{"id":84863,"date":"2019-11-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/florences-missing-link\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T09:05:59","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:05:59","slug":"florences-missing-link","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/florences-missing-link\/","title":{"rendered":"Florence\u2019s missing link"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wan<\/span>t to be depressed? Read up on Florence in the fifteenth century. It\u2019s not just the overabundance of outsized talent. At one time or another, centers like Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, and New York have boasted comparable rosters. It\u2019s the unmatched level of ambition, innovation, curiosity, self-discipline, and imagination its denizens brought to bear in remaking their world. Some of their endeavors\u2014Brunelleschi lofting a dome over the cathedral without centering, for example\u2014were the moonshots of their day, efforts that involved not just realizing a vision but inventing, every step of the way, the means of doing so. They revered their classical heritage, seeing the past as a bottomless wellspring of instruction. Early on, Brunelleschi and Donatello moved to Rome to study, respectively, ruins and statuary, then used that knowledge to revolutionize architecture and sculpture upon returning to Florence a couple of years later. But the past was also the standard against which such figures measured their achievements. In his Lives<\/span>, the highest praise Giorgio Vasari can bestow is to say someone or something \u201csurpassed the ancients.\u201d (Unless you were Michelangelo, in which case you had gone one better and \u201cvanquished\u201d them.) Finally, they refined and elevated narrative art, purging it of lingering Gothic conventions and stylizations to forge a naturalism of such emotional and psychological immediacy that we sometimes feel the artists are speaking as much about their own experiences as about the scriptures. How small our era feels by comparison.<\/p>\n

This fall, the Frick Collection has offered a window into this remarkable world with its exhibition \u201cBertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence,\u201d a small gem of a show that resuscitates a pivotal yet all-but-unknown figure and at the same time offers an immersion in some of the less familiar byways of the sculpture of the time.1<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Until now Bertoldo (ca<\/span>. 1440\u201391) has been one of the big question marks of art history. Reputationally, he has come down to us as an essential link in the great chain of Renaissance sculptors. He stands between Donatello in the fifteenth century, whose student and assistant he was, and Michelangelo in the sixteenth, to whom he gave early instruction in his capacity as live-in sculptor to Lorenzo de\u2019 Medici (the Magnificent) and curator of his garden of antiquities, where a number of young artists of talent were invited to school themselves in sculpture under Bertoldo\u2019s guidance.<\/p>\n

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Bertoldo di Giovanni, <\/em>Shield Bearer, <\/em>ca. 1470\u201380, Gilt bronze, The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Yet in many respects he has been the missing<\/span> link. As artists tend to, Michelangelo portrayed himself as sui generis<\/span>, a talent so supreme and original it owed no debts to others. As a result, early biographers such as Vasari and Ascanio Condivi either substantially downplayed Bertoldo\u2019s role in his formation, or wrote him out of the story altogether. An added problem was the lack of a reliable corpus of sculptures. Only four works could reliably be attributed to Bertoldo: two reliefs, a Crucifixion<\/span> from the 1470s and Battle<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1480\u201385); a mythological subject, Bellerophon Taming Pegasus<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1480\u201382); and a medal commemorating Sultan Mehemed II<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1480). It was not until the nineteenth century that he was rediscovered by scholars and a larger body of work identified, and not until the 1990s that the first monograph was published, by the former Metropolitan Museum curator James David Draper, to whom this exhibition is dedicated. Henry Clay Frick purchased the classically inspired Hercules-like Shield Bearer<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1470\u201380), the only work of Bertoldo\u2019s outside Europe. The occasion for the show, which has been organized by the Frick curators Aimee Ng, Alexander J. Noelle, and Xavier F. Salomon, as well as the Frick conservator Julia Day, is the desire to learn more about this work (it has never been previously exhibited) and, thereby, Bertoldo himself.<\/p>\n

