Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Verrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art 1107172853, 9781107172852

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PRACTICE AND THEORY IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE WORKSHOP

Verrocchio was arguably the most important sculptor between Donatello and Michelangelo, but he has seldom been treated as such in art historical literature because his achievements were quickly superseded by the artists who followed him. He was the master of Leonardo da Vinci, but he is remembered as the sulky teacher that his star pupil did not need. In this book, Christina Neilson argues that Verrocchio was one of the most experimental artists in fifteenth-century Florence, itself one of the most innovative centers of artistic production in Europe. Considering the different media in which the artist worked in dialogue with one another (sculpture, painting, and drawing), she offers a novel analysis of Verrocchio’s unusual methods of manufacture. Neilson shows that, for Verrocchio, making was a form of knowledge and that techniques of making can be read as systems of knowledge. By studying Verrocchio’s technical processes, she demonstrates how an artist’s theoretical commitments can be uncovered, even in the absence of a written treatise. Christina Neilson is Associate Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art History at Oberlin College. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, among others, she curated and wrote the catalogue for the exhibition Parmigianino’s Antea: A Beautiful Artifice at The Frick Collection, New York.

PRACTICE AND THEORY IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE WORKSHOP VERROCCHIO AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF MAKING ART CHRISTINA NEILSON Oberlin College

university printing house, cambridge cb2 8bs, united kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107172852 DOI: 10.1017/9781316779408 © Christina Neilson 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Neilson, Christina, author. Title: Practice and theory in the Italian Renaissance workshop :Verrocchio and the epistemology of making art / Christina Neilson, Oberlin College. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007309 | ISBN 9781107172852 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH:Verrocchio, Andrea del, 1435?–1488—Criticism and interpretation. | Artists’ studios—Italy—Florence—History—15th century. Classification: LCC NB623.V5 N45 2019 | DDC 730.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007309 ISBN 978-1-107-17285-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Support for this publication has been provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

For Sam, Takeshi and Idrisyn

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION

page ix 1

1 VERROCCHIO’S INGENUITY

35

2 VERROCCHIO’S MEDICI TOMB: ART AS TREATISE

74

3 BRIDGING DIMENSIONS: VERROCCHIO’S CHRIST AND SAINT THOMAS AS ABSENT PRESENCE

118

4 THE SCULPTURED IMAGINATION

152

5 MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

168

CONCLUSION

196

A Note on Archival Sources

199

Bibliography

201

Notes

245

Index

343

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been written without the support of many individuals and institutions. I am grateful to my dissertation advisors, Charles Dempsey and Stephen J. Campbell, whose careful advising and inspirational example as scholars shaped many of the ideas that went into this study, which originated in a very different PhD dissertation. Their tough questions helped me over many intellectual hurdles. I want to thank (also from Johns Hopkins) the late Salvatore Camporeale, Elizabeth Cropper, Henry Maguire, Walter Melion, Carl Strehlke, Daniel Weiss, and fellow graduate students Shannon Egan, Helga Giampiccolo, Ryan Gregg, Mandy Hockensmith, Richard Leson, Jesse Locker, Jill Pederson, Lynette Roth, Eva Struhal, Joyce Tsai, Molly Warnock, Ittai Weinryb, and Sanne Wellen, and especially Frances Gage, Jennifer Sliwka, and Jannette Vusich for their insightful comments. I thank also Don Juedes and the other librarians at the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins for their assistance in locating many sources. I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University for three Charles S. Singleton Fellowships at the former Center for Italian Studies,Villa Spelman, Florence. The scholarly community at the Villa Spelman contributed to my research in countless ways, and I have no doubt that my book would be a much poorer product for the lack of that experience. I am thankful to the scholars who attended the seminars and, above all, to the acting directors of the Villa Spelman during my three semesters there: Stephen J. Campbell, Alan Schapiro, and Walter Melion.Two Katzenellenbogen and Roth Memorial Prizes from the Department of the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, enabled me to do crucial research in Europe and for that I am very thankful. I am deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation and The Frick Collection for a two-year Andrew W. Mellon pre-doctoral curatorial fellowship; to Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, for a Rush H. Kress Fellowship; to the National Endowment for the Humanities; and to the American Philosophical Society for a Franklin Grant, all of which enabled me to conduct crucial research. And my thanks to Jody L. Maxmin, Oberlin College’s office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding, and to Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, for underwriting the costs of my images. I would like to thank my colleagues at The Frick Collection, Oberlin College, and Villa I Tatti for their kindness and interest in my project, which ix

