1548 where the sculptor is surrounded by small scale models in A. M. Massinelli (ed.), Bronzetti e Anticaglie nella Guardaroba di Cosimo I, exh. cat. Florence Museo del Bargello, 1991, p. 43-50 and fig . 34-37. Massinelli is among the few scholars to discuss these engravings from the point of view of the models represented.

1 12 LEATRICE MENDELSOHN

Fig. 1 - Enea Vico, Baccio Bandinelli's A cademy. Florence, GDSU, engraving.

replicas since, for the most part , they appear to derive from antiquities, although some may be the preparatory modellini of contemporary sculptors such as Bandinelli himself17• While we cannot determine from the engravings whether the figures are of gesso, terracotta , wax, or bronze, they resemble the small scale copies of ancient statues made in the Renaissance in all of these materials. In actual workshops these may have included bozzetti for bronzes as well as the small terraco tta figurines reportedly

17 See Massinelli, id., fig. 34, 35 and p. 18 for the 1559 inventory of the Medici Guardaroba (ASF, Fondo Mediceo 30) which includes numerous «piccolo» bronze figures not all of which are called antique; F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900, New Haven, London, 1981, p. 1-6; J. Montagu, Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art, New Haven, London, 1989, p . 151-172, especially p. 161-162., Armenini (1587, ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, II , 5, p . 96 and sq. ) gives the most complete description of the various types of models used and their function in the workshop. Some replicas were cast from copies rather than taken from the originals . This was certainly the case with small scale replicas. An example of a cast copy, hollow but weighted with rubble, is the Spinario by Antonello Gagini, executed in Messina, Sicily c. 1500 now in New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Inv. 32 . 12 1 ) . My attention was kindly drawn to this work by Prof. Salvatore Settis.


unearthed at excavations of antiquities such as the Cinquecento site of the Chimera excavation in Arezzo18•

Figurines of all types were eagerly collected by conoscenti. Viewed in relation to his drawings, the small scale copies of antiquities and contemporary statues that appear in Bandinelli's engraved self-portraits, for example o ne dated 1548, wer� undoubtedly common in sculpture workshops, but they are also found in drawings that appear specifically to be intended for utilization by painters 19• In his Life of Bandinelli, Vasari writes that while preparing a model for the statue of the archangel Michael in Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, to pass the time and test how he would accomplish the casting :

[Bandinelli] fece molte figurine alte due terzi e tonde, come Ercoli, Venere, Apollini, Lede, ed altre sue fantasie; e fattele gittar di bronzo a maestro Jacopo della Barba fiorentino, riuscirono ottimamente20•

Furthermore he adds that some were given to the Pope and some were pla�ed in the scrittoio of Cosimo I among the more than 100 antiquities in his collection21• A drawing now in the Louvre, attributed to Bandinelli , of an incomplete statue, possibly the Antinous in the Belvedere, is drawn in two stages (fig. 2)22• A second version of the same antiquity on the same page, shows the completed body, either in order to reconstruct the original statue or to create a variant. To the mutilated figure, Bandinelli added a more

18 The Chimera was found «Fuori Pa. S. Laurentino » along with other anticaglie and, as Cellini wrote, «Una quantita di piccole statuette » ; it was brought immediately to the Palazzo della Signoria. It is usually said, but without documentation, that the restoration of the tail and two feet on the left side was the work of Cellini; see A. Del Vita, Dove fu trovata la Chimera di Arezzo, in Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archeologischen Instituts, 25, 1910, p. 293-297.

19 Engravings by A. Salamanca, 1548, and N. Della Casa, 1531. The former includes male and female figures among which is a Hercules as well as innumerable torsos. To the far right, seen from the rear, is a figure resembling the wax Bozzetto attributed to Michelangelo which appeared in the Salviati exhibition catalogue. For Armenini's descriptions of Salviati's use of small scale modelli see below p. 117, note 28.

20 Vasari, BB, V, p . 251. See fig. 7 and 8 for representations of these figurines

and infra note 37. 21 Indicating that their status was equivalent. A drawing by Bandinelli now

in Florence (GDSU, Inv. 1526 E verso) representing Jason and deriving from the Apollo Belvedere is close to a small bronze by the same artist in the Bargello, illustrated in J. Pope-Hennessey, Benvenuto Cellini, New York, 1985, p. 178,fig. 59 .

22 Paris, musee du Louvre, departement des Arts grafiques, Inv. 111. On the Antinous, see P. Gerlack, Bin Hand van Guglielmo della Porta? Cavalieri, Tetrode, Perret und der sogen. Antinous vom Belvedere, in Fests chrift Erasmus, 1934-1989, Amsterdam, 1984, p. 179-190.

1 14 LEATRICE MENDELSOHN

Fig. 2 - Baccio Bandinelli, Two Male Nudes. Paris, musee du Louvre, departement des Arts graphiques, Inv. 111.


precise head closer to an antique type, which gives the figure a more canonical appearance. The left arm, missing from the shoulder, was completed in the restored version. The fragmentary nature of the original statue permitted the artist to camouflage missing parts of the figure and reconfigure it according to the needs of a new pictorial context. Armenini cites Leonardo who recommended dressing statues with draperies which would conveniently cover cavities or missing parts23•

Leaving aside questions of authorship, Bandinelli's drawing in the Louvre may stand as representative of numerous others of the same genre. It may be compared to Salviati's drawing after the wax bozzetto attributed to Michelangelo (fig. 3)24 and then to the bozzetto itself (fig. 4), which as M. Hirst has shown, was transformed into a

23 In De' veri precetti . . . (1587, ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, II, 5, 99) Armenini writes about clothing modelli with actual fabric : « ( . . . ) molti cuoprono e vestono ih varii modi, con piu sorte panni ( . . .) » (see also in Scritti d'Arte del Cinquecento, ed. P. Barocchi, 3 vol . , Naples, 1 971-1977, II, p. 1884). In a CASVA conference, Small Bronzes in the Renaissance, 4-5 December 19 98, at the National Gallery in Washington, Richard Stone demonstrated that similar techniques were used in the casting process as well. He proposed that Donatello cast his Judith and Holofernes directly from a model covered with cloth.

24 See M. Hirst, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no. l1 (black chalk drawing, 400 x 161 mm.) and id., no. 1 2. It is a wax model or a copy of a wax model probably for abronze, either a lost statue of David or a Hercules. Although the presumption isthat the model is by Michelangelo, in my view, it is by a follower of Michelangelo;possibly Bandinelli may be a viable alternative. I would date the figure after 1530because of its striking resemblance to the Jdolino in both the position of thelegs and the right arm (corresponding to the left arm of the model) . The statuewas unearthed in Pesaro in that year and underwent restoration during1537-1538. A recent exhibition of the restored Idolino in the Museo Archeologicoin Florence indicated that the right hand, segments of the arms, and part of bothlegs were replaced at that time as well as the left foot; see L. Beschi L'!dolino :

storia critica, fortuna, in «Qual era tutto rotto». L'Enigma dell'ldolino di Pesaro.lndagine per un Restauro, exh. cat. ed. M. Iozzo, Florence, Museo ArcheologicoNazionale, 1998-999, p. 7-19, and diagrams p. 90, 91, 95. C.H. Smyt h consideredBronzino's study of a male nude (Florence, GDSU, Inv.6704 F (... Draughtsman, LocustValley, 1971, fig.5,pp.5-7) to be influenced by the ancient Idolino and bearing aresemblance to the wax model, particularly in the greater backward twist of theshoulder towards the hanging arm. Significantly, the replaced hand of the Idolino isremarkably close to the left hand of Michelangelo's David. The Bronzino drawing isdated c. 1541 because of its relevance to a figure in the Crossing of the Red Seafresco in the Chapel of Eleonora of Toledo ( On this see J. Cox-Rearick, Bronzino'sChapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1 993, p. 122, note 47, and pl. 22). On the wax model as related to Michelangelo's lost Herculessee the same author's Royal Treasures, the collection of Francis I, Antwerp, 1 995, pp.3 1 1-3 1 2 . We know that Bandinelli made drawings for use by Bronzino and themodello resembles what appears to be a small bronze shown in the rightforeground of the Bandinelli. engraving. (our fig.1) If the modello is the work ofBandinelli rather than Michelangelo, it would account for the similarity betweenthe modello, the Idolino, and Bronzino's drawing. (Massinelli, 1991 , supra note 1 6,fig. 36. )Th e upper bo dy of the Ba ndinelli figure is seen in shadow at the far right


Fig. 3 - Francesco Salviati, Drawing after wax model. Paris, musee du Louvre, depar

tement des Arts graphiques, Inv. 1665.

Fig. 4 - Michelangelo (attributed to ) , Wax Model of Male Nude.

