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Antonio Rossellino, the Eros of Praxiteles, and Michelangelo’s David

2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/709189

2328-207X

Sean Roberts,

Historical and Religious Studies of Rome

Previous articleNext article FreeAntonio Rossellino, the Eros of Praxiteles, and Michelangelo’s DavidSean RobertsSean Roberts Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor Renaissance writers on art, few tropes enjoyed the prominence of comparison between contemporary and ancient practitioners. Among a select group of comparanda, the most common were surely Apelles for painters and Praxiteles for sculptors, though Myron, Lysippus, Phidias, and others made sporadic appearances. To modern readers, such analogies vary widely in their appropriateness and utility, responding to regional and momentary tastes, friendships, networks, and rivalries. Battista Spagnoli’s claim that the art of the ancients “is tarnished and loses all luster” when seen alongside that of Andrea Mantegna accords, in spirit, with art historical estimations of the significance of his oeuvre.1 In contrast, Ugolino Verino’s description of the cassone painter Apollonio di Giovanni as “the Tuscan Apelles” has attracted few believers, whether among writers in the succeeding century or among moderns like Ernst Gombrich, who brought this “somewhat strained” literary exercise to scholarly attention.2This essay introduces an overlooked—and perhaps surprising—example of these paragoni: a passing mention in Francesco Berlinghieri’s Seven Days of Geography. Begun around 1465 and finished by 1481, the book is a terza rima description of the world based upon Ptolemy’s Geography, set within the narrative frame of the poet’s undertaking an aerial tour of the earth with the shade of his ancient predecessor as guide (fig. 1).3 The work is not a usual source for the study of Renaissance art, and with good reason. Its nearly two hundred pages include just a handful of references to ancient sculpture, all drawn from conventional classical sources. Indeed, Berlinghieri mentions only one contemporary artist, and he does so in a rather odd place. The description of Italy is sprinkled with poets, condottieri, theologians, and statesmen, but not a single painter or sculptor. Yet, as the poet and Ptolemy are soaring above Greece, the reader encounters this passage: “Our gaze fixed on the welcome scene of the city of Thespiae, whose fame was justly earned from the excellent Praxiteles’ sculpted image of Eros, and the great artist Antonio ‘the Red’ has such fame himself, praised no less by all the citizens of our flowering nest than by me.”4Fig. 1. Anonymous Florentine miniaturist, “Francesco Berlinghieri, Claudius Ptolemy, and a Companion Survey the Earth,” incipit of book 1 (detail), in Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della geographia, ca. 1481. Tempera on vellum. Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan. Photo: Author.Few cities “flowered” with prominent artisans like Florence did at the end of the Quattrocento. Or at least this is what writers of this generation and the following century wanted their contemporaries and posterity to believe. The usual suspects present Antonio as a significant, but hardly central, figure in the story of Tuscan sculpture.5 Cristoforo Landino wrote of “the perfect works of Antonio called ‘Rosso’ and similarly of his brother Bernardo, the excellent architect.”6 Luca Landucci called him “a very small man, but great in sculpture, who made the tomb of the Cardinal which is at San Miniato.”7 And Vasari elevated him decisively above his brother Bernardo, including his woodcut portrait in the 1568 edition and titling their collective biography “The Life Antonio Rossellino, Sculptor, and of His Brother, Bernardo.” Even in that expanded edition, however, he devoted only four pages to both.8 Modern scholars and connoisseurs, for their part, have assigned the sculptor an important but intermediary role, bridging the moment between Donatello’s immediate successors and the breakthrough of Verrocchio’s early career.9If Antonio was admired by Renaissance and modern writers alike, he is peculiar as the sole recipient of such encomia. Certainly, he was not identified in any other source as an artist so inextricably linked to Florence as Praxiteles was to Thespiae. Why, then, did Berlinghieri elevate him to such heights? It is certainly possible that the poet and sculptor were friends, though we have no sure sign of this. Even if this were true, it is unclear why his praise should appear at the description of the Eros rather than in the more natural location of the poet’s treatment of Florence. Berlinghieri might have been returning a favor. He might have been largely uninterested in visual art and correspondingly ill-informed on its makers. In what follows, I will propose instead that Antonio was an apt choice for comparison with the ancients in the years that this poem was written. I will suggest that the association with the Eros might have been inspired not only by the prominence of Antonio’s works in the cardinal of Portugal’s chapel and the nearby Collegiata of Empoli, but also by the consignment to the sculptor of the colossal marble block that would, in the succeeding decades, become Michelangelo’s David (fig. 2).Fig. 2. Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475–1564), David, 1501–3. Marble. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. Photo: Art Resource.While Praxiteles’s Eros was, by late antiquity, lost, scholars have reconstructed its type from descriptions and presumed Roman copies. Consensus holds that the work was a nude, adolescent male sculpted in the round, without other attributes (such as the bow), and marked by an expression of pain on his face. Praxiteles’s innovation in aesthetic interiority was, above all, held to convey the entwinement of suffering with earthly love.10 To understand why a poet would have connected this particular work with Antonio, however, we need instead some sense of what fifteenth-century intellectuals like Berlinghieri knew about the sculpture. It is certainly possible that he was aware of the work’s connection with the theme of love’s pains. That tradition, however, is dependent on one source which Berlinghieri is unlikely to have been directly familiar with—epigrams in the Greek Anthology—and another which he almost certainly was not—Pausanias’s Description of Greece, which recounts the sculptor’s ill-starred love for the courtesan Phryne.11 Definitively known to the poet, in contrast, were passages by Cicero and Strabo (the latter in Latin translation). In his second speech against Verres, Cicero observes of Praxiteles’s work that it “is what people go to Thespiae to see, there being no other reason to go there.”12 In the Geography Strabo wrote that “Thespiae was well known because of the Eros of Praxiteles…. Now in earlier times travelers would go up to Thespiae, a city otherwise not worth seeing, to see the Eros.”13 Berlinghieri drew heavily on both Cicero and Strabo in composing his poem and was unquestionably familiar with their estimations of the ancient sculptor’s accomplishment. He understood the Eros, then, to be a colossal male figure, on display for all to see, and closely bound to the public reputation of its home city.An unrivaled tradition of large-scale figural sculpture stretching from Donatello and Ghiberti through Desiderio da Settignano to Verrocchio, of course, nearly defines Florentine artistic accomplishments of the Quattrocento. In the late 1470s, as Berlinghieri was writing the later sections of his poem, including the verses on the Eros, Antonio Rossellino was at work on the latest entry to this emerging canon. In 1477, the sculptor was consigned a massive marble block originally brought to the Opera del Duomo by Agostino di Duccio a decade earlier. This was the block that would, in the hands of Michelangelo, become Florence’s most famous sculpture, the David. Antonio was, by this time, a sound choice for the commission. He had demonstrated his ability in carving large-scale figures, especially his life-size Saint Sebastian (fig. 3) for Empoli’s Collegiata di Sant’Andrea.14 Scholars have assigned extremely varied dates for the Sebastian, from John Pope-Hennessy’s belief that it was a work of the early 1460s to Eric Charles Apfelstadt’s contention that the figure is a summation of the sculptor’s late career. In any case, by 1477 the Sebastian would have taken its place alongside the celebrated works for the cardinal of Portugal’s chapel at San Miniato, propelling Antonio to the top of the Opera’s list of trusted sculptors.Fig. 3. Antonio Rossellino (1427–79), Saint Sebastian, ca. 1475–77. Marble. Museo della Collegiata di Sant’Andrea, Empoli. Photo: Author.Though Agostino never began the process of carving, the Opera’s intention was to create a companion for Donatello’s massive terracotta and gesso Joshua high atop the buttresses of the Duomo.15 Though no longer extant, Donatello’s Joshua was perhaps the best-known sculpture in fifteenth-century Florence. Largely detached from its original iconography and described as “the big white man” and as a “colossus,” the figure served as landmark for centuries.16 It appeared prominently, for example, on Stefano Bonsignori’s printed map of the city, along with the terracotta test piece produced by Agostino in preparation for his own commission.17 In taking on the eighteen-foot block left untouched by Agostino, Antonio Rossellino announced his intention to produce such a colossus himself, a work that, like the Eros, would draw viewers from far and wide to marvel. Indeed, the poet Alessandro Rosselli wrote of Michelangelo’s David, several decades later, that it could have been crafted by the hands of Praxiteles.18At first glance, the association between Rossellino and the planned colossus might seem unlikely, as scholars have often claimed that the sculptor made no significant progress on the block. John Paoletti, however, has recently argued that descriptions of Michelangelo’s early interventions suggest that Antonio did rather more with the marble than previously thought. Likewise, later claims that previous attempts at the carving were botched—that Michelangelo saved a doomed project by sculpting an uncarvable piece of stone—are partial fabrications. Antonio’s progress on the block does not seem to have been halted by a flaw either in materials or execution but by his death from plague, probably in the early months of 1479.19 Indeed, the sculptor’s claims on this most publicly visible of projects might have been a good deal more plain to see than scholars have supposed. Antonio’s colossus was apparently out in the open until Michelangelo’s decision to have a brick and wood shed constructed around it on September 3, 1501, ostensibly to protect his