Battle of the Nudes

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Italian printmaker, possibly Paduan) [7, 8]. Arthur M. Hind (Early Italian Engraving [London, 1938-48], 1: 189-92, hereafter Hind) lists six prints under Pollaiuolo, but suggests that all but the Battle are copies based on Pollaiuolo designs: Battle of the Nudes (as "Battle of Naked Men"), Hercules and the Giants, Hercules and the Hydra (a different version than that described by Bartsch), Profile Portrait of a Lady, The Grand Turk (El Gran Turco), and Two Centaurs Fighting. 6. Inspired by Shelley Fletcher's study of Mantegna and the pre- liminary research for the present catalogue, the Center for Ad- vanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) held a colloquy, gathering ten impressions of Pollaiuolo's Battle of the Nudes from eight institutions in the paper conser- vation lab at the National Gallery of Art in Washington for exami- nation and comparison by a group of scholars, curators, and conservators (Curatorial/Conser- vation Colloquy 9: Antonio Pollaiuolo's Battle of the Nudes, 19-21 June 2000). Cleveland's unique impression of the first state was examined next to three second-state impressions from the National Gallery (Russell Allen, Rosenwald Collection, and "Gott" impression) and second- state impressions from the Balti- more Museum of Art, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery. This event allowed the comparison of many impressions at once, un- mounted and unframed, with high-caliber microscopes (particu- larly important for discerning ink variation, plate wear, and state changes) and the input of inter- ested and knowledgeable profes- sionals in the field, which pro- vided essential groundwork for the course of research for the Cleveland project (see Acknowl- edgments for a list of partici- pants). 7. Louise S. Richards, "Battle of Naked Men," The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art (hereafter CMA Bulletin) 55 (1968), 66. 8. Jay A. Levenson, "Mantegna and the Emergence of Engraving in Italy," in Cesare Mozzarelli et al., Le Corte di Mantove nell'eta di 57 would have made up this stalk on a whim. The extended stalk in the woodcut also fills in the other- wise empty area in the upper right corner of the engraving, and seems better matched with the opposite corner where tree branches and foliage extend right up to the edge. Since the woodcut has a printed border around the image, it is unlikely that the stalk was added by Francfordia to make a firmer printing edge. 12. One must also allow for the possibility that Uberti could have copied Francfordia's woodcut rather than Pollaiuolo's engraving, which might explain the slightly cruder style, once- removed from the original example. It is also worthy of note that despite their appropriated image, both Francfordia and Uberti saw fit to promote their own names in prominent plaques; Uberti's is ironically elaborate considering the decid- edly weaker effort displayed in his version. 13. Richards, "Battle of Naked Men," 69-70. 14. Erwin Panofsky (Albrecht Diirer [Princeton, 1943], 2: 95-96) identified the scene as the story of the Roman consul Titus Manlius who slew a Gaul and took his necklace, thus gaining the nickname "Torquatus" or "chain." John Goldsmith Phillips (Early Florentine Designers and Engravers [Cambridge, 1955], 48- 49) suggested that the print repre- sents a scene from the Legend of the Golden Fleece, the battling warriors that sprang to life when Jason sowed the dragon's teeth. But the figure of Jason, the central character, is neither present nor alluded to, and it was a helmet, not a chain, that Jason threw into the warriors' midst that caused them to turn on one another. According to Fusco, Colin Eisler, following Bartsch (Le peintre- graveur, 13: 202, no. 2) and Paul Oskar Kristeller (Kupferstich und Holzschnittt in vier Jahrhunderten [Berlin, 1905], 171), put forth the idea that the figures are gladia- tors who are engaged in an ancient funerary ritual fight to the death, thus offering a blood sacri- fice signifying regeneration in commemoration of the deceased. The remains of the fallen gladia- tors would nurture the soil from which their own sustenance came (grain, wine from the vines, from olive trees). Eisler even suggested that the print may have been commissioned to memorate the death of a pow ful Florentine such as Cosim (1464), Piero (1469), or Giul de' Medici (1478). This prop at least accounts for the lack differentiation among the fig figures and the seeming aiml ness of the battle. For a summ tion of these and other sugge tions, see Hind, 1: 189-92; L Smith Fusco, "Battle of the Nudes," in Jay A. Levenson Early Italian Engravings fro National Gallery of Art (Wa ton, 1973), 66-80; and Wend Stedman Sheard, Antiquity in Renaissance, exh. cat., Smith lege Museum of Art (Northampton, 1979), no. 44. 