1st Edition
The Performance of Sculpture in Renaissance Venice
This study reveals the broad material, devotional, and cultural implications of sculpture in Renaissance Venice.
Examining a wide range of sources—the era’s art-theoretical and devotional literature, guidebooks and travel diaries, and artworks in various media—Lorenzo Buonanno recovers the sculptural values permeating a city most famous for its painting. The book traces the interconnected phenomena of audience response, display and thematization of sculptural bravura, and artistic self-fashioning.
It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, early modern art and architecture, material culture, and Italian studies.
Biography
Lorenzo G. Buonanno is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
"This book could become fundamental for the study of Venetian Renaissance art. The discussion reaches across art forms, showing their remarkable interdependence even when the practitioners of painting and sculpture were assigned to separate professional organizations, and elucidates the ways sculptures may have worked in their physical, spiritual-devotional and theoretical contexts." Alison Luchs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
"This manuscript relies on sensitive visual analysis, on the study of ritual and ceremony …, on the analysis of religion and liturgy in Venice, on the consideration of Venetian history and literature and language, and on the reading of a range of textual sources …. This study is, in a word, interdisciplinary. More than anything else, however, it focuses on the artworks themselves, arguing that, to comprehend fifteenth-century Venetian sculptures, we must consider their spectacular material forms, which are often remarkably crafted, as well as the techniques used to fashion them." Amy R. Bloch, University at Albany