work from the elements but undoubtedly too to guard his own practice from prying eyes and perhaps to divert attention from previous interventions in the block. The block was not publicly visible again until June 23, 1503, when the Opera had the walls removed so that all could see Michelangelo’s triumph for the feast of the Baptist.20In the period between roughly 1476 and the early months of 1479, Antonio must have seemed to an astute Florentine observer like Berlinghieri a colossal figure himself, poised to take on the world by rising to the challenge of carving Agostino’s gigantic block. In other words, he represented an excellent choice for the poet as he was finishing the poem that represented more than fifteen years of his life’s work. The panoptic presence of the Duomo’s “big white man” has led Paoletti to observe, “[A]lthough Michelangelo may not have been obliged to compete formally with his contemporaries to gain his commission, he was clearly in competition across generations with Donatello.”21 Berlinghieri’s praise lends an important piece of corroborating evidence, reminding us that Michelangelo was also in competition with his more immediate predecessors, among them Antonio. Moreover, it demonstrates just how necessary his caginess and secrecy might have been for the highly successful strategy to take full and sole credit for Florence’s new colossus in an environment in which at least some Florentines must still have remembered a would-be Praxiteles of the previous generation.Notes. 1. Quoted in Paul Kristeller, Andrea Mantegna (Berlin: Cosmos, 1902), 491–93.2. Ernst H. Gombrich, “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen through the Eyes of a Poet,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18 (1955): 16–34, at 32.3. Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2–4.4. “Thespie cicta qual fama & pregio acquista / pel simulacro sculto di cupido da praxitele egregio & sommo artista / Antonio russo ha tale et / fama & grido / e mio so non men che sono insiem: / cictadin tutti del fiorito nido.” Francesco Berlinghieri, Le septe giornate della geographia (Florence: Niccolò di Lorenzo, 1482), 3:26. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my own. For the literary context of this passage, see Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World, 59–60, 66.5. Early literary responses to Antonio are summarized in Eric Charles Apfelstadt, “The Later Sculpture of Antonio Rossellino,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1987), 1:15–20.6. “Restono opere perfecte d’Antonio cognominato Rosso. Et similmente di Bernardo suo fratello, architecto nobile.” Cristoforo Landino, Scritti crtici e teorici, ed. Roberto Cardini, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 1:125.7. “Di poi venne su el Rossellino, un uomo molto piccolino, ma grande in iscoltura; fece quella sepoltura del Cardinale che è a San Minato.” Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, ed. Jodoco del Badia (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1883), 3.8. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de più eccellenti pittori … , ed. Rosanna Bettarini, 5 vols. (Florence: SPES, 1966), 3:390–97.9. See esp. Apfelstadt, “Later Sculpture of Antonio Rossellino,” 1:20–30.10. See esp. Antonio Corso, “Love as Suffering: The Eros of Thespiae of Praxiteles,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42 (1997–98): 63–91.11. The Greek Anthology, vol. 5, trans. W. R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 278–79; Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5 vols., trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–35), 1:96–97, 4:285–87.12. “Idem opinor, Artifex eisdem modi Cupidinem fecit ilium qui est Thespiis, propter quem Thespiae visuntur, nam alia visendi causa nulla est.” Cicero, The Verrine Orations, vol. 2, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 286–87.13. Strabo, Geography, vol. 4, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 318–19.14. John Pope-Hennessy, “The Altman Madonna by Antonio Rossellino,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 3 (1970): 133–48, at 137–44; Apfelstadt, “Later Sculpture of Antonio Rossellino,” 326–76; Eric Charles Apfelstadt, “A New Context and Chronology for Antonio Rossellino’s Statue of St. Sebastian in Empoli,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, ed. Steven C. Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence: Le Lettere, 1992), 189–203; John Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David: Florentine History and Civic Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 72.15. For the technological challenges posed by hoisting marble sculpture to the cathedral’s buttress, see William E. Wallace, “An Impossible Task,” in Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio (New York: Routledge, 2015), 47–58.16. Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David, 27–28.17. Ibid., 30.18. “Hic tibi Davidiis sublatus in astra colossus / Fingere Praxitelis quem potuere manus.” Quoted in Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David, 108, 339.19. Ibid., 72–75.20. The author is currently at work on a more expansive essay treating the problem of Antonio’s interventions on the block and Michelangelo’s secrecy within the context of workshop practice.21. Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David, 27. 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