Florence, Casa Buonarroti. ·


figure seen from the rear in Salviati's preparatory drawing for an intarsia depicting the story of David25 • Observing these drawings in relation to a wax sculptor's model generates assumptions about the process by which antique statues were transformed into painted figures. Analyzing the pictorial process makes clear why painters used small scale, sculpted models rather than original antiques and the extent to which both the subject and the presumed sculptor of the antiquity influenced painters' choices. We may well ask : what is the relationship of a drawing after an antique statue to a drawing after a wax model for a lost Michelangelo26? Does the wax model and any drawings deriving from it constitute a legitimate substitute for antiquity in the same way as would a sketch taken directly from the original ancient statue? Are not the deviations from antiquity as significant for the formation of a maniera style as line for line copies would be27? Can we assume that the authority of the artist's personal maniera as it reshapes his sources (by substituting for or deviating from an original) was considered a measure of the success of a painter at that time? In other words : to what extent was an artist's assimilation of antiquity a necessary prerequisite for acquiring bella maniera?

Clues to the relationship of drawings to sculptural models are found in Armenini's words. He describes how Salviati brought his drawings to an artisan specializing in model-making to have t,hem replicated in wax28• This well-known passage underscores the fact that a drawing after a statue could gain precedence over the original antiquity. It also became a blueprint for producing a functional manikin which could then be manipulated to create varied compositions . A drawing by a known artist such as Perino or Michelangelo was considered a viable substitute for an antique original simply because it came from the hand of a master. If an

from the rear). Our discussion underscores the difficulties of resolving problems which arise when several artists work from the same models and also share drawings based on them.

25 Inv. 5901. M. Hirst, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no. 1 1 . See also C. Monbeig Goguel, Drawings by Vasari and his Circle in the Collection of the Louvre : An Examination and New Findings, in Drawing, XI, 1989, p. 1-5.

26 Regarding any comparison between antique originals and Michelangelo's models we should recall remarks by Vasari and Michelangelo's biographer Condivi concerning the sculptor's desire to surpass rather than merely emulate the ancients. If the origin of the small model of a male nude can be traced to Michelangelo regardless of who executed the final small bronze, then it may well have been an attempt to outdo the Idalina or another Roman version of a similar type of Greek statue.

27 The wax model exhibits increased contrapposto with respect to the bronzeIdalina precisely in order to surpass it.

28 Armenini , 1587, ed. princeps, cit. supra note 10, III, 15, p. 225.


artist used small scale wax figures, Armenini tells us, the limbs as well as their positions in space could also be varied : « Is there anyone who still doesn't know that merely by turning one or two figures in the round (figure di tondo rilievo) in such a way that they are facing in different directions, one can extract from them many [figures] in painting, and all of them different?»29• As A. Nova observed, small replicas were useful for creating compositional variants in which stock figures are repeated30• The figures, as they appear in the final paintings, however, naturally resemble the finished drawings more .than the movable wax manikins, giving priority to the two-dimensional.

Michelangelo's contemporaries preserved his wax and terracotta preparatory models (bozzetti) , casting some of them in bronze, for example, one for an unexecuted River God intended for the New Sacristy Tombs which is now in the Casa Buonarroti31 • Terracotta and bronze replicas of body parts from statues in the Medici Chapel survive in collections of the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and elsewhere32• Other lost works have come down to us only through bozzetti that were evidently saved as precious traces. What is less well understood is the esthetic that validates the use of fragments by painters and what precisely their use signified.

29 Id. , II, 5, p. 96 and ed. Barocchi, cit. supra note 23, II, p. 1883. In the passage which follows Armenini asserts that Michelangelo used wax models in planning his Last Judgment, a statement supported by Cellini's testimony in his Trattati (see sopra l'arte del disegno), in Opere, ed. B. Maier, Milan, 1968, p. 217 .

30 Op. cit. supra note 3. 31 Preserved because they were thought to reflect the hand of the sculptor,

not all of these surviving models are actually by the master; some are evidently casts taken from copies or from bozzetti. In addition to the River God, in Casa Buonarroti, a waxed terracotta model attributed to Michelangelo exists in the Victoria and Albert Museum. While these two appear to be original bozzetti rather than casts, they must be distinguished from the final modello from which the mold was made; see Ch. Avery, La cera sempre aspetti: Wax sketch models for sculpture, in Apollo, CXIX, 1984, p. 166-176. Bibliography on Michelangelo's models is scarce and outdated; see L. Goldscheider, Michelangelo's Models in Wax and Clay, London, 1 962. Other authors have dealt with the problem from the point of view of seventeenth century restoration on which more information is available eg. D. Walker, Surveying the History of Collecting Italian Sculptural Models, in From the Sculptor's Hand, exh. cat., Chicago, The Art Institute, 1998, p. 14-29 . A dissertation on the subject of Michelangelo's terracotta models, whichI have not read, was completed by J. O'Grody for Case Western ReserveUniversity, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1 999.

32 See Massinelli, 1991 , op. cit. supra note 1 6. In the Casa Buonarroti : a wax model for a Hercules, a black wax model of a River God, a terracotta model of the Torso of a Hermaphrodite, a clay model of a Hercules and Cacus, and a terracotta model of an a-cephalic female nude. We have already discussed the wax model of a male nude from the Salviati exhibition (supra note 24).

'

t

I l I

THE SUM OF THE PARTS 1 1 9

A Portrait of a Gentleman by Bronzino in Ottawa (National Gallery of Canada), includes an acephalic, female nude in the Venus Pudica pose (fig. 5). Its scale appears comparable to the small scale models seen in the Bandinelli «Academy » engravings. Its blue hue, revealed after cleaning, suggests not bronze but a painted or waxed gesso33 • Drawings apparently based on the same or a similar statue exist from at least three decades before Bronzino's painting. A silver point .c. 1500, attribued to Granacci, after what appears to be the same Venus (Florence, Uffizi, fig. 6) shows a female torso based on an inc0111plete statue and shares the page with a detailed drawing of a hand 34. Whether the model for this drawing was a replica or an original n1arble is difficult to say, but only a three-dimensional torso could have been rotated on its axis in order to be drawn from different points of view35.

Like Bronzino and other painters such as Parmigianino and Lotto, Salviati included small scale figurines in several of his portraits36. A small gold or gilded figure tenderly held in the Portrait

33 A similar color is used on the statuette of a satyr that appears in the Portrait of a Young Man by Bronzino (1550-1555), oil on wood, on loan to the National Gallery in London. In the background behind a curtain we see a small scale statue of Bacchus with a putto. The right arm of the Bacchus is broken suggesting an antiquity, however, the material appears to be painted blue as is the Venus in the Ottawa portrai t . On the fragmentary B acchu s , s e e J. Holderbaum, Recuperi moderni di sculture di Pierino da Vinci, e l'identificaz.ionedi un ritratto de! Bronz.ino che raffigura Pierino con la sua statua di Bacco, inPierino da Vinci, Atti della giornata di Studio, (Vinci, Biblioteca Leonardiana, 26Maggio 1990), ed. M. Cianchi, Florence, 1995, p. 17-23.

34 Florence, GDSU, Inv. 190 E, Studio da una statua antica di Venere. See the entry for this drawing by A. De Marchi, in Il Giardino di San Marco, Maestri e Compagni del Giovane Michelangelo, exh. cat. ed. P. Barocchi, Florence, Casa Buonarroti, 1992, no. 9.

35 It is suggested that a drawing attributed by K. Oberhuber to Marcantonio in the Albertina, Inv. 2583 verso (V. Birke et J. Kertesz, Die italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina, Generalverz.eichnis, 4 vol . , Vienne, Cologne, Weimar, 1992-1997, II, 1992, p. 1450) and another to Raphael's School in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Inv. Parker 626), as well as one from an Umbrian sketchbook in a private collection in Calenzano, near Prato, may all depend on a torso (partially restored) identical to one which belonged to Giovanni Ciampolini (see A. Schmidt, Romische Antikensammlungen im Spiegel eines Munsterbuchs derRenaissance, i.o Mii.nchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst , XXI, 1970, p. 99-128,Ap. I); see Ph. Bober and R. 0. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and AntiqueSculpture. A Handbook of Sources, Oxford, New York, 1986, fig. 14a, lSa and lSb.An alternative source is an acephalic draped Venus currently in the MuseoArcheologico, Siracusa.

3 6 For a recent article on Bronzino's additions see S. Currie, Discerning the Sculptural Content of Branz.in.o's Early Male Portraits, in The Sculpted Object 1400-1700, ed. S. Currie and P. Motture, London, 1997, p. 117-29.


Fig. Sa - Bronzino, Portrait of a Gentleman. Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada.


