Book contents
- Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop
- Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Verrocchio Experimentalist
- 1 Verrocchio's Ingenuity
- 2 Verrocchio's Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise
- 3 Bridging Dimensions: Verrocchio's Christ and Saint Thomas as Absent Presence
- 4 The Sculptured Imagination
- 5 Material Meditations in Verrocchio's Bargello Crucifix
- Conclusion
- A Note on Archival Sources
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
3 - Bridging Dimensions: Verrocchio's Christ and Saint Thomas as Absent Presence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2019
- Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop
- Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Verrocchio Experimentalist
- 1 Verrocchio's Ingenuity
- 2 Verrocchio's Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise
- 3 Bridging Dimensions: Verrocchio's Christ and Saint Thomas as Absent Presence
- 4 The Sculptured Imagination
- 5 Material Meditations in Verrocchio's Bargello Crucifix
- Conclusion
- A Note on Archival Sources
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores how Verrocchio used techniques and materials in his Christ and Saint Thomas to represent visually Thomas’ revelation of Christ’s material state after the Resurrection as absent presence. Made from bronze (by an artist who touched his material only indirectly) and as shallow reliefs, the sculpture shows through its material facture Thomas’ revelation. The bronze makes Christ physically present but the wax that the artist touched and from which the sculpture was made is materially absent; similarly, although the sculptures appear to be solid sculptures made in the round, they are only shallow reliefs, their physical forms serving as metaphors for the idea of absent presence.
- Type
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- Information
- Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance WorkshopVerrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art, pp. 118 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019