Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini: Sculptors' Drawings from Renaissance Italy (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)

This is the catalogue accompanying the small but exquisite and delightfully eclectic exhibition of the same name at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from October 2014 until January 2015. The work presented is mostly from Central Italy and covers a bit more than 200 years, from Jacopo della Quercia in the early quattrocento to Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the mid-seicento, i.e., roughly from the earlier Renaissance to the Baroque. Although Donatello, Michelangelo and Cellini star in the title and are certainly the most famous of the artists in the exhibition, others also figure prominently, including Giambologna, Andrea del Verrocchio, Antonio del Pollaiuolo and more of comparable stature, not the least of whom is Baccio Bandinelli, who is credited with inspiring the whole project: one of the Gardner's most celebrated paintings is Bandinelli's self-portrait from around 1545 (the cover image is a detail), and the question that spurred the exhibition is: If Bandinelli is such a famous sculptor, why does he paint himself pointing to a drawing of one of his projects, rather than to the statue itself (the famous "Hercules and Cacus" group erected in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1534)? The answer to that question turns out to be fascinating, complex and involving practical issues of professional and social stature, political and family connections and economic and market conditions, as well as more theoretical matters like manual vs. mental occupations and, centrally, the "paragone" (Italian for "comparison"), i.e., the ongoing debate about the relative merits of sculpture vs. the graphic arts of drawing and painting ("disegno"). These and related topics are addressed in five scholarly essays, beginning with "Why did Sculptors Draw?", a general and introductory piece by Michael W. Cole, a professor of art history at Columbia University, who has written extensively on Italian Renaissance art and who co-curated the exhibition and edited the catalogue. He begins with Giorgio Vasari's contention in the 1568 "Lives of the Artists" that drawing is necessary to painters but not to sculptors, and he examines, under such rubrics as "installation," "mobility," and "annotation," why that may not be so true as Vasari thought, and why drawing is valuable and sometimes even necessary to sculptors. The other contributors are also distinguished art historians and/or senior curators at the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Hartford Athenaeum, and the topics they discuss include goldsmiths and design, drawings of sculptor-architects, and the sculptor-draftsman as a motif in portraiture. Although all the essays are informative and authoritative (and meticulously annotated), I would point particularly to "'Disegno' as 'Ritratto'" by Linda Wolk-Simon, a former curator of prints and drawings at the Met, as an especially useful introduction to Bandinelli and his drawing that clearly articulates this painter-sculptor's seminal role in the discussion. Although there is no list of contributors, it is clear from the credits that at least thirty institutions worldwide have lent artworks, including, wherever possible, three-dimensional objects relating to the drawings featured, e.g. a "bozzetto" (a small, preparatory model in wax, clay, or, as in this case, terra-cotta) of Michelangelo that is exhibited for the first time in this country, and, as Prof. Cole states in his foreword, more objects by Benvenuto Cellini than have ever before been exhibited together outside Italy. These are clearly among the highlights of the show: to see the 1545 drawing of the "Satyr" (from the National Gallery, Washington) next to the small bronze cast of it Cellini did (from the Getty) in preparation of a larger group for King François I's retreat at Fontainebleau, or the 1554 drawing "Mourning Woman" (the Louvre) next to the low bronze relief "Perseus and Andromeda" (the Bargello, Florence) is a remarkable experience and is made all the more satisfying by the intimate ambiance of the small Hostetter Gallery in the Museum's new Renzo Piano wing. Since this is the first exhibition devoted specifically to the drawing practices of sculptors, the catalogue constitutes a major contribution to the literature on Italian Renaissance art. The forty-seven catalogue entries are excellently reproduced, mostly in full-page format, and are accompanied by seventy-five companion illustrations and several chapter frontispieces that provide detail blow-ups of selected works. Each work receives extensive signed commentary by one or more of the twenty-five experts the curators have assembled and is provided with provenance, a specialized bibliography, and thorough documentation. The up-to-date and authoritative nature of the scholarship is indicated by several corrections to the existing research: Carmen C. Bambach, a curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum, here accepts Michelangelo's important "Project for a wall-tomb of Pope Julius II" as autograph without question and redates it to c.1505-06, and she re-orders the sequence of execution of his 1523-26 drawings "Torso of a nude Venus." Similarly, the celebrated "Portrait of Giambologna in His Studio" (c. 1585-88) in the National Gallery of Scotland, generally attributed by the scholarship to the Bolognese painter Bartolomeo Passarotti, is here given, on excellent grounds, to Pieter de Witte (called "Candid") of Bruges in an entry by the German scholar Heiko Damm. The high level of scholarship is reflected also in the excellent fifteen-page selected general bibliography (to 2014). But one does not have to be a scholar to benefit from this catalogue; the texts are all easily accessible to an interested amateur; the reproductions are superb; the design and layout are elegant and the printing is beautifully done, all making for a volume as visually enjoyable as it is intellectually informative. Highly recommended.

Excellent. There are few books out there on drawings by and for sculptors. Wonderfully written and illustrated. I would recommend it.