Fig. Sb - Bronzino, Portrait of a Gentleman (detail of Venus). Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada.


Fig . 6 - Francesco Granacci, Study of an ancient statue of Ven us. Florence, GDSU, Inv. 190 E.

of a Goldsmith (fig. 7) and a burnished version of the wax model from the Casa Buonarrotti in the Portrait of a Sculptor (fig. 8) may ultimately tell us more about the use of small scale models than about the sitters' identities37 • Although in both portraits the

3 7 For the Portrait of a Sculptor (Montpellier, musee Fabre) , see M. Hirst, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no. 84; for Portrait of a Goldsmith (Rome, private collection), see Ph. Costamagna, id., no. 83. On the basis of a drawing for a self-portrait attributed to Beccafumi, (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, Inv. PD.7-1965), J. Katalan (Beccafumi's Infl.uence on Salviati, in Apollo, CXLIX, 1999, p. 17-23,p. 18, fig. 7) identifies the sitter as Beccafumi.


Fig. 7 - Francesco Salviati, Portrait of a Goldsmith. Rome, Private Collection.


Fig. 8 - Francesco Salviati, Portrait of a Sculptor. Monptellier, musee Fabre.


assumption has been made that the sitters are artists, statuettes or statues play an emblematic role in relation to the sitter in portraits of letterati . In Parmigianino's Portrait of a Collector in Hampton Court and Bronzino's Portrait of Ugolino Martelli in Berlin, the sitter is identified as the owner-collector in this way. In the latter, the statue known as the Martelli David indicates family ownership while other objects, such as the books, inform the viewer aqout the sitter's personal taste and political allegiance38• The cap worn by Salviati's two · sitters is similar to those worn by various members of the Accademia degli Humidi who were portrayed by Bronzino in the late 30s and 40s, later known as the Accademia Fiorentina; it was the Academy to which Salviati belonged until 154739 •

The statuettes in Salviati's two portraits appear quasi-animated so that their status as objects is ambiguous . From his expression, one might conclude that the sitter identified in the catalogue as a goldsmith had a rapport beyond pride of authorship with the miniature female figure he holds so lovingly40 • In other portraits which incorporate inanimate objects in human form, the artist is implicitly commenting on his Dedalian ability to transmute art into nature. With respect to the sitter, the reverse occurs : nature is transmuted into artifice .

38 Apparently carved into the molding beneath the table in the Martelli portrait is a lion's paw pouncing on a snake. On the Ugolino see E. Cropper, Prolegomena to a new interpretation of Bronzino 's Portraits , in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, Florence, 1985, p. 46-52, and R. Wildmoser, Das Bildniss des Ugolino Martelli von Agnola Bronzino , in Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen , XX.XI, 1989, p. 181-214. I would like to thank Erich Schleier of the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, for kindly providing photographic details of the Ugo lino for study purposes.

39 See A. Cecchi, Il Bronzino, Benedetto Varchi e l 'Accademia Fiorentina : Ritratti di poeti, letterati e personaggi illustri della carte Medicea , in Antichita viva, XXX , 2-3, 1 9 9 1 , p. 17-18 ; id. , 'Famosi frondi di cui santi honori . . . ' Un sonetto di Varchi e il ritratto di Lorenzo Lenzi dipinto dal Bronzino, in Artista , II, 1990, p. 8- 19 , and id. , Ritratti a Firenze nel secondo Cinquecento, in Il ritratto, gli artisti, i modelli, la memoria , ed. G. Fossi, Florence, 1996, p . 123-135 . The cap, however, does not exclude the possibility that Salviati's sitters are artists. Until 1547 when it underwent a purge, many artists, including Salviati, were members of the Academy. A candidate for sitter of one of these portraits may be the Jacopo della Barba mentioned by Vasari, supra, p. 113 .

4 0 If the sitter i s Cellini, as has been suggested, his use of a live model, a certain Dorotea, for some of his statuettes such as a Danae (which this could represent) , may account for this impression. See J. Pope-Hennessey, 198 5 , op. cit. supra note 21, p . 178. I t i s also the case that the verso o f the Beccafumi drawing has a small reclining figure which may be related to such a model (as suggested by J. Katalan, 1999, op. cit. supra note 37 ,p.122). Whoever its author, the small figurine was painted by Salviati and therefore bears the stamp of his ferma maniera .


In the painter's workshop the function of modellini was similar, i .e . , to serve as mediators between art and nature . Alberti consideredstatues to be substitutes for nature but within the virtual reality ofthe pictorial surface they act as catalysts to effect the shift fromreality through artifice to illusion; their occult allusions support theimage of the artist as magician or alchemist41 • The statuette inBronzino's Ottawa portrait gives an impression of the scale andsurface of the type collected and used in the painter's workshop42 •That Salviati, like earlier painters, employed a variety of suchmodels is noted by Armenini . Beyond that, the variations of similarfigures repeated in different paintings, at different times in hiscareer, suggest that such models were retained by Salviati, alongwith drawings m ade after them , t o b e reworked for newcompositional contexts at a later date .

Many of Salviati's drawings depict antique prototypes, both full scale originals as well as small scale replicas, for example, Standing Male Nude with Raised Arm and detail of a Torso from the Albertina (fig. 9)43, or the preparatory drawing for Rebecca and Eleazar at the Well in the Uffizi (fig. 10)44 • Although it has been suggested that both figures derive from the Horse Tamers on the Ouirinale, the male nude may simply be a variant of the torso which appears to the left in the drawing, possibly a small scale modello merely seen from an opposite angle. The distinctive figure may derive from the similar figure in Rosso's lost painting of the Rebecca story, a copy of which

41 The use of small figurines and the use of metals in alchemical experiments relates to the occult properties attributed to statues. See B. Varchi's treatise · Quistione sull'alchemia, Cod. inedit. 1544, Florence, 1827, dedicated to Don Pietro da Toledo the brother of Eleonora, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici and patron of Bronzino. Cellini, whose small bronzes (as on the salt cellar for Frarn;ois I) resemble those held by the sitters in fig. 7 and 8 , also believed in alchemy. See L. B. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture - The Latin texts of De Pictura and DeStatua, ed. C. Grayson, London, 1972, p. 100-101.

42 That the replica was used for workshop purposes does not exclude the possibility that it was the property of a collector. The identity of the Ottawa sitter has been considered to be Cosimo I de' Medici but there is only a slight resemblance to other portraits of him by Bronzino. The identification has been strengthed by association with a paired portrait in Turin said to be of Cosimo's wife Eleonora, but here too the resemblance is slight and there is no reason to consider the two paintings a pair; see C. McCorquodale, Bronzino , New York, 1981, p. 131, pl. 92, 93.

4 3 Vienne, Albertina, Inv. 4865, see P. Joannides, Cat. Salviati, 1998 , no. 5 . 44 Florence, GDSU, Inv. 14610 F, see P . Joannides, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no. 4.

See E. A. Carroll, Some . Drawings by Salviati formerly attributed to Rosso Fiorentino , in Master Drawings, IX, 1971 , p. 15-37 on the relationship of this drawing to Rosso's painting.


Fig. 9 - Francesco Salviati, Standing male nude with raised arm and detail of a torso. Vienna, Albertina, Inv. 4865 SC. R 566.

exists today in Pisa (Museo Nazionale di San Matteo)45• In several cases Salviati and Rosso represent the same figure rotated and

45 See D. Franklin, Rosso in Italy, New Haven, London, 1994, p. 115 , fig. 82. In the Rosso copy, the figure in question is significantly closer to the Horse Tamers than it is in Salviati's drawing in which the horse has become a camel ; Rosso's male figure differs from Salviati's in other ways. On Rosso's original, probably sent to England, see C. Sicca, Rosso e l 'Inghilterra , in Pontormo e Rosso , atti del Convegno di Empoli e Volterra (Empoli and Volterra, 1994) , ed. R. P. Ciardi and A. Natali , Venice, 1996, p. 147-156.


Fig. 10 - Francesco Salviati, Rebecca and Eleazar at the Well. Florence, GDSU, Inv. 14610F.


rendered from a different point of view. This is particularly apparent in the central reclining figure in Salvia ti's Rebecca and Eleazar drawing which reverses Rosso's lower left figu:re, · changing the position of the legs and revealing part of the face not shown by Rosso46 • Thus, it would appear that Salviati, working from a threedimensional model, followed Armenini's advice, so that : « per ogni poca mutazione che si faccia di una figura, rimovendosene le membra di essa, diverso effetto e forza che faccia dal primo perche cio e verissi1no e si concede » 47 • Conversely, rendering the antique . statue as a drawing helped to reinforce the two-dimensionality of · the painted version. .

