The Multimedial Early Modern Workshop
The early modern workshop has been the subject of sustained art historical enquiry, from research on contracts, apprenticeships, concepts of originality and seriality, to studies of taste, commerce and materiality. Yet such discussions have tended to focus on individual media, reinforcing notions of the separation between the arts that are reflected in modern museum taxonomy and the professional skills of the art historian. Although studies on metapainting, images-within-images, and the ‘paragone’, or competition between the arts, have revealed a consciousness among early modern makers and theorists of individual media and their respective qualities, these ideas arose from contexts in which formal, material and technical exchange across artistic practices was commonplace and in which the boundaries between different media were far from stable.
This panel highlights the generative and fluid nature of early modern artistic production by examining the intersection of media in the workshop and transmedial encounters suggested by artworks and written sources. How did multimedial training, specialisation, or collaboration influence artistic practice in the early modern period? What types of transfer took place, whether related to techniques, materials, iconographies or motifs? How did the proximity between workshops specialised in the production of different types of objects facilitate the exchange of props, materials and skills? Can we connect creativity and invention to multimedial dynamics?
The sessions in this panel explore these and similar questions, which investigate the multimedial dimension of workshop practice in the early modern period, the constant dialogue and interaction between artistic media, and their implicit transmedial effects.
Session Convenors:
Amanda Hilliam, I Tatti / The University of York
Laura Stefanescu, I Tatti / Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence
Speakers:
Amanda Hilliam, I Tatti / The University of York
Quattrocento Goldsmith-Painters and their Sharp Instruments
Many of the most renowned artists of medieval and renaissance Italy began their careers in a goldsmith’s workshop. Was this mere coincidence, or did the goldsmith’s training furnish artists with skills that could be usefully applied in other media? In this paper, I will pursue the second line of inquiry with a particular focus on goldsmithing tools and their manual and intellectual associations.
In doing so, my paper will reconcile the time-consuming labour necessitated by using instruments such as the burin with artistic prestige and the concept of disegno, or design. I argue that the sharp tools used by artists during their training in metalwork cultivated a love of line that re-emerges in their later works of painting, sculpture and architecture. Applying a phenomenological approach that considers precision, speed and resistance, I show that sharp instruments—burins, chisels, styluses and quill pens—trained hands that became adept at producing dazzling lines and contours. The work of artists such as Parri Spinelli, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Botticelli will serve as case studies to demonstrate how sharp tools informed the intellectual ambitions of these artisan-designers.
Laura Stefanescu, I Tatti / Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence
Of Dolls and Candlesticks: Transmedial Encounters in Neri di Bicci’s Workshop
If one would have entered in 1466 in the Florentine workshop of Neri di Bicci, there would have been several altarpieces and small devotional panels in the making. But, alongside them, reliquaries and candlesticks, crucifixes, life-size statues and heads of saints, infant Christs, wooden frames and ornaments would have been lying around. A variety of objects were awaiting to be gilded and painted, as the workshop also specialised in this type of services. By turning the focus unto Neri di Bicci’s “side jobs”, as recorded in his workshop Ricordanze, this paper proposes to analyse his workshop as a space of transformation, in which new images and motifs were born from transmedial encounters and the materiality of the objects that travelled through the painter’s studio.
Specialised tasks of secondary importance in Neri di Bicci’s production and the objects to which they were connected might have shaped certain aspects of his more important artworks. The practice of gilding reliquaries and frames would have impacted the impressive variation of thrones of the Virgin Mary in his altarpieces, with their intricate pillar shapes. Painting terracotta infant Christs might have influenced the rigidity and position of painted infant Christs in his colmi da camera. Analysing the workshop as a space of transmedial encounters would bring new insights into stylistic aspects of Neri di Bicci’s production, as well as into specific motifs, and even elements related to connoisseurship, by turning to objects, material culture, and the study of transfers between different media and artistic practices.
Rossella Monopoli, The Warburg Institute
Painting and sculpture in the work of Saturnino Gatti of L’Aquila
In the late fifteenth century multimedia workshops commonly operated in L’Aquila, a city in the northernmost part of the Kingdom of Naples and second for political importance in the region. The main masters of Renaissance art in L’Aquila such as Silvestro dall’Aquila (ca.1450-1504), Saturnino Gatti (1463-ca.1518) and Sebastiano di Cola di Casentino (documented 1486-1504), were eclectic artists, skilled in several media. They likely received their initial training in goldsmiths’ workshops in L’Aquila and later moved to Florence where they had direct contacts with its specialised workshops and received a more sophisticated education. These artists are almost always referred to as “magister” in the documents and, crucially for understanding the nature of production in L’Aquila, they were employed by their clients to create works in a variety of media.