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improved my work immeasurably, especially Denise Allen, Colin Bailey, Susan Grace Galassi, Joseph Godla, Kristel Smentek, Charlotte Vignon, and Lydia Dufour at The Frick Collection; and Bonnie Cheng, Farshid Emami, Sarah Hamill, John Harwood, Jamie Jacobs, Susan Kane, Diane Lee, Heath Patten, Barbara Prior, Matthew Rarey, Joseph Romano, Pam Snyder, and Kay Spiros at Oberlin College; the director of Villa I Tatti, Lino Pertile, and his wife, Anna Bensted; the Assistant Director of Academic Programs, Jonathan Nelson; and all my fellow Tattiani, especially Ilaria Andreoli, Almudena Blasco Vallés, Montserrat Cabré, Marta Cacho Casal, Robert Colby, Roisin Cossar, Maria Del Rio-Barredo, Filippo De Vivo, Laura Giles, Juan Luis González García, Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Shona Kelly Wray, Tomaso Mozzati, and Guido Ruggiero. Among many other friends and colleagues, I would like to thank most particularly the following: Nicole Bensousson, Giorgio Bonsanti, David Alan Brown, Andrew Butterfield, Joseph Connors,Yvonne Elet, Margaret Haines, Liz Hillaire, Alex Hurd, Aden Kumler, Louise Marshall, Cecilia Martelli, Lorenza Melli, Peta Motture, Fiorella Paino, Jacqueline Thalmann, Emer O’Dwyer, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, Linda Pellecchia, Linda Pisani, Sandhya Subramanian, Allie Terry-Fritsch, Katherine Thomson-Jones, and Alison Wright. I owe Luca Boschetto a special debt of gratitude for generously helping me with my research on the Ricci family in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. I thank Jill Dunkerton, Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini, and Mari Yanagishita for discussing the conservation of objects and their technical aspects of making with me in great detail. Special thanks are due to Michael W. Cole, Andria Derstine, Erik Inglis, Lauren Jacobi, Timothy McCall, Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Pamela H. Smith, and an anonymous reviewer who read parts of or the entire manuscript and offered invaluable feedback. I am indebted to all them for their insights, which greatly improved my arguments. My sincere thanks to Alex Jones for the Latin translations and Marta Cacho Casal, Roisin Cossar, Filippo De Vivo, and Dario Tessicini for checking my Italian translations. For help with photographs I thank especially Debra Pincus, Susi Piovanelli, and Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini. Warm thanks to my editors at Cambridge, Asya Graf and especially Beatrice Rehl, and to Sapphire Duveau, Lisa McCoy, and Indra Priyadarshini for expertly guiding the book through production. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love, unflagging support and kind interest in my work: my parents, Kathy and David Neilson, who first inspired my love of Renaissance art; my sister, Briony Neilson, who offered many suggestions that significantly improved the ideas in this study; and my children, Takeshi and Idrisyn, who have brought such joy to my life. Above all, I thank my husband, Sam Jones, who selflessly helped me through all phases of the researching and writing of the dissertation and the book. His intellectual acumen and thoughtful questioning of my ideas contributed greatly to the final product. I dedicate this book to him and to my children. Unless otherwise noted, the translations from Italian are mine.

Color Plates

Plate 1.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 2.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, porphyry, marble, and bronze, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 3.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Ideal Head of a Woman, soft black chalk, partly reworked in pen and golden brown ink and gray wash, outlines later pricked for transfer, early 1470s, Christ Church, Oxford, 0005. By permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.

Plate 4.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Crucifix, polychromed limewood, cork, stucco, and linen, early-to-mid–1470s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo - Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

Plate 5.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Crucifix, early-to-mid-1470s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Detail of gessoed linen loincloth. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico and Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

Plate 6.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Crucifix, polychromed cork and stucco, early-to-mid-1470s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Detail of face of Christ. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico and Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