The use of sculptural models was already common practice in Quattrocento workshops but in the Cinquecento they were adapted to serve the new objectives of painting: According to A. Radcliffe it was not until the Cinquecento that sculptural models appear to take precedence over the human in the construction of painted figures48• The use of models in painting workshops at that time would appear to have been appropriated from sculptors' methods, especially in cases where a shop dealt in multiple media productions . While Michelangelo preferred marble over bronze for both esthetic and

46 See the entry in Cat. Salviati , 1998, no. 4, in which P. Joannides relates this figure to drawings after Michelangelo's statues and to his early paintings. On the reuse of artists' drawings see A. Nova, 1992, op. cit. supra note 3, p . 83-108. A painting of the Descent into Limbo , possibly after Rosso, (now in Slovakia, in the National Gallery, Inv. 0-367) formerly attributed to Beccafumi and here attributed to I1 Poppi, combines eclectically a variety of figures from the Rebecca painting as well as from other Rosso works into a fragmented composition, close to Rosso, but with variations in the poses of individual figures. I am grateful to Lubomir Konecny for calling this work to my attention. The reconfiguration of compositional elements cannot be discussed here. For the use of Rosso as a model for Salviati see both Carroll, 197 1 , op. cit. supra note 44, and Franklin, 1994, op. cit. supra note 45, p114 and sq.

47 Armenini, 1587 , ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, II, 5 , 98. According to Castelnuovo (G. B. Armenini, De ' Veri Precetti della Pittura , ed. M . Gorreri, preface by E. Castelnuovo, Turin, 1988, p. IX, note 12) , Armenihi probablystudied in Faenza before leaving for Rome in 1549. In Rome, he participated in the fresco programs underway during the pontificate of Paul III.

48 A. Radcliffe, The model and the marble. in the Renaissance and Multiple production in the fifteenth century; Florentine stucco Madonnas and the della Robbia workshop, in A. Radcliffe, M. Baker, and M. Maek-Gerard, The ThyssenBornemisza Collection, Renaissance and Later Sculpture with Works of Art in Bronze, London, 1992, p. 10-15 , 16-23. Also see C. L. Ragghianti and G. Dalli Regoli, Firenze 1470-1480. Disegni dal Madella , Pisa, 1975, and more recently, G. Dalli Regoli , Pastille ai Disegni dal Madella. I Tem i e le Farme dellaSperimentazione, in Florentine Drawings at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent,Firenze, Villa Spelman colloquia. 4 (Florence, 1992) , ed. E. Cropper, Bologna,1994, p. 7 3 -8 1 , who speaks of « componenti staccati dalla figura umana,raffigurate secondo diverse visuali )) .


philosophical reasons, his terracotta models were highly prized49•

The strongest case for using models was made by Vasari who never disconnects «practical» advice from his canon of «ideal» works, nor from the theoretical framework within which specific antiquities are inserted as exemplars50

•

Both Vasari and Alberti before him recommended ancient statues as preferred models, supplements, and substitutes for nature51

• Both focus on the extremities as modules for the creation of proportionally harmonious figures and as conveyors of theaesthetic quality of grazia 52

• Still more significant for painters is thediscussion of the additive method of combining separate body partsto make a figure, found in the Proemio to part III of Vasari's Vite53

•

The method had already been described in the technical introduction to part I where, in both the 1550 and 1568 editions, bronze casting procedures are outlined 54 . Writing about small and large terracotta modelli to be used in casting large scale figures in metal or bronze, Vasari stresses that « they must be brought to that perfection which is the result of study and skill» 55

. The next step is to

49 When describing the colossal bronze statue of Nero by Zenodorus (which in the Renaissance was sometimes identified with the Capitoline Bronze Head), Pliny singled out for praise the remarkable likeness of the preparatory clav model and emphasized its importance just as Vasari did later (Natural Histo1y, 34, 46). Pliny refers to Lysistratus of Sikyon, the brother of Lysippos, as having « invented a method of molding copies from Statues» (Natural Histo,y, 35, 153). Casts found in Baiae attest to the practice in Roman times. Primaticcio used casts taken from bronzes to reproduce full scale antiquities for Fran�ois I, however, as a technique, it was more appropriate for replicating bronzes in gesso, rather than for copying marble statues in bronze. Surviving large scale bronze replicas from antiquity made in the Renaissance are rare. One known example is the standing male knO\vn as the Magdale11sberg Youth, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, a sixteenth century cast after a Roman original found in 1502 (Bronze, H. 183.5 cm, Inv. VI. l). That this statue was Renaissance rather than ancientRoman was discovered only in 1983. The Renaissance cast, made in a singlepiece, bears a strong resemblance to the ldolino. See Kunsthisrorisches Museu111,Vienna, Guide to the Collectio11s, Vienna, 2"" ed., 1997, fig. 64, 65.

so See infi·a note 62.51 Alberti, De Pic111ra ... cit. supra note 41, p. 100-101. Unlike Vasari, Alberti

(II, 40, p. 79) cautioned against repeating poses in the same painting. oz id., 11, 36, 37, p. 75.55 Vasari, BB, Proe111io to part III, IV, p. 4 and sq. In a review of P. Rubin,

Giorgio Vasari: Art and History, New Ha\'en, London, 1995 (Ne11· ·York Revie11· o( Books, 5 Oct. 1995), Ch. Hope proposed that Vasari is not the author of the Proemios to the Li1·es. The question of authorship is beyond the scope of this paper. but a change in author \\'ould not substantialh alter m:-, argument.

54 Vasari. BB, I, p. 96-98. ,, \.'asari. BB. I. p. 97 and sq. : «Come si fanno i modelli per fare di brnnzo k

figure grnndi e picciole, ( ... )».


( ... ) e cosi di pezzo in pezzo la figura si forma, e la testa, le braccia, il torso e le gambe per fin all'ultima cosa, di maniera che il cavo di quella statua, cioe la forma incavata, viene improntata nel cavo con tutte le parti et ogni minima cosa che e nel modello57•

It cannot be accidental that the same phrases and vocabulary used in this technical section are repeated nearly word for word in the t hird t h e o r e t i cal Pro e m io i n supp ort o f t h e f a c t t h a t contemporary artists surpassed antiquity :

La maniera venne poi la piu b ella d'aver messo in uso il frequente ritrarre le cose piu belle, e da quel piu b ello, o mani o teste o corpi o gambe, aggiungnerle insieme e fare una figura di tuttequelle bellezze che piu si poteva ; e metterla in uso in ogni opera pertutte le figure, che per questo si dice esser bella maniera58•

5 6 Id. , I, p. 97 : « ( . . . ) cominciano poi con gesso da fare presa a formare sopra

questo modello parte per parte, facendo addosso a quel modello i cavi d'i pezzi ( . . . ) » .

57 (Italics mine) Id. , I , (1550) , p . 97, from the Proemio to Part I . The importance Vasari gives to the wax model was reinforced by its literary use as a metaphor. The conceit of the wax impression appears in Dante's Commedia as a metaphor for reproduction, in Purgatorio X, 45 and in the Proemio to the Paradiso. The source of this idea is Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics , translated in 1537 by Benedetto Varchi and cited in his 1 549 Due Lezzioni, to which Vasari contributed a letter on the paragone ; see L. Mendelsohn, Paragoni : Benedetto Varchi and Cinquecento Art Theory, Ann Arbor, 1982, appendix A. p. 148-150 .

58 Vasari, BB, Proemio to part III, IV, p. 4 and sq. (as in supra note 7) . This repeats the citation of the same passage in English in the text supra p. 109.

5 9 Della Pittura . . . ed. cit. supra note 41 , II, 40, p. 79.

century, the interpretation of Vitruvius is expanded by Raphael and his humanist advisors. Although ostensibly concerned with architectural members, Raphael's interest in establishing the precise measurement of a foot is certainly intended to be utilized by all forms of representation, including painting. I. D. Rowland (Raphael, Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders , in The Art Bulletin, LXXVI, 1 994, p. 95-97) describes the «highly literate» Fire in the Bargo as a demonstration of principles of beauty based on Vitruvian measure. In Raphael's letter to Leo X, a reference to perspective drawing as the « province of painting » applied to architecture suggests the precedence of painting in the use of mathematical proportions ; in fact, the Renaissance pictorial use of the body as measure depends on Vitruvius and architecture. The linking of painting to


D etails furnish measurable rpodules . The ability to replicate faithfully depends on the accuracy of these details while a consistent system . of proportion based on dimensio and fin itio ensures comparability. Furthermore, replication to scale is consonant with the ability to transfer and disseminate that beauty which is concentrated in the details, in the smallest parts of the statue, i .e . the extremities . An antique fragment, whether a torso or a hand, is a synecdoche, useful for mathematically reconstructing the original while simultaneously signifying the perfection of the lost entirety. Alberti's sculptural method of recreating beauty through measured details is , in the Cinquecento, transmitted through replicated, modular body parts.