Saturnino Gatti (1463-1518 ca.) was an accomplished painter on wall and panel and also a talented sculptor, capable of carving beautifully refined figures of wood and of modelling figures of terracotta. During his career Saturnino, like his colleagues, was commissioned also to produce a particular type of multimedia object which was popular at the time in Abruzzo, the polygonal tabernacle altarpiece.
By close looking at few works among sculptures made in wood and terracotta and paintings on wall and on panel by Saturnino Gatti, this paper reflects on the way a multimedial training influenced his artistic practice, examines the connection between painting and sculpture in Saturnino’s production and generates ideas on the level of specialisation the artist was able to employ in the different media.
Amanda Lillie, University of York
Colliding Workshop Aesthetics? Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks in its original sculptural setting
The original altarpiece for which Leonardo painted the Virgin of the Rocks was a major work by Giacomo del Maino and his workshop, among the most productive sculpture workshops in late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Lombardy. Leonardo’s task was to paint and gild the pre-existing ancona as well as providing a painting as its centrepiece. A fresh look at documents concerning the architectural and sculptural design of the chapel of the Immaculate Conception in San Francesco Grande in Milan, as well as the contract for Leonardo and his workshop collaborators, reveals how tightly connected architecture, sculpture and painting were.
Although we know that sculpture and painting were frequently combined in altarpieces and in many other contexts, most scholars and curators have been unwilling to attempt full-scale reconstructions or discuss the intermedial dialogue set up within the ancona. This paper explores the reasons behind this reluctance, how a purist aesthetic continues to isolate Leonardo, and why we might benefit from seeing contrasting styles of painting and sculpture yoked together within a single frame.
Sophia Feist, University of Cambridge
Illustrating Dress: Collaboration between painters and tailors in the sixteenth century Holy Roman Empire
This paper examines how the communication and collaboration between artisans’ workshops shaped the process of livery design in the early sixteenth century Holy Roman Empire.
In this period, imperial princes and other potentates issued liveries, or uniform dress, to their vassals several times each year as part of a culture of ritual and visual-political communication. Liveries were planned in collaboration between tailors, princes, and courtiers. The design was then illustrated in a painters’ workshop, and accounts from the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder show that even highly skilled painters participated in this process. The resulting illustrations were sent along with materials to local tailors, who interpreted them into garments. This design process therefore involved several steps of translation by court painters, tailors, embroiderers, and princes from word to two-dimensional and then three-dimensional object and was complicated by the physical distance of local tailors from court.
While no liveries from this period survive, some illustrations do. These ink drawings with a coloured wash on paper are not garment patterns or technical drawings, but detailed and characterful representations of dressed figures made by skilled painters. My research relies on the examination of these illustrations as objects, supplemented by accounts, correspondence, and my own craft skills as a trained bespoke tailor, to understand the communication process between artisans’ workshops.
This paper ultimately asks what the livery design process reveals about artisanal communication across distance, material literacy across specializations, and what is gained or lost in the process of translation between media.
Livia Lupi, University of Warwick
Before the Paragone: How Artists Reinvented Architecture in Renaissance Italy
This paper examines the representation of architecture in the Italian Renaissance, putting aside interpretations based on pictorial space and arguing that artists engaged in a competitive comparison with built structures which resulted in a significant contribution to architectural practice. Using their architectural settings as a platform for structural and ornamental experimentation, artists played with the aesthetic potential of materials and explored the communicative abilities of architectural forms, displaying their architectural knowledge as well as their powers of invention. Their work therefore represents a visual form of paragone before its theorisation, which taunts architectural practice at the same time as it generously contributes to it. The paper focusses on drawings and artworks produced in Northern Italy between the late fourteenth and the early sixteenth century: from Altichiero da Zevio’s frescoes in Padua to the drawings in the Soane’s North Italian Album; from Jacopo Bellini’s albums to Fra Damiano Zambelli’s intarsia. It discusses the social, professional and cultural implications of this phenomenon for both patrons and craftsmen, reflecting on the reasons behind artists’ concerted efforts to engage with architecture. As it questions our understanding of the workshop practices that enabled trained artists to perform as architectural designers, the paper explores the emergence of the architect in this period as a new kind of professional, arguing for a more fluid relationship between art and architectural practice.
Daniel Tischler, ETH Zurich
The Wax and the Paper: Designing Francesco Borromini’s Architectural Plasticity
Francesco Borromini’s modern renown notably draws on his extraordinary draftsmanship. A hallmark of his graphic work is the so-called synoptical drawings, in which multiple levels of an architectural body are superimposed onto one another (figure). This paper argues that these idiosyncratic sheets bear witness to Borromini’s other major design medium: wax models. In contrast to his extensive graphic corpus, however, none of these models have survived the Roman heat or other ravages of time—and thus, tend to escape scholarly attention.