INTRODUCTION

VERROCCHIO EXPERIMENTALIST

In January 1468 a group of citizens and artists assembled to discuss the appropriate decoration for the summit of Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome (1420–36) of Florence’s Cathedral (Figure  1).1 A decision had already been made for a palla (ball) to surmount the lantern (indeed, Brunelleschi’s model for the lantern included a bronze ball and cross),2 but the choice remained about whether it should be cast or hammered and from what material it should be made. Minutes record that the group of prominent citizens and experts, which included such esteemed citizens as the humanist Matteo Palmieri and Lorenzo de’ Medici (soon to become Florence’s quasi-­ruler) and the artists Luca della Robbia, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Andrea del Verrocchio, concluded that the palla should be cast in one piece and on no account should it be made by hammering. The group also decided that it should be made from copper as fine as possible and alloyed with fine brass. That same month a competition was held to determine which artist should make the palla. After models were submitted and considered, a decision was made to give the commission to Giovanni di Bartolomeo and Bartolomeo di Fruosino. On August 1 they cast a bronze palla, but for unknown reasons it was deemed unacceptable and was broken up the following year.3 Verrocchio is first mentioned as one of several contestants who submitted models for the palla. As he is not referred to in the later document about the casting, it seems he was an unsuccessful competitor. But shortly after the first palla was rejected, Verrocchio was given the commission to make a second 1

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Figure 1.  Filippo Brunelleschi. Cupola, 1420–36, Duomo, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

(on September 10, 1468), and he did this successfully (Figure 2).4 On May 27, 1471, his enormous gilt copper palla (measuring about 2.35 m wide and weighing 4,368 Florentine libbre, almost 1,481 kg)5 was hoisted into place at the top of the cupola on a crane.6 Three days later, when a bronze cross was raised and attached to the ball, Florentines rejoiced and sang the Te Deum, as the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci records in his diary.7 Although the palla has been overlooked in most art historical discussions of Verrocchio,8 Giorgio Vasari made it the centerpiece of his biography of the artist, as a proof of the artist’s inventiveness, writing: [Verrocchio] made [the palla] four braccia high, and positioned it on a knob in such a way that the cross above it could be attached securely; the finished work was put in place with great celebration and the delight of the people. Truly great were the ingenuity and skill used in making it so that one can enter it from below, and also in attaching it securely so that the winds cannot damage it.9

As Vasari emphasizes,Verrocchio’s cleverness lay in particular in the engineering of the enormous palla so that it could be positioned atop Brunelleschi’s lantern,

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 2.  After Andrea del Verrocchio. Palla, hammered copper, installed 1471; damaged, 1601, Duomo, Florence. Alinari Archives, Florence.

over 350 feet above the ground.Verrocchio did this by stabilizing his ball with an internal armature and a device that connected it to a bronze knob below and a cross above (Figure 3).10 Vasari was not the only one to recognize the importance of Verrocchio’s palla. The author of a fifteenth-­century mathematics treatise (probably Pier Maria Calandri) used the dimensions of the palla to explain how to calculate the circumference and volume of a sphere, and in the late sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne expressed wonder at the scale of the palla, declaring that it could fit forty men inside.11 Although Montaigne exaggerates, his claim reveals the wonder Verrocchio’s palla inspired in its beholders. Verrocchio’s ingenuity consisted not only in attaching the palla to the lantern but also in how it was made. Surviving documents indicate that between August 1469 and June 1470 Verrocchio had copper sheets hammered with wooden mallets over a stone sphere by three stone carvers (they probably also helped in carving the sphere).12 Verrocchio had chosen the sheets of metal personally during a special trip to Venice – the best source for copper on the Italian peninsula  – in 1469. On his journey, he also visited Treviso, a major center in the manufacture of goods made from repoussé (hammering) in copper.

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Figure 3.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Palla, hammered copper. Detail (cross-­section of sphere as engraved by Bernardo Sansoni Sgrilli and published in Descrizione e studi dell’insigne fabbrica S. Maria del Fiore, metropolitana fiorentina, in varie carte in 1733). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (86-B4853).

Here he would have learned valuable skills, probably through observation and conversations with specialists.13 By summer 1470 the hammered sheets were soldered together.14 Leonardo da Vinci, who was working in Verrocchio’s bottega (workshop) at the time of the palla’s manufacture, wrote many years later (c. 1515): “Remember how the soldering for the palla of Santa Maria del Fiore was done.”15 A drawing accompanying the note (Figure  4) demonstrates how it was achieved: it shows a cone representing solar rays being reflected from a burning mirror onto a join between separate pieces of metal to solder them together.16 Between August and October 1470,Verrocchio’s palla was gilded and polished.17 The decision to make the palla using repoussé is striking, not least because the majority of citizens and artists present at the meeting of 1468 had recommended that the ball be cast and stated that it should not be made by hammering.18 The choice appears to have been Verrocchio’s own, made in response to the failure of the first palla.19 We do not know what went wrong earlier, but probably it was not a casting error. More likely, the problem lay in the gilding.