By the Cinquecento, artists realized that measured models could be utilized to transmit beauty to painting as well . This is apparent in Armenini's description of how gessi didattici could substitute for original antiquities :

si come sono quelle , che d i gesso sono formate su l e proprie · benissimo, overo che siano di altra materia ritratte da' buoni maestri.Io ho veduto il Laocoonte ritratto di cera da quello di Roma, il quale non passava due palmi di grandezza, che si puo dire che era il proprio in quella forma. Ma se quelle parti che di gesso sono su quelle formate si possono havere, senza dubbio sono migliori, poiche vi e ogn i minutia a punto nel modo che nel marmo si comprende , si che si godono bene, et servono ottimamente a gli studiosi, oltre che poi tuttavia sono c o m modissime, sl per e s s ere l e ggieri e t atte amaneggiarsi et a portarsi in ogni paese , si ancora per il p

.recio, il qual

si puo dire essere vilissimo, io dico a rispetto il valore delle proprie, dove che per cosl eccellenti m ezi non vi e scusa per niuno che ben s'invoglia di apprendere il buono, et antico sentiero61•

In this way, the accurate reproduction of great statues down to the last detail, in a portable scale, made the beauty of antiquity accessible to artists everywhere. Vasari translated into « pratica » ,

methods already i n use by Salviati and his teachers62• But if Vasari

Vitruvian measurement by Raphael prepared the ground for Vasari's approach and a maniera based on antique figure proportions.

61 Armenini, 1587 , ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, I, 8, p. 62-63 (italics mine). Armenini attests to having seen «studies and rooms in Milan, Genoa, Venice, Parma, Mantua, Florence, Bologna, Pesaro, Urbino, Ravenna, and other small cities, full of such materials, and well made», suggesting that in this way the treasures of Rome were disseminated throughout Italy.

62. 0n Vasari's use of the word « pratica» see D. Cast, Vasari on the Practical,in Vasari 's. Florence. Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court (conference proceedings, New Haven, 16-18 April 1994) , ed. Ph. Jacks, New York, 1998, p. 70-82 .


was and is still the most widely read spokesman for the: bella maniera, it is Armenini's buona maniera which gives us the c:�earest picture of how to achieve it. .

Armenini, who knew Salviati in the 50s, and who acurately describes workshop practices of the late 40s to 70s, gives • us a picture of the circumstances which contributed to a theory even more pragmatically derived than Alberti's. Armenini focuses on those techniques which realize Vasari 's ideal style , without theorizing about that ideal . From his examples of working practice, we can reconstruct the various ways that artists utilized ancient art in the workshop, the locus for stylistic development.

Although copying from drawings is the primary means of stylistic transmission, I want to stress that the fundamental importance of drawing lies in effecting the translation of threedimensional sculpture into two-dimensional, linear form. Sculpture, as Armenini tells us , especially antique sculpture, i s never superseded by painting as the source of beauty. Armenini follows literary theorists in positing two opposing methods of imitation : frequent copying of works by various « good » artists versus copying works from one « eccellent» artist 63 • Above all, one should draw the most beautiful things, « ritrar le cose che sono piu belle, piu dotte

· and piu alle bu one opere de gli anti chi scultori prossimane » i .e . the most beautiful, the most erudite, and those closest to the great works of ancient sculptors . One should look at more than one composition on every possible occasion so that the antique « buono » will appear as miraculously in first sketches as in finished drawings and finally, in paintings . From this practice the rules from which one works are derived precisely because imitatfon is « non�: other than a dil igent and j udicious perception derived from the observation of other great artists, of which the works of<ancient sculpture are the most notable » 64 . Finally, one copies the best artists because, possessing superior judgment, they have already chosen « the most beautiful things » to use as their models65 •

Armenini' s list of « most beautiful things » is synonyni:o4s with « the most perfect statues in Rome » . The corpus consists. of the following works : 1 ) Laokdon, 2) Ercole (the Commodus) , 3) Apollo

63 In the Carracci Academy at the end of the century, Malvasia tells us that the first method was thought to be the better one : « ( . . . ) l'imitare un solo e un farsi di lui seguace, e l'secondo, che il tor da tutti e sceglier dagli altri, e farsi di esse il giudice e l'caporione » . Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice , ed. G. Zanotti, 2 vol . , Bologna, 1841, I, p. 284.

64 Armenini , 1587, ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, I, 8, p. 60-69 : «e che sono piu intiere ai tempi nostri, e che piu ancora si accostano all perfezzion vera dell'arte » (p. 61) .

6 5 Id. , p. 6 1 : « ( . . . ) i l piu bello dal natural buono » .


(Belvedere) , 4) the Torso grosso (the Belvedere Torso ) , 5) the Cleopatra (Ariadne) , 6) Venus, 7) The River God Nile , all of which were then exhibited in the Vatican Belvedere66• Given this core list of seven exemplars , we can assume that the various parts of each statue could be reassembled to (re) « invent a beautiful and erudite figure » . To Vasari's l ist of antiquities , Armenini added the following : 8) the bronze Marcus Aurelius , 9) the Horse Tamers (of Montecavallo), and 10) the Pasquino . These additions reflect a more inclusive view of the « highest » examples . In addition to sculpture in the round, Armenini mentions reliefs, both medium and low, on which one sees « istorie » such as 1 1 ) the Column of Trajan and 12) the Column of Antoninus. And in an all-inclusive judgment, he mentions entire collections of ancient statues and fragments such as those in 13 ) the Case Della Valle , 14) the Casa dei Massimi as well as 1 5) those on the Campidoglio . Armenini chose those collections that had become repositories for artist-copyists , whose drawings , functioning like pattern books, were widely circulated at the time67•

References to this corpus are visible in Salviati's paintings and drawings68• Among the most obvious sources used is the Horse Tamers , cited in his Conversion of Paul in the Cancelleria. Although reliefs were rarely listed in the standard corpus of antiquities, Salviati's citations include them along with sculpture in the round69 . And even though, in Armenini's list of exemplary

66 Id. , p . 61. For the Hercules see Bober and Rubinstein, 1986, op. cit. supra note 35 , p. 166, no. 132. A similar list with minor differences is given by Vasari (BB, IV, p. S) and by Varchi in his Due Lezzioni.

67 See Bober and Rubinstein, 1986, op. cit. supra note 35, and A. Nesselrath, I libri di disegni di antichita, tentativo di una tipologia, in Memoria dell'antico nell'arte itatiana, III, ed. S. Settis, Turin, 1986, p. 87-147 .

68 The Marcus Aurelius perhaps only in details. The drawing of a Head .of a Bearded Man in Oslo (Najonalgalleriet, Inv. 1996, see C. Monbeig Goguel, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no, 18) reflects the head of the River God in the Vatican, restored in the sixteenth century by either Montorsoli or Michelangelo himself.

69 Drawings were frequenty based on reliefs as well as three-dimensional s tatues . An example is offered in an article by S . Ferino-Pagden, Zwei Zeichnungen nach dem Medici-Kairos , in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XLI, 1997, p. 382-387 . But were we not familiar with the source, it would be difficult to determine from the two drawings that the source was a relief : Florence, GDSU, Inv. 14886 , and Paris, ENSBA, Inv. 260 (FerinoPagden, id. , fig. 1, 2) . Nevertheless, when more than one view exists and when the source is known, we can be reasonably certain that the drawing depends on a statue in the round. In these two drawings, the artists appear concerned with reproducing the pose which requires an accurate rendering of the muscles of the abdomen to create tension. The same relief no doubt provided Salviati with the model for his « Occasio » in the Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Sala delle Udienze frescoes (see A. Coliva, in Francesco Salviati. Af{reschi romani, ed. id. , Milan, 1998, p. 88-99) and also in the Palazzo Vecchio. He would have been aware that


antiquities very few key works were bronze (only the Marcus Aurelius and the colossal fragments are mentioned) , bronze itself was highly prized as a valuable material signifying durability. Certain Roman marbles were commonly recognized as referring to original Greek bronzes . Contrary to the opinions of art historians since Winkelmann, Salviati and his colleagues appear to have been aware of a distinction between Greek and Roman art. Salviati, through his patrons the Grimani in Venice and Cardinal Salviati in Rome, whose collections included notable Greek antiquities, must have considered himself able to distinguish a statue whose origin was Greek from one which was essentially Roman in style 70 • .

