of Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo and Sarto, works typified by a Mannerist upset of harmony, overextended forms, wavy bodies and various bodily contortions with occasional recourse to dissonant colour combinations. In short, Mannerism was a radical reaction to Golden Age Classicism. The Last Judgment in the Pauline Chapel and other later figurative works of Michelangelo are textbook examples of this school. And the Tondo Doni itself, Michelangelo’s new manner is plain for all to see. His works would go on to demonstrate a fusion of drama and fantasy. In architecture, Michelangelo blazed the trail with the curves and tension he created for the San Lorenzo Church. Mannerism even affected gardening. The gardens around the great private estates were rife with eccentricities, oddities, curious caves, fountains and statues of animals – neat examples are the Boboli Gardens of the Pitti Palace. But Michelangelo opened up new horizons in sculpture too. Though botched, Bartolomeo Ammannati’s statue of the sea god at Piazza della Signoria was nonetheless based on Michelangelo’s David while Cellini’s Perseus at the Loggia dei Lanzi is magnificent. A final worthy successor was Giambologna (a.k.a. Giovanni Bologna and Jean de Bologne) and his Rape of a Sabine in the same loggia. But in the sixteenth century, the best artists were deserting Florence, Mannerism was floundering in trivia and real art was now happening in Rome.
Returning to Sarto, this artist was influenced by Raphael and Michelangelo, who was himself doing Mannerism. Mannerism was a response to the general unrest permeating Florence at the time because of the local political situation and the broader background of the Reformation. Around 1520 to 1524, Florentine painting began shifting from the Golden Age into the Late Renaissance.
For all his genius and social prominence, Michelangelo was never immune to the whims of his patrons yet he nonetheless devoted his life to exercising his talents as a sculptor, painter, architect and poet, leaving an enormous body of work in his wake.
In his late nineteenth-century History of Art during the Renaissance, Eugene Müntz includes a very thorough study of Michelangelo. However, the study needs updating to incorporate new data, transfer of works to new locations, discovery of additional drawings, recent issues, restorations and more compassion for pre-sixteenth-century Italian art. Nonetheless, Müntz did an enormous job and, in recognition of that, the only editing of his clear and straightforward style concerns a few idiomatic turns of phrase that would sound precious today.
13. Fra Bartolomeo, Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, ca. 1498. Oil on wood, 47 × 31 cm. Museum of San Marco, Florence.
The sculptor
14. David, 1501–1504. Detail. Marble, 410 cm. Galleria dell’Academia, Florence.
Late Renaissance Sculpture
15. Copy of The Head of a Faun, attributed to Michelangelo, original disappeared. Bargello Florence.
Michelangelo not only outshines all his predecessors; he remains the only great sculptor of the Renaissance at its best. Sculpture flourished in the fifteenth century only to fade and die off in the next. Having got too far ahead of painting, it was only natural for sculpture to be the first to peak and decline.
What most Late Renaissance sculptors lacked was not talent but the ability to use their own eyes and share a vision with either their contemporaries or posterity. We should immediately add that the era was unfavourable to them: Michelangelo’s extreme genius left little scope for works that escaped his influence, damning all his contemporaries to settle for aping him.
The decadence had yet another cause: Michelangelo had brilliantly solved every essential problem facing sculpture at the time, thus freeing fellow artists from research and inclining them towards carefree routine work where they soon found themselves copying readymade techniques, which is the death of all art.
Assuredly, the quest for character and movement was germinating in the works of Donatello, but it was tempered by a strong dose of naturalism; their matter invariably counterbalanced their spirit. Donatello made a major contribution up until the heart of the sixteenth century; his influence was in marked conflict with Michelangelo’s, especially when it came to low relief, a genre Buonarroti practiced little. But when it comes to Michelangelo’s successors, neurosis prevails: anything you would call bone structure, musculature, vitality or health goes downstage. Who would still look at such eyesores? And nonetheless, it is the vanquished copycats who give power and flavour to the whole period.
Vasari detailed all the techniques of contemporary sculpture, reviewing the manufacture of wax and earthen models, scaling techniques, low and high relief, casting, stucco and woodwork. For his part, Cellini offers a comprehensive body of practical information about working wood in his memoirs and a treatise on sculpture. Since the early Renaissance, only bronze and marble have found favour with the public. You would imagine Michelangelo’s preference for marble might tilt tastes his way but both continued to flourish, whether for low relief or in the round. Giambologna’s biography gives insight into the set-up of a Florentine Renaissance sculptors’ workshop: artists would make smaller works of marble themselves from a model but brought in help for larger ones. For bronze statuettes, the artist does an easily fashioned model in wax or clay and turns over execution to helpers supplied by the grand duke. Marble sculpture happened then as it does now. It was wrongly claimed that Michelangelo used to roughhew a marble right after finishing up the small-scale model. Cellini adamantly declares that, though he used to settle for this shortcut, Michelangelo made a point of doing a preliminary full-scale clay model. As he says:
That’s what I saw with my own eyes in Florence. While working on the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, that’s what Michelangelo did, not only for the statues but also for the architectural works. He often realised the ornaments needed for his constructions through models built to the exact size of his intended sculptures. When the artist is satisfied with his model, he turns to charcoal and carefully sketches his statue from its principal angle. Failing this, he risks being easily fooled by his chisel. Until now, the best method is Buonarroti’s; after sketching the model from its principal angle, [the artist] starts producing from the drawing with a chisel, proceeding exactly as if sculpting a figure in semi-relief. This is how this marvellous artist gradually hewed his figures out of marble.
16. Bertoldo di Giovanni, Bellerophon taming Pegasus, 1481–1482. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
But while Michelangelo took all sorts of precautions at this level, he all too often neglected the finishing touches. Attacking the marble with his characteristically spirited fury, he often exposed himself to mishaps, as occurred with the literally atrophied right arm of the Medici Madonna in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo Church.
Although polychrome enthusiasts became ever fewer, works of coloured marble sustained a following for some time. Juxtaposing marbles of different colours, Vasari argued, enabled sculpture to compete with painting.
Terracotta had few faithful disciples left. As for Della Robbia’s style of enamelled terracotta, it was definitely relegated to the countryside. Bronze castings held many surprises and disappointments. We know how Benvenuto Cellini’s picturesque and dramatising description immortalised the misadventures of casting his Perseus. As for Giambologna, he subcontracted the door casting for the Dome of Pisa, sculptures for the Salviati Chapel and statues of Cosimo I.
Wood and ivory sculptures were almost non-existent and stuccos were earning wider appeal. Pasteboard was commonly used for copies of greater works and execution of ornaments. And finally, wax sculpture blossomed brilliantly. In Vasari’s time, no goldsmith would model effigies without it.
Michelangelo dominated and even snuffed out the rest of Late Renaissance sculpture with his style, and even more so with his technique. Given this dazzling superiority, need we add that his influence was more harmful than fertile? The master focused on sobriety and concision while his imitators mostly delivered empty output of remarkable poverty.