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 4.  Leonardo da Vinci. Ms. G, 1510–1516, fol. 71v, pencil and ink, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Paris. Detail. Copyright. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY/Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France, Paris.

Hammering rather than casting the ball was a clever solution on Verrocchio’s part because beaten pure copper sheets would have lent themselves well to mercury gilding.20 Although the palla no longer survives (it was brought to the ground by lightning and damaged in 1601 [modern style]), it tells us much about Verrocchio’s approach to making in general. The palla speaks to the artist’s experimental methods of manufacture (in using repoussé rather than casting), his facility with acquiring new skills (learning how to do repoussé on a large scale and soldering using mirrors), and his ability to meet the demanding expectations of his patrons, all of which, as we shall see, was typical of this ingenious Florentine. Verrocchio was arguably the most important sculptor between Donatello and Michelangelo, and many of his works are considered groundbreaking – most notably his Christ and Saint Thomas and Colleoni monument (Figures 5 and 6). In his Christ and Saint Thomas, Verrocchio succeeded in creating a sculpture of unprecedented compositional complexity. Thomas, placed on the step outside the niche, is depicted actively moving toward Christ, who is positioned behind and above Thomas. Christ responds to Thomas’ gesture of reaching forward by raising his arm and pulling back his robe to reveal his side wound. This careful choreography contrasts with the tendency of sculptors up to this point, who showed figures in more static poses, regardless of the subject.21 The Colleoni monument is equally revolutionary. Although Verrocchio

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Figure 5.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

did not cast the statue himself, he was responsible for its extraordinary design. As an equestrian monument, it surpasses its predecessors (both ancient and Renaissance) in its sense of movement and naturalism. The horse’s raised foreleg and corresponding balance of the rest of its body creates a sense of movement, as if the horse is in the process of stepping forward. Moreover, the horse’s anatomy is impressive in its accuracy, such that Pomponius Gauricus declared the horse was “denudatus” (like an ecorché – a figure shown without its skin to reveal the musculature).22 Verrocchio designed his sculpture to be seen from multiple viewpoints, a departure from all contemporary and ancient examples, which were limited in the number of principal viewpoints.23 Verrocchio exerted considerable influence on artists of the following generation (many of whom probably trained with him, including Leonardo, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Pietro Perugino) and beyond. Yet Verrocchio’s achievements have been overshadowed by those of later artists, especially Leonardo, his most famous pupil. This is due in large part to Vasari’s negative assessment of Verrocchio in his vita.Vasari tells how Leonardo assisted on Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ (a painting probably executed

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 6.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Equestrian Monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni, bronze (formerly gilded) on a marble and Istrian pedestal with a bronze frieze, designed by Andrea del Verrocchio, early 1480s–1488 completed by Alessandro Leopardi between 1490 and 1496, Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo,Venice. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

in two campaigns, one beginning c. 1468 and the other c. 1476; Figure  7), executing the divinely illuminated turning angel on the left, so different from the pedestrian angel beside him, painted by Verrocchio. In Vasari’s tale, when Verrocchio first laid eyes on Leonardo’s angel, the older master threw down his paintbrushes in frustration at the superiority of his pupil’s contribution, never to paint again.Vasari’s topos of the older master giving up painting in the face of greater talent is repeated many times throughout the Lives (it is told, for instance, of Giotto and Cimabue, and Raphael and Francesco Francia)24 and thus deserves to be treated with skepticism. Furthermore, the evidence does not support it. Inventories of Verrocchio’s workshops in Florence and Venice drawn up after his death record ten paintings left in the workshops,25 and a document of 1485 records the near completion of a painted altarpiece for San Zeno in Pistoia (Figure  8), a commission that had been granted to Verrocchio.26 Although his authorship of the Pistoia painting is often doubted, there is reason to accept at least part of it as autograph.27 Yet even today scholars perpetuate the implication inherent in Vasari’s tale that Leonardo was a genius who came from nowhere with an innate talent that required no teacher.28