This corpus of famous fragments known to the sixteenth century, with some refinements, is cited repeatedly in paintings of the period. The citations appear as ostentatiously as any line of Cicero quoted in a Renaissance dialogue. But visual information about these exemplars did not necessarily depend on first hand acquaintance , s ince the statues were disseminated through engravi ngs , Renaiss ance drawi ng notebo oks , and writ ten descriptions which survived from antiquity7 1 •

The repetition and variation of limbs on a select number of torsos visible in Cinquecento paintings is the result of a desire to reconstruct an ancient figure as a product of its « members » rather than simply as an a priori image. The depiction of the human body as a construct of parts appears to depend, at least in part, on the influence of casting methods and the reuse of their by-products, that is, wax models and gesso casts72• Although Roman marbles were often used as direct replacements as well as models in the restoration of fragments , it was sometimes easier to attach a gesso or stucco copy covered with marble dust to a torso rather than to

the relief was based on Lysippos' Kairos through Alciati. Thus the drawing, while taken from a relief, still refers to the original statue.

70 See P. Pecchiai, Una saliera del Cellini ed altri oggetti preziosi ed antichi posseduti dal cardinal Giovanni Salviati, in Archivi d'Jtalia, XI-XVI, 2-4, p. 1 13 -140 . Cardinal Salviati owned 453 Greek and Latin Medals and coins. See Ph. Costamagna, Le mecenat et la polztique culturelle du cardinal Giovanni Salviati in this volume and the essay by M. Hochmann, Francesco Salviati a Venezia, in Cat. Salviati, 1998, p. 56-60. In contrast to my viewpoint, Hochmann sees Salviati's Venetian experience as remaining marginal with respect to the models he assimilated. I do not , however, mean to suggest that Salviati and his contemporaries were connoisseurs of Greek art, or that their ability to make such distinctions was highly refined and always applied.

71 Bober and Rubenstein, 1 986, op. cit. supra note 35 , Appendix I, p. 451-470 and A . Nesselrath, 1986, op. cit. supra note 67, p. 87-147.

7 2 Casting models, however, should not be confused with preparatory models used for marble sculpting.


replace a missing limb with niarble73• Lost-wax casting permits replication of like statues in bronze, with or without variations, using the master mold taken from an original model 74• Reuse of a basic model with adaptive variations is possible when the « indirect » casting technique is employed. In these cases, the modello in wax or terracotta may be considered the « original » 75• The Roman method of assembling separately cast segmen�s of large scale statues was revived in the Renaissance and its .effects were felt in the conception · of the figure76• I have proposed elsewhere that a connection between the techniques of ancient bronze casting as they were known and practiced by Renaissance artists and the widespread use of ancient fragments as models in Renaissance painting workshops motivated the repetition of similar bodies and their variant forms in the mid-

73 L. Dolcini, Per una storia del restauro delle sculture, Posizioni teoriche fra · XVI e XIX secolo, in OPD Restauro, Quademi dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Resta uro di Firenze. Restauro del Marmo; Opere e Problemi, Florence, 1986 , p . 1 3 . Restoration in the sixteenth century is not as well documented as in later periods. On those by Lorenzetto for the gardens of Cardinal della Valle, see Vasari, BB, IV, p. 307 : « ( . . . ) e di sopra nelle dette nichie pose alcune statue pur antiche e di marmo, le quali sebbene non erano intere per essere quale senza testa quale senza braccia, ed alcuna senza gambe, ed insomma ciascuna con qualche cosa meno, l'accomodo nondimeno benissimo, avendo fatto vi fare a buoni scultori tutto quello che mancano » . On Cellini's restorations see A . Conti, Storia del restauro e della conse111azione delle opere d'arte, Milan, 1988 , p. 3 2-42 .

74 R . E . Stone, Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting in Italy a t the End of the Quattrocento, in Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, 16 , 1982 , p. 87-1 16 and D . Blume, Zur Technik des Bronzegusses in der Renaissance, in Natur und Antike in der Renaissance , exh. cat . , ed. H . Beck and D . Blume, Frankfurt a/M. , Liebieghaus Museum alter Plastik, 1985, p. 18-23 , fig. 1-1 1 .

·

75 R. Stone, 1982, op. cit. supra note 74, p. 94 and sq. At the same time, a cautionary word is in order; Stone (verbal communication, 1997) believes we have « no evidence of indirect casting in Florence » and no surviving casting models from its use. This does not negate the possibility that casts were made from existing bronzes and from wax preparatory models to be used as substitutes for the destroyed anima .

76 The characteristic of casting Roman bronzes in sections and assembling the parts mechanically or by the use of fusion welding was revived in the ·Renaissance. See B. Bearzi, Le fusioni artistiche in bronzo nell'antichita , in La Metallurgia Italiana, 2 , 1949, p. 62-66; E. Formigli et al. , Indagini sulle techniche di esecuzione di un torso bronzeo romano dei Musei Vaticani, in Monumenti m usei r{gallerie Pontificie, Bollettino, 10 , 1990, p. 5-24. Although the attachment of the leg of Holofernes in Donatello's Judith and Holofemes, has been shown not to be ¢ast separately, the cast was made in stages from body parts modelled separately; .see M. Leoni, Considerazioni sulla fonderia d'arte ai tempi di Donatello. Aspetti tetnici delgruppo della Giuditta in Donatello e il restauro della Giuditta, exh. cat . , ed . L Dolcini, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, 1988, p. 54-57. Photo details are in Verrocchio 's Christ and St. Thomas, exh. cat. , ed. L. Dolcini, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993, p. 98.


Cinquecento 77 • I further propose here that the new pictorial maniera is the result of the imitation of sculptural processes as well as sculptural products.

Drawing after a common corpus of models resulted in a figure style which, like casting, utilized a shared set of sculptural components, and thus was intentionally replicable . A style designed to facilitate replication (albeit with variations) could not help but transfer an agreed upon system of proportions whose deviations were equally predictable.

I would now like to offer some examples which demonstrate that this piece-meal construction of the body resulted in more than an « assembly line » approach. The system described by Armenini was not merely a mechanical operation; its products as well as the process carried an implicit signification.

A drawing in Hamburg (fig. 1 1) previously given to Pontormo but possibly by Bronzino, at first glance appears awkward 78• A study of the pose yields the cause of its disjunction. The upper Torso, derives from the ancient crouching Venus type with upraised arms, a statue which Salviati included in the background of his frescos in the Sala dell'Udienza of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, shown as armless and headless (fig. 12) . The lower portion of the body derives from various solutions which restoration brought to this Venus statue; the legs were taken either from variations of the lower limbs of the Venus or, from a variety of standing statues similarly restored in the Cinquecento. These variations enjoyed a wide circulation through prints and small scale replicas in wax and bronze. The division of parts , as seen in a diagram for casting, makes clear how

77 L. Mendelsohn, Replication and Restoration : Ancient Bronze Techniques and the Construction of the Figure in Cinquecento Painting, in The Journal of Roman Archeology (Special Issue, The 13th International Bronze Congress, Harvard University Museums, 1996) , forthcoming 200 1 .

78 Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Inv. 2 1 173 , see Smyth, 1971 , op. cit. supra note 24, note 1 8 , gives this drawing to Bronzino and I am in agreement with him. See J. Cox-Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo. A catalogue Raisonne with Notes on the Paintings, 2 vol. , Cambridge, 1964, I, p. 289, II, no. 314; it also relates to her cat. no. 244, a tondo in the Capponi collection which may also be by Bronzino. This drawing should be connected to Pontormo's black chalk study for Venus in Capricorn , Paris, musee du Louvre, departement des Arts grafiques, Inv. 1 0396, discussed in the addenda to J. Cox-Rearick, id, with Addenda and corrigenda, New York, 1981 , p. 371 , pl. 10. This figure, in which Cox-Rearick sees Pontormo as the inventor of the vertical figura serpentinata , lies behind the figure of Venus in Bronzino's London Allegory of Love. See also C. Monbeig Goguel, I Disegni dei Maestri, Il Manierismo Fiorentino , Milan, 1983, p. 7, pl. III.


Fig. 1 1 - Bronzino (attributed to), Female Allegory Study for the Careggi Loggia . Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Inv. 2 1 173 .

Fig. 12 - Francesco Salviati, Story of Camillus (detail of the background) . Florence, Palazzo Vecchio.


the process of fragmentation influenced the variations of pose employed by painters (fig. 13) 79 •

How was a figure such as this used by Bronzino and others, and in particular by Salvia ti ? Consider the figure of Venus giving arms to Aneas enthroned below her in the Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani80• Seen in conjunction with the female figure in a similar pose in Salviati's Birth of St. John in San Giovanni Decollato81 and with his drawing for a Mazza Liturgica82, it is apparent that they all derive from the same female torso.

