This volume of essays presents papers given at a conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2010, as part of the Robert H Smith Renaissance Sculpture Programme. The book is divided into eight sections, comprising seventeen essays, mostly by established scholars. The sections are entitled ‘Collecting and Collections’, ‘Framing Sculpture’, ‘Portraiture’, ‘Sculptors and their Workshops’, ‘Northern Europe’, ‘Studying Bronzes – Different Approaches’, ‘Florence’ and ‘Venice and the Veneto’. The quality of the illustrations is generally outstanding and the layout is one that makes the book particularly easy to use.
Some essays refer to pieces in the V&A’s own collection, but this is by no means the principal focus and, in several instances, comparisons are instructively made between objects in the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance galleries with works elsewhere, and there is even, in the case of Volker Krahn’s intriguing contribution on Wilhelm von Bode, a comparison with a work which does not appear to survive and is known only from photographs.
Appropriately, the first image is that of the late Mr Smith, prefacing Cyril Humphris’s essay on this generous philanthropist as a collector, in particular of small bronzes. His support of technical analysis of bronzes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, has borne fruit in the revelations discussed here by Shelley Sturman and Dylan Smith. Continuing the theme of collections, Peta Motture writes about research carried out for the new galleries at the V&A, highlighting important new evidence discovered about Bartolomeo Bon’s Madonna della Misericordia (c 1440–1) and, on the other hand, the unresolved questions arising from a closer investigation of a relief panel often attributed to Donatello, but probably not by him. Gary Radke’s examination of the jambs of Ghiberti’s bronze doors reminds the reader of the ways in which fascinating new insights can emerge from even the most apparently familiar objects. Relatively unknown sculptors are discussed by Claudia Kryza-Gersch in the case of two busts by Simone Bianco, Jeremy Warren in making new attributions to the Grandi family in Renaissance Padua and Victoria Avery in her examination of documents relating to Giacomo Calderari, bell-maker and bronze-caster of Venice, which allows her to propose him as the maker of some pieces with the mark IC.
Alison Wright provides a typically thoughtful piece on ‘Tabernacle and sacrament in fifteenth-century Tuscany’, which considers these in their role as framing devices, but also as active constituents in the meaning of what they contained. A number of contributors make reference to various types of reproduction; thus Jeanette Kohl draws attention to the ‘multiples’ of busts, many deriving from death masks, which proliferated in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; polychrome terracotta busts also feature in Frits Scholten’s discussion of the work of Johan Gregor van der Schardt in Nuremberg. Dimitrios Zikos’s exploration of the relationship between Giambologna and Susini reveals new documents for the latter, which permit a revision of some previous thinking about Susini’s development and, like Kohl, Zikos considers the production of subsequent versions of certain well-known originals. Manfred Leithe-Jasper presents some new thoughts on the figure of the Amphora Bearer, which appears as a bronze now at Klosterneuburg, but also in a variety of other forms, drawn, painted and sculpted. The bronze is here reattributed to Vettor di Antonio Gambello.
Willem van Tetrode appears in both the essay by Krahn and in Denise Allen’s valuable contribution, in which she explores Cellini’s employment of assistants in the execution of several works, most notably his reconstruction of an antique marble fragment into Ganymede with the Eagle. This is a rare instance in which it might have been helpful to signal more clearly this connection to the reader, although the subject matter of these two essays is very different.
Sculpture produced in northern Europe is considered in Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s essay on Hans Vischer, and whether or not he was a failure and the cause of ‘the demise of the … family workshop’ (p 120) – probably not – and in the essay by Scholten already mentioned. There was clearly some northern influence on the remarkable pearwood altarpiece of the Crucifixion by the Del Maino brothers, originally in Piacenza (now in the V&A), discussed by Davide Gasparotto. This monochrome altarpiece is contrasted here with painted figures attributed to the same workshop, notably the St Roch.
This beautifully produced and consistently fascinating volume serves as a fitting tribute to Robert H Smith and it is much to be regretted that he did not live to see its appearance.