An inventory taken after Borromini’s death reveals that his modeling block stood in the same room as his drawing desk. This spatial proximity suggests a contiguous back-and-forth between the two media, aiding the complex succession of defining form, geometry, and measurements. The synoptical technique facilitates this intermedial practice. As a representational means to simulate three-dimensional corporeality in a drawing’s two dimensions, it helped preserve the plasticity set by the initial wax model throughout the entire, multimedial process.
Notably, Borromini preferred the same red modeling wax used by sculptors. This is hardly surprising. Initially trained as an intagliatore (a stonemason responsible for ornamental elements and details), he maintained this tactile habit throughout his career. His consistent choice of materials reflects this sculptural engagement. From the wax and graphite of the design work to the brick and stucco of the buildings, their unifying feature is an innate malleability. It may not be far-fetched to give in to the illusion that Borromini’s architectures are “wax models translated into magnitude and permanence” (M. Raspe).
Tianna Helena Uchacz, Texas A&M University
Ornament in Translation
Around 1540, enterprising publishers across Europe began commissioning prominent artists to create print series of ornament designs featuring one design per print. To make these innovative series legible, some were furnished with title plate prints that introduced the individuals responsible for the work, the sub-genre of ornament featured in the designs, the intended addressees of the series, and the function of the prints. Indeed, many title pages address themselves explicitly to particular classes of artisan, declaring that the prints are useful for goldsmiths, painters, wood carvers, stone sculptors, weavers, embroiders, or jewelers—or for specific and surprising combinations of these artisan classes. The formulaic nature of the title pages has led scholars to see them as marketing ploys disconnected from the material concerns of craft making. After all, how could a given design be just as useful for artisans painting on canvas, carving in wood, casting in silver, or embroidering with threads, other than in a general way? This paper presents and analyzes the rhetorical claims made within a never-before assembled corpus of ornament print title pages ca. 1540–1620. It explores the questions raised when we take the prints’ claims to utility at face value. It considers how shared tools and techniques, ephemeral intermediary processes, and workshop heuristics and habits may have helped artists to think transmedially and translate printed designs into their destination media. Finally, it suggests that we read ornament prints not simply as ideative designs but as technical texts for the making of art.
Matthijs Jonker, Utrecht University
A Multimedial Academy: Montorsoli’s Designs for the Accademia del Disegno’s Emblem
The Florentine Accademia del Disegno (1563) was the first organization in which painters, sculptors, and architects came together in an institutional setting to study the theory and practice of their arts. The artists justified the foundation of this multimedial academy with the concept of disegno, which they, following the humanist Benedetto Varchi (1502/3-1565), understood as the common principle of their professions.
In this period, disegno stood both for the creative image in the artist’s mind (“design”) and for the preparatory sketch on paper (“drawing”). Art historians have argued that the members of the Accademia del Disegno emphasized the intellectual significance of the term and obfuscated its practical meaning. As evidence for this claim they point to the three intertwined garlands that the artists ultimately selected as the emblem of their academy. This was an adaptation of Michelangelo’s personal device consisting of three intertwined circles, which, according to Vasari, alluded to the idea that the three arts are inextricably related to each other.
However, before selecting the Michelangelesque emblem, many designs by different artists were discussed, of which only those by Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) and Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli (1507-1563) have survived. By connecting Cellini’s and, especially, Montorsoli’s designs to other visual and written sources from the early period of the academy, this paper argues that the Florentine artists considered the physical and intellectual aspects of disegno to be of equal importance and, therefore, that they took a more nuanced position on the relationship between theory and practice than previously thought.
Samir Boumediene, Institut d’histoire des représentations et des idées dans les modernités, Lyon
Just as Another Craft? The Visual Arts in Stradano’s Nova Reperta
Known as one of the most elaborate discourses on discovery in early modern times, Stradano’s Nova Reperta series, published around 1590 between Antwerp and Florence, also offers an interesting vision of the workshop as a social organization. The frontispiece and the 19 subsequent engravings conceive of technology as a coordination of instruments, gestures and knowledge. In this series, which includes engravings depicting the discovery of America, the compass, gunpowder, printing, the mechanical clock and distillation, the inclusion of painting and engraving is not an intrusion. In an earlier engraving (1573) he dedicated to the « Practice of the Arts », Stradano had already represented, in a kind of ideal workshop, the different artistic mediums of painting, sculpture, engraving and drawing. In this respect, the Nova Reperta got a step further, placing artistic practices in absolute continuity with other craft practices. On the engraving dedicated to painting, for instance, the creation of the table is directly related to the preparation of pigments and, through a series of cross-references, to other techniques such as distillation or oil making. By examining this series, our paper aims both to restore artistic practices to the world of craftsmanship, and to detect what, perhaps, was their specificity according to Stradano, and which would lie in a certain technique of the gaze.