Thi<\/span>s they have done with resounding success, securely establishing and clarifying his role. \u201cHistory comes alive\u201d is an overused phrase, but it applies here, owing to the presence of two remarkable works which make t<\/span>he case for Bertoldo as someone who, as Noelle writes in the catalogue, \u201cfacilitated an almost hereditary transfer of creative genius between the great sculptors of the Early and High Renaissance.\u201d<\/span> At one end of the aesthetic spectrum is the life-sized, polychromed, wood-and-gesso St. Jerome<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1465\u201366). This is jointly attributed to Donatello and Bertoldo, though it is thought to have been a commission originally awarded to the former but executed by the latter. It shows the emaciated saint naked and mortifying himself with a stone, blood dripping down his torso. His head, with its matted gray hair and beard, turns upward and to his left as if he\u2019s in a state of ecstasy, the result of meditating on a now-missing crucifix. He seems slightly unsteady on his feet, as if made delirious by his physical privations, religious visions, or both. This is Bertoldo at his most Donatellesque. He and other Florentine sculptors in the fifteenth century would sometimes allow a fold of drapery or portion of a figure to protrude beyond the confines of a sculpture\u2019s base or enclosing niche to connect it more vividly with the viewer\u2019s world and experience. Donatello had one further method. As he did in his wooden Mary Magdalene<\/span> (1454), he would make some works so physically stark and psychologically raw that the viewer was instantly caught in their grip and had no choice but to participate fully in their implied narrative. This is what Bertoldo has done with St. Jerome<\/span>. We are mesmerized by this figure, at once appalled and curiously fascinated by his physical state and marveling at how such a ruined specimen could wear such an expression of ecstasy and wonder.<\/p>\n

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Attributed to Donatello and Bertoldo di Giovanni<\/em>, <\/em>St. Jerome, <\/em>ca. 1465\u201366, Wood, gesso, and paint, Pinacoteca Comunale, Faenza.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

At the other end of the spectrum is Battle<\/span>. A relief roughly eighteen inches tall by three feet wide, it is aptly described in the catalogue as a scene \u201cof organized chaos.\u201d Nude and semi-nude, with classical proportions and musculature, twenty-five warriors, some on horseback, battle each other without clear lines dividing friend and foe. What is striking here isn\u2019t so much the military drama as the figures. In the 1960s Richard Serra compiled his famous \u201cVerb List\u201d of all the actions he associated with art-making. One could create a similar inventory here of positions and postures of the figure in vigorous motion: to crouch, bend, twist, reach, stretch, fling, strike, recoil, lean, swing, lunge, and so on.<\/p>\n

Battle<\/span> is based on an ancient Roman sarcophagus in Pisa. But Bertoldo has gone beyond merely copying, animated, it would seem, by the desire to transcend the details of his subject and make the figure an independently expressive entity. In this sense, Battle<\/span> is Bertoldo\u2019s most proto-Michelangelesque work, nothing less than an academy for the study of the human body in action. No surprise that it is credited with influencing one of Michelangelo\u2019s earliest efforts, a relief, The Battle of the Centaurs<\/span> (1491\u201392). (Seeing Bertoldo\u2019s Battle<\/span> makes it more impossible than ever to accept the simpering Peter Pan figure, from around the same time on loan to the Metropolitan Museum and now known as Cupid<\/span>, as being by the hand of Michelangelo.) There\u2019s a straight and uninterrupted line from Bertoldo\u2019s Battle<\/span> to the Sistine ceiling. But let us not sell Bertoldo short by subordinating him to Michelangelo. Battle<\/span> is a masterwork in its own right, a riveting work of art that is hard to quit.<\/p>\n

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Bertoldo di Giovanni, <\/em>Battle, <\/em>ca. 1480\u201385, Bronze, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cBer<\/span>toldo\u201d is a small show of only around twenty works, almost all his extant oeuvre. It is also one likely to come as a surprise to those who think of the Renaissance solely in terms of monumental art\u2014large fresco cycles and supersized statuary. St. Jerome<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1465\u201366) is the only life-sized sculpture. In the main, Bertoldo was what you might call a cabinet artist, a maker of small-scale objects for individual delectation: commemorative medallions, small-scale reliefs for private devotions, and table-top sculptures. Anyone who thinks large is a prerequisite for monumental, however, need only look at Bellerophon<\/span>, a marvel of competing energies as man and beast battle for supremacy. Such works also offer some of the most exquisite, refined pleasures to be found in the art of the Renaissance or almost any other period. Another equestrian sculpture, the highly articulated and richly embellished Hercules on Horseback<\/span> (1470\u201375), shows the ancient hero seated atop a prancing horse as he turns to look behind him. It\u2019s a pity that visitors can only experience it visually, for, as the catalogue tells us, the tactile dimension was just as important in appreciating such works\u2014they were meant to be picked up and handled. And what a frisson for the fingertips this one would have provided with its myriad surface textures: the smooth musculature of the horse; the knotty business end of Hercules\u2019 club; the furry mane of the lion skin that drapes him.<\/p>\n

