{"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