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Figure 7.  Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop. Baptism of Christ, tempera and oil on panel, 1460s and 1470s, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 8.  Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop. Madonna di Piazza (Pistoia altarpiece), tempera and oil on panel, c. 1474–85 San Zeno, Pistoia. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Just as influential has been Vasari’s characterization of Verrocchio’s style as “somewhat hard and crude, as one who acquired it rather by infinite study than by the facility of a natural gift.”29 For Vasari, the greatest artists were those who endowed their figures “with motion and breath.” To achieve these qualities, artists observed nature and absorbed its lessons but departed from it to invent something entirely new.30 Inherent in Vasari’s assessment of Verrocchio, and his history of art, is a bias toward artists who pointed the way to the style of the High Renaissance (and thus to his own art), most notably Leonardo and Michelangelo. It was in the work of these two artists that art, according to Vasari, came closest to nature (“truly heavenly and admirable was Leonardo”).31 Unfortunately for Verrocchio, Vasari’s unfavorable judgement has meant that his place in the history of art has suffered ever since. He has been treated as a kind of buffoon (the sulky teacher who Leonardo did not need) and an artist whose achievements were quickly superseded by the artists who followed him. The point of this book in part, then, is to reassess Verrocchio’s accomplishments. More importantly, it argues that Verrocchio was one of the most experimental artists in fifteenth-­century Florence, itself one of the most innovative centers of artistic production in Europe, and that the artist’s unusual practices of making had meaning. Verrocchio worked in a wide array of media and often moved between them. His production in sculpture alone is remarkable: he created works in bronze, marble, wood, terracotta, and wax. This range is extraordinary, as most sculptors are thought to have mastered the skills of only one medium. He was also a master goldsmith and a painter.Verrocchio’s skills as a draftsman merited specific praise from Vasari. In addition, Vasari refers to Verrocchio as an architect. Verrocchio was not the only fifteenth-­century artist to work in more than one medium; indeed, one could argue that it was the norm.32 What is unusual is the extent to which Verrocchio worked in different media and the frequency with which he transferred tools and techniques from one material to another.33 Although his tendency to work across and between media was integral to Verrocchio’s artistic production, it has not been examined in studies on the artist. Instead, monographs consider his work in different media separately.34 Part of the reason for this may be due to Vasari, who implied that Verrocchio often moved from one object to another simply to avoid boredom.35 Vasari’s assertion has had the effect of foreclosing any discussion of the implications of Verrocchio’s transferal techniques. Scholars since Vasari have tended to be interested in issues other than Verrocchio’s practice (focusing especially on iconography or attribution), and when they have considered the topic, those studies have tended to concentrate on individual objects. Because of this, the possible meanings of Verrocchio’s unusual practices have been obscured. This study seeks to address

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what Verrocchio achieved by working in this way.Verrocchio’s practices, it will be argued in Chapter 1, were a response by the artist to the tastes of his audience and thus must be seen within the broader artistic context of Renaissance Florence. Although some other artists worked across media, Verrocchio’s is a paradigmatic case because he appears to have developed a self-­conscious attitude toward the potential for art making to express ideas. It will be explored in the chapters that follow how Verrocchio’s approach to making provided him with a hermeneutic framework, one in which he developed a sophisticated system of expressing complex ideas – theological, political, economic, poetic – metaphorically, and that he did this through visual puns on making and his use of materials. Chapter 1 introduces Verrocchio as an experimentalist, and each of the chapters that follow is a case study of an object dating from the 1470s. I have chosen to focus on this decade because it was especially productive for Verrocchio, when he was particularly experimental and moving between many different materials. It was also a moment of intense creativity in Florence in general, due in part to the remarkable rise to power of Lorenzo de’ Medici (“il Magnifico”), who used art to further his political ambitions.36 Chapter 2 argues that Verrocchio’s tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici (Figure 9) should be read as an oration for the interred and as a defense of wealth gained through usury (about which the Medici were perpetually anxious). Chapter  3 proposes that Verrocchio’s Christ and St. Thomas (Figure  5) should be considered a material meditation on the experience of faith. Unlike his contemporaries, Verrocchio showed Thomas reaching in as if to touch Christ’s wound, but he does not. This chapter addresses the theological and artistic implications of this unusual emphasis. In Verrocchio’s Ideal Head of a Woman (Figure 10) – the focus of Chapter 4 – the artist depicts a woman in profile in black chalk.Through the use of sfumato within the woman’s face and the strict maintenance of an outline around it, the drawing resembles a marble relief sculpture coming to life. Verrocchio’s technique here is explored in the light of vernacular poetry, in which the theme of the beloved’s metamorphosis was popular. The final chapter investigates Verrocchio’s unusual methods of making in his Crucifix (Figure 11) in relation to devotional practices. It argues that although much of the sculpture’s making is invisible to the naked eye, it was meaningful for an artist interested in animation. Verrocchio emerges from this study as an artist who used materials and techniques to express ideas. My focus on materials and their meanings is part of a larger scholarly interest in materiality in recent years.37 Indeed, Michael Cole has declared it a “subfield” of Renaissance studies.38 However, although much of the art of fifteenth-­century Florence has been well studied, it has not tended to be treated in studies of materiality.39 Instead, scholars interested in this topic have tended to focus on medieval art, or Italian art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These range from studies of specific materials40 to

