Book contents
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction Making and Unmaking Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Part I Surface Effects: Color, Luster, and Animation
- Part II Sculptural Bodies: Created, Destroyed, and Re-Enchanted
- Part III Sculptural Norms, Made and Unmade
- Chapter 7 The Body, Space, and Narrative in Central and Northern Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 8 Rethinking Style in Fifteenth-Century Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 9 Bellano’s Invention at the Santo
- Part IV Sculpture as Performance
- Part V Sculpture in the Expanded Field
- Part VI Sculpture and History
- Index
- References
Chapter 7 - The Body, Space, and Narrative in Central and Northern Italian Sculpture
Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and Ghiberti in Comparison
from Part III - Sculptural Norms, Made and Unmade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2020
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction Making and Unmaking Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Part I Surface Effects: Color, Luster, and Animation
- Part II Sculptural Bodies: Created, Destroyed, and Re-Enchanted
- Part III Sculptural Norms, Made and Unmade
- Chapter 7 The Body, Space, and Narrative in Central and Northern Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 8 Rethinking Style in Fifteenth-Century Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 9 Bellano’s Invention at the Santo
- Part IV Sculpture as Performance
- Part V Sculpture in the Expanded Field
- Part VI Sculpture and History
- Index
- References
Summary
In the early Quattrocento, few in Italy were more engaged than Tuscan sculptors with changing paradigms of representation. In the century’s first decades, before emerging standards were codified by treatises and by increasingly unified practice, these sculptors developed and explored innovations such as perspectival constructions, the illusionistic integration of figure and space, and engagement with the beholder. Attuned to this context of rapidly changing artistic practices, this essay addresses how Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and Lorenzo Ghiberti composed human forms in narratives contained in implied or represented space and questions how these sculptors approached the construction of spatial settings in ways that affected their subjects and related to their viewers. A primary issue is how Donatello employed spatial representation as a narrative tool, as well as a compositional one. How, for instance, did he capitalize on space and perspective’s narrative potential such that they are often inseparable from the story? In contrast, Jacopo’s examples suggest that, for him, spatial representation was at odds with figure and narrative, a tension that the artist resolved by favoring the body. Between these poles, Ghiberti navigated a changing course where spatial representation alternated from backdrop to narrative device.
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- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy , pp. 155 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020