15. Alison Wright, in Patrici Rubin and Alison Wright, Re sance Florence: The Art of th exh. cat., National Gallery (L don, 1999), 259. 16. Patricia Emison, "The W Made Naked in Pollaiuolo's B of the Nudes," Art History 13 (1990), 261-75; Joseph Manc "Passion and Primitivism in Antonio Pollaiuolo's Battle of Naked Men," Source: Notes i History 20 (2001), 28-36. Em perceives a more generalized concept for Pollaiuolo's imag that offers a complex allusion philosophical and theologica beliefs rather than a specific or historical event. She reads grain and vines as referring t Eucharist while the ensuing b of nude figures points to the subject of universal death an resurrection of the soul when separated from the mortal bo Manca (p. 34) dismisses the "subjectless" interpretation o engraving and describes the w riors as representative of the passions of a base and barbar society. He regards the engra as a statement about the impo tance of moderating desire, " central tenet that unites vario moral philosophies that flour ished in antiquity, a point we known in humanistic circles quattrocento Florence." 17. For a discussion of the as ciation of the wild man with German tribal origins and fur analysis of the iconography r ing to an ancient battle betwe the Romans and the Germani
the Pollaiuolo workshop, based on the slightly faceted articula- tion of the anatomy, notably the V-shape of the sternocleidomas- toid muscles near the neck, although the large hands with large and distinct knuckles and highly articulated feet appear somewhat closer to Verrochio's style. How- ever, these Renaissance copies after antique examples are notori- ously difficult to attribute with certainty to specific artists be- cause of the complexity in discerning the Renaissance artist's individual stylistic approaches from elements belonging to the original antique sculpture. John Pope-Hennessy considers the bronze Marsyas in the Frick Collection to be in the style of Pollaiuolo (The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture [Princeton, 1980], 129-32). The less finished surface of the Modena example, as compared with the Frick bronze, is more in keeping with the Florentine practice of leaving bronze statuettes relatively in the rough (since they would have been shown alongside excavated examples), and typical of Pollaiuolo's other known works such as the Hercules, also in the Frick Collection, and the Hercules and Antaeus in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. For a description of the antique source, see Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London, 1986), 73-74, no. 30. 22. For a discussion of a group of Marsyas bronzes affiliated with the Medici collections, see Anna Maria Massinelli, Bronzetti e Anticaglie dalla Guardaroba di Cosimo I, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Florence, 1991), 31-39. 23. For instance, the use of the lion skin as a supporting strut for the Hercules figure is unneces- sary given the tensile strength of the bronze, but it may have been an intended allusion to the use of such struts to support marble Roman copies of Greek bronze statuary. For further discussion of possible antique sources and motives that influenced Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus sculpture, see Edward J. Olszewski, "Framing the Moral Lesson in Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus," in Luba Freedman and Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, 58 eds., Wege zum Mythos (Berlin, 2001), 71-87; and Massinelli, Bronzetti e Anticaglie, 26-30. 24. See Joy Kenseth, "The Virtue of Littleness: Small-Scale Sculp- tures of the Italian Renaissance," in Sarah Blake McHam, ed., Look- ing at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge, 1998), 128-48. 25. Alison Wright, "Dimensional Tension in the Work of Antonio Pollaiuolo," in Stuart Currie and Peta Motture, eds., The Sculpted Object 1400-1700 (Aldershot, U.K., 1997), 65-86. For further discussion of Pollaiuolo's incor- poration of two- and three- dimensional formal concerns and use of antique sources, see Laurie Fusco, "Antonio Pollaiuolo's Use of the Antique," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 257-63. 