Description
Book SynopsisDr. Avery has worked on Italian sculpture since he joined the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966. His study continued during his career as Director of Christie's sculpture department (1979-1990) and since then as an independent consultant and historian. He has published extensively in this field, including his survey, Florentine Renaissance Sculpture (1970); Giambologna: the complete sculpture (1987); Donatello: an Introduction (1994); and Bernini, Genius of Baroque Rome (1997). A number of articles on Italian sculpture have been included in two successive volumes entitled Studies in European Sculpture (1981 and 1987). The present volume comprises further articles written over the decade since 1986, some on specific discoveries and others consisting of broader surveys of individual sculptors' activity or under-studied classes of Renaisance sculpture: bronze artefacts, such as seals and locks; and garden sculpture. Several are unpublished texts of lectures, or radical expansions of briefly published pieces.
Table of ContentsPreface
Donatello's character as revealed in the early sources: "Rough and simple in everything except his sculpture"
Donatello's Madonnas Revisited
Donatello's Marble Narrative Reliefs
The early Medici and Donatello
'Treasures in Relief' [Luca and Andrea della Robbia 'Madonna' reliefs in All Saints', Nynehead, Somerset]
An Assumption of the Virgin by Benvenuto Cellini. A Gilt-Bronze Seal in the Wernher Collection
Pierino da Vinci's 'Lost' Bronze Relief of The Death by Starvation of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his Sons rediscovered at Chatsworth
'The Flagellation of Christ': a Clarification of the Identity of the Reliefs by Pierino da Vinci and Vincenzo Danti
Giovanni Bandini (1540-1599) reconsidered
Giambologna's Horse and Rider
Giambologna's Horses: Questions and Hypotheses
Giambologna's Wood Statuette of Julius Caesar: The Rediscovery of a Masterpiece
Mercury - a Flight of the Renaissance Imagination
Giambologna's Bathsheba (Psyche?)
Cristoforo Stati of Bracciano, and Giambologna: New tDiscoveries
Fontainebleau, Milan or Rome? A Mannerist bronze lock-plate and hasp [with up-dated listing]
A Retreat from Reality: Sculpture Grottoes of the Medici
The 'Garden called Bubley': Foreign Impressions of Florentine Gardens, and a new discovery relating to Pratolino
Fanelli's Cupid on a Dolphin Mount on a Wanli Porcelain Ewer
The Bronze Statuettes of Caspar Gras
Additional Notes
Index