Not only representations of Venus owe something to this pose. A similar process is at work in representations by Salviati of PallasPrudence and Occasio 83• A figure of Occasio painted by Allori in Poggio a Caiano, was similarly combined with a symmetrically paired figure of Pallas 84 • Both artists knew that Occasio was a Lysippan statue. This knowledge was disseminated in Alciati's Emblemata which Salviati, in close contact with the author, surely knew85• Alciati's texts derive from Greek epigrams and Roman inscriptions 86 • What is significant for painters is that in the

7 9 The bronze statuette used here is by Antico. Use of the Crouching Venus as a variable model begins early in the Cinquecento. A. Natali (La Bibbia in Bottega, le scritture, l 'antico, l 'occasione, Florence, n. d . , p . 78, fig. 2, 4, and p. 79, fig. 7) has suggested that a male torso in a pose similar to the Crouching Venus, now in the Glyptothek, Munich, was similarly utilized in paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael .

so Illustrated in A-f{reschi romani . . . cit. supra note 39, p. 85 . 81 See C. Monbeig Goguel, in Affreschi romani . . . cit. supra note 39, ill. p. 32 . 82 Cat. Salviati, 1998, fig. 8, p. 38 . See also similar figures in the drawings of

others, for example Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta's Death of Adonis fresco, Monterotondo (Roma), Palazzo Comunale, illustrated in Affreschi Romani . . . cit. supra note 39 , p. 12 .

8 3 In the Palazzo Vecchio decorations, for example. See Cat. Salviati, 1998, no . 68, p. 199, the engraving 9f Time and Fortuna (?) persecuting a man , and the relevant text by A. Nova. See also the Virtues flanking the papal tiara in the fresco depicting Paul III enthroned, Palazzo Farnese, in Affreschi romani . . . cit. supra note 39, ill . p . 85 .

84 See E. Schwarzenberg and B . Paolozzi Strozzi, Norzia o la costan te Fortuna : la lunetta di Alessandro Allori a Poggio a Caiano , in Kunst des Cinquecento in der Toskana. Italienische Forschungen herausgegeben vom Kunsthistorischen lnstitut in Florenz, ed. M. Cammerer, XVII, Munich, 1992, p. 197-206, pl. I , III.

85 Andreas Alciati, Emblemata, Augsburg, Henri Steyner, 1 53 1 (ed. princeps) . See illustrations to the edition of 1558 in the reprint Toutes les emblemes, Lille, 1989, where Occasio is placed opposite the emblem of Prudence (Pallas) and Mercury (Ars) ; see also M. Schlitt, Francesco Salviati and the Rhetoric of Style, Ph. D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1991 .

86 An antiquarian himself, Alciati illustrated a text on Milanese monuments and their inscriptions, known only in manuscript form.

- --- -- -�


Fig. 13 - Pier Jacopo Alari - Buonacolsi, called Antico, Small Bronze Demonstration Model. Frankfort/Main, Stadtische Galerie Liebighaus.


illustrations to the Emblemata, the Greek statues mentioned in the epigrams appear as they were known to the Renaissance, that is, in the form of contemporary Roman copies . The moral messages contained in the motti attached to Alciati's illustrations became permanently linked to the memory of these statues . In the case of Occasio , the epigramatic description of the Lysippan statue has been encoded in the image. In this way, prototypes for a canon of important statues were transmitted in printed texts, not only as exempla of ancient beauty but also as moral exemplars . Besides Alciati, ancient writers (as remarked in other papers presented in the Salviati symposium) were important for the perpetuation of personifications . These moralized statues with their references to allegorical subjects should be included in the list of Armenini's canonical corpus.

Armenini refers to three .contemporary artists whose works may be used as models : Michelangelo, Bandinelli, and Guiglielmo of Milan (Guglielmo della Porta ?) ; he also mentions the many drawings sold after Perino's death and subsequently used for copying87• Of all possible models, the best, advised Armenini, was Michelangelo who, however, was rarely imitated well 88• Pontormo, an early practitioner of the technique of imitating Michelangelo, passed it on to his student Bronzino. It is clear, however, that the dependence of both artists on Michelangelo did not hinder the growth of their own styles since many of their borrowings have long gone unnoticed.

Hands extracted or excerpted from Michelangelo's works are rotated and re-attached to the torsos in portraits by Bronzino (as in the Portrait of a Youth in the Uffizi) and a similar technique is apparent in portraits by Pontormo, Rosso, and Salviati . As we know, drawings after Michelangelo's statues circulated independently of the models from which they derived, becoming accepted substitutes for those antique sources89•

87 Armenini, ed. princeps cit. supra note 10, I, 8 , p. 64 : « ( . . . ) fra i tanti, Ii molti disegni che ci rimase di Perino dopo la sua morte, i quali quando io era in Roma furono comperati tutti ( . . . )» (1556). Armenini (id. , p. 65) also records the use of drawings taken from bronze medals and printed illustrations : « ( . . . ) Ii ritraeva certi medaglioni di bronzo antichi, e d'oro con l'acquarello di grandezza d'un palmo, i quali ritratti con i loro riversi, esso poi li mandava ai Fuccheri richissimi mercanti d'Anversa (. . . ) ridotti prima quelli ad uso di bellissimi libri ( . . . ) » .

88 Armenini, ed. Barocchi. cit. supra note · 23 , II, p. 1591 and sq, note 4 on the dangers of imitating Michelangelo.

89 See Ph. Costamagna, L'etude d'apres !es maftres et le role de la copie dans la formation des artistes a Florence au XVI• siecle , in Disegno, actes du colloque (Rennes, musee des Beaux-Arts, 9-10 novembre 199n l . 'R PnnP" 1 00 1 � c:: 1 C:: A "' "'


Michelangelesque poses found in the works of other artists also turn up in works by Salviati. But figures by Salviati are less easily divisible into separate segments than those of Bronzino or Vasari. In Salviati's figures, indeed in his compositions as a whole, the smooth continuity of the quoted members is the end result of harmonizing his combined sources beneath an ornamental linear screen90•

Salviati's hands, while often similar to those of Michelangelo, differ from them in important ways. I suggest that this is because their form derives primarily from those works believed to be certifiably Greek or copies of Greek, rather than Roman statues . Perhaps his taste was due to his exposure to such statues in Venice when he worked in the Grimani Palace ; the Grimani collection was publicly accessible from the late 1530s91 • The fingers of Salviati's figures are longer, thinner, and tipped at ends, just as we find them in Greek bronzes. A bronze statue known as the Betende Knaben in the Antikensammlung im Pergamonmuseum (Berlin, Staatliche Museen) , or any number of similar Greek bronzes, can illustrate this point, although Roman marble sculptors sometimes also copied the longer Greek fingers92 • The hands in Salviati's drawing of Christ and St. Thomas (fig .. 14 ) contain similarly treated, segmented fingers93 • The painting for which this drawing is preparatory, the Incredulity of St. Thomas now in the Louvre, was painted in 1 544-154594• The same type of hand also appears in a later drawing by Il Poppi in the Uffizi where it testifies to the use of a three-dimensional model (fig. 15)95 •

9 0 In the treatment of the hands, for example, the intervention of Dilrer's engraving of the Resurrection of Christ with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, dated 1 5 1 1 , was surely influential for Pontormo's Capponi Entombment, as it may also have been for Michelangelo's late sculpture and ultimately for Salviati. The hand of the mourner from Bronzino's Deposition for the Chapel of Eleonora of Toledo (Florence, Palazzo Vecchio), depends on the left hand of Michelangelo's David, a hand quoted in numerous other Florentine paintings. in Salviati's works, similar references are often submerged in the overall effect of the composition.

91 M. Perry, The Statuario Publico of the Venetian Republic, in Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell'Arte, 8 , 1972, p. 75-253 .

92 The Berlin statue came to Venice in the 1 6th century from Rhodes. A GaitJs or Lucius Caesar (?) bronze, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, Inv. 1914 , illustrates another typical Greek hand position.

93 Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Inv. FC 125612. Pen and brown ink, see C. Monbeig Goguel, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no. 38. The same hand appears in numerous other drawings, and paintings, as well as engravings after Salviati.

94 C. Monbeig Goguel, Cat. Salviati, 1 998, no. 36 . 9 5 Florence, GDSU, Inv. 6407 F , one o f a group o f pages that probably once

belonged to a notebook; see A. Giovannetti, Francesco Morandini detto fl Poppi, I disegni, I dipinti di Poppi e Castiglion Fiorentino , exh. cat . , Poppi, Liceo Scientifico Statale « G. Galilei » , 1991 , no. 3, p. 50.


Fig. 14 - Francesco Salviati, Christ and St. Thomas. Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Inv. FC 125612.


Fig. 15 - Francesco Morandini, detto Il Poppi, Study of an open hand. Florence, GDSU, Inv. 6407 F.