26. Before entering the Uffizi collection in 1788, the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (fig. 17) was housed in the Medici villa in Rome. It was acquired by the Medici family in 1584 when Ferdinand de' Medici bought most of the antique sculptures from the della Valle collection. It is not known when this sarcopha- gus entered the collection of Car- dinal Andrea della Valle (1463- 1534), which was well established in the quattrocento by the della Valle family of learned jurists, physicians, and classical scholars and developed by the cardinal into one of the most important collections of the 16th century. A variant example, also known in the Renaissance, is now in the Vatican collection. See Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 161-62, 479-80, nos. 126 and 126a. 27. Lorenzo Ghiberti, I Commen- tarii, ed. Julius von Schlosser (Berlin 1912), 1: 22; Pliny, Natural History, 35.67-72. 28. It should be noted that both the Fogg and British Museum drawings have suffered damage over the years. Some of the lim- ited interior modeling lines (de- scribing ribs and muscles in the areas of the stomach and neck) have faded and thus are difficult to see in an illustration; the dis- coloration and restoration of the surface of the drawings make it impossible to ascertain if any pale wash was applied, as is often found in Pollaiuolo's drawings this type. The execution of the two drawings with their unusu solid dark backgrounds have been compared to the dancing nude figures of Pollaiuolo's Vi Gallina frescoes at Arcetri, wh in turn have been discussed in relation to painted imagery on ancient Greek vases that were being rediscovered as collector items in Italy in the 1460s. In attempts to link the elusive sub ject matter of the British Muse drawing and the Fogg fragmen (and the so-called Hercules an Giants engraving to which it re lates) with the Battle of the Nu engraving, Cruttwell, Popham and Pouncey, and others have suggested that all these works may have been conceived as preparatory to some decorative scheme that did not necessarily have a complicated iconograph beyond staging inventive displ of the nude figure in action, w generalized references to class sources. See Maud Cruttwell, Antonio Pollaiuolo (London, 1 124; A. E. Popham and Philip Pouncey, Italian Drawings in Department of Prints and Dra at the British Museum: The Fo teenth and Fifteenth Centuries don, 1950), 136-38, no. 224; F Shapley, "A Student of Ancien Ceramics, Antonio Pollajuolo, Art Bulletin 2 (1919), 78-86; A H. Barr, "A Drawing by Anton Pollaiuolo," in Art Studies: Me eval Renaissance and Modern bridge, 1926), 73-78; Michael Vickers, "A Greek Source for Antonio Pollaiuolo's Battle of Nudes and Hercules and the Tw Giants," Art Bulletin 59 (1977 182-87; Ettlinger, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, 161, nos. 35 and Ann Driscoll, "The Pig Painter: Parties, Poets, and Pollaiuolo," CMA Bulletin 80 (1 83-111. Alison Wright (Rubin Wright, Renaissance Florence has also noted the affinity of th Fogg and British Museum draw ings with the small-scale relief silhouetted against dark groun found in the ancient cameos th were avidly collected by Pollaiuolo's patrons, the Medic in the 1470s. 29. For a discussion of Finiguerra's stylistic relationsh to Pollaiuolo, and their possibl collaboration in the same gold smith shop in the early years o Pollaiuolo's career, see Alison Wright, "Studies in the Paintin
Page 1 and 2: Battle of the Nudes POLLAIUOLO'S RE
Page 3 and 4: Pollaiuolo's print is also somethin
Page 6 and 7: 5). There also appear to be some re
Page 8 and 9: tance the image appears silvery gra
Page 10 and 11: difficult and time consuming to rec
Page 12 and 13: and eliminating the subtlety of mod
Page 14 and 15: were so enamored of them that they
Page 16 and 17: cution differs in the engraving, th
Page 18 and 19: interior modeling that suggests a s
Page 20 and 21: ously he renders the limbs." 42 A c
Page 22 and 23: own inscription on the tomb of Sixt
Page 24 and 25: sponse to the crude interpretation
Page 26 and 27: attributed to Perugino's most famou
Page 28 and 29: the plate in an attempt to alter th
Page 30 and 31: visited Florence. And although wild
Page 32 and 33: plate was cut, that while the sheer
Page 36 and 37: of the Pollaiuolo" (Ph.D. diss., Co
Page 38: 67. Martin Clayton, Raphael and His

Battle of the Nudes

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?