The Frick deserves a lot of credit for organizing this exhibition on such a worthy but undeniably niche subject, especially when, in terms of scholarly research, catalogue production, borrowing, and display arrangements, it was surely a huge investment for an institution of its size. Yet if there is a flaw to what is otherwise a judicious treasure of an exhibition, it is the sense we get that for all the considerable and necessary focus on contextualization\u2014clarifying chronologies, attributions, personal and professional relationships\u2014we are missing out on the details of Bertoldo\u2019s artistic evolution, particularly his relationship to Donatello. It\u2019s a trajectory that appears to have been both effortful and inspired.<\/p>\n

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Bertoldo di Giovanni, <\/em>Hercules on Horseback, <\/em>ca. 1470\u201375, Bronze, Galleria Estense, Modena.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As works such as St. Jerome<\/span> and Bellerophon<\/span> indicate, Bertoldo was an accomplished sculptor in three dimensions. He was equally good at medallions, such as the one he designed, shown here, to commemorate the Medici survival of the Pazzi Conspiracy, the 1478 effort to overthrow Lorenzo and drive the family from Florence. Yet possibly because of his success in this last area, it seems to have taken him a little longer to master the kind of narrative relief of which Donatello became the supreme exemplar in the Renaissance. When he did, however, the results were spectacular.<\/p>\n

The difficulties Bertoldo encountered can be seen in the plaque Virgin and Child with Angels<\/span> (ca<\/span>. 1470). In his reliefs, Donatello used barrel vaults and other monumental architectural forms to create a fictive space within which his dramas played out. Bertoldo does the same thing here, the vault being visible at the top of the relief. But Mary and the attendant figures are way over-scaled in relation to the architecture and don\u2019t so much inhabit it as stand in front of it, filling the entire field in a way that suggests Bertoldo\u2019s source was medieval ivories (such as the \u201cArchangel Michael\u201d ivory in the British Museum) in which there is a similar compositional approach. (These had come to central Italy from France in the late Middle Ages, helping to spark the sculptural revolution of the Pisani, so they could have been known to the artist.) Bertoldo here seems to be caught between two aesthetic realms: on the one hand the medallion, where legibility demanded a clear-cut figure\u2013ground relationship; and on the other the Donatellesque relief, which depended for its effects on dissolving the ground to achieve pictorial illusion.<\/p>\n

But it didn\u2019t take him long to overcome this problem, because in the slightly later (and, at about two feet square, considerably larger) Crucifixion<\/span> (1470s) we have one of the most remarkable and ambitious reliefs of the Renaissance. In the foreground, Mary and seven other grieving, gesticulating figures form a frieze that runs across the bottom third of the composition. They look up at the dead Christ in the center, flanked by the two thieves set against a cloud-flecked sky that fills the remaining two-thirds of the scene. We see the thieves from the side, their crosses having been placed perpendicular to the picture plane. The overall effect is of an event taking place out-of-doors in an expansive, even atmospheric space. Bertoldo achieves this illusion by the contrast between the foreground frieze and the clouds in the rear, the turned crosses that lead our eye into the space opened up between these two markers, and the gesticulating impenitent thief at the right, who animates it.<\/p>\n

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Bertoldo di Giovanni, <\/em>Crucifixion, 1470s, Bronze, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

There is nothing like this in Donatello, at least not in bronze, and no wonder. He had pioneered the atmospheric relief with his St. George and the Dragon<\/span> (1416) on the exterior of Orsanmichele in Florence, but using marble, a material whose receptivity to light permits a sculptor to achieve a play of optical and luminescent effects. Bronze, which reflects light, often harshly, does not, which, one suspects, is why in his bronze reliefs Donatello attempted no such thing. Instead, the field is filled top-to-bottom, edge-to-edge with visual incident, and space is created with a multiplicity of orthogonals.<\/p>\n

Wha<\/span>t Bertoldo has done in his Crucifixion<\/span>, then, is bold indeed. And since there is no precedent for it in sculpture, one imagines he must have been inspired by the painters of his time, most likely Fra Angelico or Verrocchio, two pioneers of deep, atmospheric space. With works like this, Bertoldo emerges from this show not just as the missing link, but as a Renaissance sculptor of the first rank.<\/p>\n

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1<\/a> \u201cBertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence\u201d opened at the Frick Collection, New York, on September 18, 2019, and remains on view through January 12, 2020.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On \u201cBertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence\u201d at the Frick Collection.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1312,"featured_media":132116,"template":"","tags":[1350,1671,708,833,1239],"department_id":[563],"issue":[2910],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":13,"value_formatted":13,"value":"13","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Bertoldo di Giovani, <\/i>Shield Bearer (Both), <\/i>ca. 1470\u201380, Gilded Bronze. 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