Salvia ti's illustration of anatomical books must have influenced his approach to hands96• I believe these stylistic influences also affected Bronzino's painting, for example in the scorziato figure of St. Bartholomew from a panel fragment once in Pisa and now in the collection of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (fig. 16) 97 • By the

96 See his drawing of the skeleton of two hands, London, British Museum, C. Monbeig Goguel, Le dessin chez Francesco Salviati , in Cat. Salviati, 1998, p. 40, fig. 1 1.

97 Bronzino, St. Bartholomew (fragment from Pisa Cathedral Altarpiece), Rome, Accademia di San Luca. It should be noted that Salviati's drawings have at

\ [


Fig. 16 - Bronzino, St. Bartholomew (fragment of the Pisa Altarpiece) . Rome, Accademia di San Luca.


1 5 7 0 s , Arm enin i ' s fe l l ow p aint ers w ere s e ek ing greater authentication of bodily perfection through the study of anatomy. Later figure styles suggest that modelli which at mid-century implied perfection because of their imitation of antiquity were replaced by new models. These models responded more directly to a Counterreformation demand for greater « truth to nature » . To accomplish this , some artists turned to Greek bronzes and anatomical accuracy and away from Roman marbles98•

In early Roman mannerist paintings and more so in the later Florentine maniera, formulaic patterns marked by a heightened exactitude of detail in the hair and the extremities, what Vasari calls in the Proemio « minuzie dei fini » , abound99• The citation from the Proemio to part three of the Lives follows Vasari' s reference to Verrocchio's restoration of an antique Marsyas for the Medici and is part of a contrast he makes between the imitation of antiquity in his own day and earlier Quattrocento practitioners. The achievement of « ( . . . ) una certa bellezza contenuta in ogni minima cosa » was what made sixteenth century artists superior to their predecessors 100• As we have said, for Vasari, beauty is in the details. By viewing detail as ornament, Vasari forged a link between an emphasis on repetition and the application of detail in bella maniera . For Alberti, ornament

times been mistaken for those of Bronzino, see P. Joannides, Drawings by Francesco Salviati and Daniele da Volterra : Additions and Subtractions, in Master Drawings , :XXXII, 1 994, p. 230-251 , p. 241 , fig. 14. The drawing proposed depends on one by Michelangelo in the Casa Buonarroti which A. Natali (op. cit. supra note 79, p . 88, fig. 20-2 1 ) has convincingly suggested is based on a statue of the Dying Alexander in the Uffizi.

98 Salviati's more calligraphic, ornamental line may have been reinforced by his exposure to manuscript illuminations, in particular the Byzantine codices that existed in numerous copies in Rome, Milan and in the Paris collection of Fran<;:ois I. I am thinking specifically of the Paris Psalter which entered the King's collection after he acquired a large group of Greek manuscripts from Milan in the mid-sixteenth century. I believe the Psalters, illustrating the psalms and stories of David, may account for compositional elements and details found in some of Salviati's representations of related subjects , but this is material for another paper. Compare, for example, Paris Psalter, David and the Muse Melodia to Salviati's drawing of Christ borne by Angels appearing to saint Thomas, Louvre, departement des Arts graphiques, Inv. 1644, see C. Monbeig Goguel, Cat. Salviati, 1998, no. 40.

· ·

99 See Vasari, BB, IV, p . 5 : « ( . . . ) mancando loro pure lina fine et una estrema perfezzione ne' piedi, mani, capegli, barbe, ancora che il tutto delle membra sia accordato con l'antico et abbia una certa corrispondenza giusta nelle misure ; che s'eglino avessino avuto quelle minuzie dei fini che sono la perfezione et il fiore dell'arte, arebbono avuto ancora una gagliardezza risoluta nell' opere loro ( . . . ) » .

1 00 Vasari BB, IV, p . 5 (italics mine). This phrase appears in both editions of the Life.


which gives grace and pleasure was the catalyst for resolving the parts into a harmonious whole101 :

( . . . ) just as the head, foot, and indeed any m ember must correspond to each other and to all the rest of the body in an animal , so i n a building and especially a temple, the parts of the whole body must be so composed that they all correspond one to another and any one, taken individually, m ay provide the dimensions o f all the rest102•

Detail and repetition, not coincidentally, are basic to both bronze work and rhetorical ornament103 • In Book VIII, 3, of the Institutiones Oratoria , Quintilian speaks of ornament as part of the art of arrangement and focuses on vocabulary, that is, words, word order, and their meanings . The arrangement of a sentence or a paragraph is compared to the arrangement of the human body. Ornament (the graceful arrangement of words) is a means of achieving eloquence. By giving the audience pleasure, ornament furthers the case being made by the orator, that is, his meaning or intention. While ornament includes « grazia » and « diligenza » (both qualities attributed to Salvia ti) , Quintilian notes that « The ornate is something that goes beyond what is merely lucid and acceptable » 104• Ornament enables us to form a mental picture of a described scene.

1 0 1 Alberti' s discussion of ornament is combined with that of beauty in the De Re Aedificatoria , where he says « Ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty. From this it follows ( . . . ) that beauty is some inherent property, to be found suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful ; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional » [VI, 2, p. 93-94], Leon Battista Alberti , On the Art of Building in Ten Books , translated by J. Rykwert, N. Leach and R. Tavernor, Cambridge, London, 1988 , p . 1 5 5 - 1 5 7 and sq. ) . Alberti's discussion of ornament is for the most part firmly tied to architecture and, in particular, wall surface. His discussion of plaster relief, recommending flat relief for ceilings and higher relief for walls, brings to mind some of the relief-like effects we see in Salviati's frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, for example, the formula of layering marching figures or soldiers to suggest depth but which creates instead a pattern that reinforces the wall surface, emphasizing line rather than space. It is surely not coincidental that Chapter 6, on ornament, includes a recapitulation of the earlier discussion in Book I of « compartition» . In Book I, « compartition» or compartmentalization is the division of a site into smaller units. In Book VI , Alberti relates this to Vitruvian divisions of the whole into smaller units «which articulate it and integrate the parts by composing all the lines and angles into a harmonious work ( . . . ) » Alberti, id. , I, 9, fol. 13 verso-1 5 recto, p . 23-24.

1 0 2 Alberti , id. , VII, 5, fol. 1 16 recto-verso, p. 199, following Vitruvius' Ten Books, 3 . 1 . 1 . and 9, see Vitruvius on Architecture , trans. F. Granger, Suffolk, 1 998, p. 1 59-16 1 . Smyth, op. cit. supra note 5 , note 162, linked the two to Vasari and to maniera painting through the word regola .

103 The identification of Mannerism with an ornamental or decorative style is most strongly argued by J. Shearman, Mannerism, Harmonsworth, 1967.

1 04 « First, we must form a clear conception of what we wish to say, secondly


Its ability to achieve « Vivid illustration » can be equated with Erasmus' energeia and Aristotle's vivacita , terms which indicate that an event is « impressed » into our «vision » , that is, imprinted into the memory. All the forms of speech that help to achieve this goal, eg. allegory, metaphor, etc, constitute ornament for Quintilian. Like a wordy description, an accumulation of details or ornament can heighten the effect of a painting.

For Quintilian, the result of an intense accumulation of detail should not be excessive but should exhibit « tasteful elegance » . If we equate Salviati's eloquent line with this oratorical definition of ornament, each body part can be seen as a word in the recounted epic or oration 105 • His calligraphic line, an accumulation of detail, becomes the binding element that overlays and unites the individual parts , privileging the surface and consequently « imprinting » or pressing the idea sharply into our minds .

The tactile impressions of sculpture, when transmuted into a pictorial mode, retain the associations they draw from antiquity. As a form of visual intertextuality, they recall the past to the viewer, reinforcing it through repetition. Previously perceived or described statues are actively recalled when only a fragment is seen and these associations recombine in a new context . Recycling, effected through drawings, is a means of transposing their beauty. The reassemblage of lost parts in a graceful and proportionate manner in pa-i-n-tin-g, accomplished through the prior stage of drawing from fragments, is the conduit for the dissemination or propagation of beauty. It is the very process of transferal that defined la bella maniera for Salviati and his colleagues .

Leatrice MENDELSOHN

give this adequate expression, and thirdly, lend it additional brilliance » . Quintilian calls the process « embellishment» . (Inst. Or. , VIII, III, 61and sq.) .

105 The comparison between figures and rhetorical speech was drawn in two seminal articles by D. Summers. Contrapposto : Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art, in The Art Bulletin, LIX, 1977, p. 336-3 6 1 and id. , Maniera and Movement : The Figura Serpentinata, in The Art Quarterly, XXXV, 1972, p. 269-301 .

The Sum of the Parts: Recycling Antiquities in the Maniera Workshops of Salviati and his Colleagues

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