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 9.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, porphyry, marble, and bronze, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

exhibition catalogues with an emphasis on techniques.41 A welcome result has been considerations of a wide range of objects, many of them typically ignored in art history because of their quotidian uses or the anachronistic preference for “fine arts.”42 While much work – especially by curators and conservators – has

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Figure 10.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Ideal Head of a Woman, soft black chalk, partly reworked in pen and golden brown ink and gray wash, outlines later pricked for transfer, early 1470s, Christ Church, Oxford, 0005. By permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.

been devoted to studying how objects were made, little attention has been paid to the meanings of techniques and materials employed by fifteenth-­century Florentine artists, which this book addresses. Studies in materiality have pointed to the ways in which a consideration of the processes by which objects are made can illuminate an understanding of ideas expressed by the finished works and the ways in which they were experienced.43 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin put it thus in their discussion of “new materialism” and its contribution to scholarship in a wide range of academic disciplines:

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 11.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Crucifix, polychromed limewood, cork, stucco, and linen, early-to-mid–1470s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo - Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

In terms of artworks, . . . a new materialist perspective would be interested in finding out how the form of content (the material condition of the artwork) and the form of expression (the sensations as they come about) are being produced in one another, how series of statements are

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actualized, and how pleats of matter are realized in the real . . . In this way, new materialism is different from most post-­Kantian studies of art, since in these studies, the material and discursive dimensions are treated separately. After a short description of the materials used following a “crude materialism,” the contemporary scholar influenced by the so-­ called ‘linguistic turn’ proceeds to deconstruct its messages. New materialism allows for the study of the two dimensions in their entanglement: the experience of a piece of art is made up of matter and meaning.The material dimension creates and gives form to the discursive, and vice versa.44

This book takes up the challenge posed by Dolphijn and van der Tuin. It proposes that the peculiar nature of Verrocchio’s workshop – where he worked in many different media simultaneously and in the same space (unlike many other artists, who had dedicated workspaces for different materials) – and the highly experimental and competitive environment of mid-to-late fifteenth-­ century Florence led Verrocchio to use materials and techniques to realize and express ideas through the nature of making. It was the artist’s engagement with matter that led him to realize his ideas (rather than forming them in the mind first), suggesting a degree of material agency.45 What interests me is the nature of the relationship between the artist and his materials and how certain specific contexts (for instance, Verrocchio’s mixed-­media workshop) presented materials and techniques as potential communicators of meaning that the artist recognized and referred to through his unusual processes of making.46 By attending to Verrocchio’s methods of making and the messages they communicate, we gain a better understanding of the role artists played in shaping attitudes toward objects, extending Renaissance beholders’ experiences of what art could be (spiritually, politically, poetically, etc.).47 I hope that the conclusions reached here offer a historically nuanced consideration of matter, materials, and their meanings – a response to the caution expressed recently by scholars in a range of disciplines about the anachronism of the “material turn.”48 What becomes clear from a consideration of Verrocchio’s productions in all media when placed in dialogue with one another is the extent of Verrocchio’s tendency to work between materials and also his interest in referring to one material by using another (for instance, black chalk to represent stone – the topic of Chapter 4 on a drawing of a sculptured relief). Verrocchio’s interest in the in-­betweenness of materials challenges a tendency in much materiality studies, which often essentializes materials (the result of which is that specialists concentrate on one material at the expense of another, or that drawings and sculptures by the same artist fall under the purview of different museum departments, the connections between the objects remaining unexplored).49 Scholarship on Verrocchio has tended to be hindered by questions of attribution – a valid concern but one whose basis often rests on Vasari’s negative

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assessment of the artist. The topic of Verrocchio’s role as a painter is the most vexed. Despite sustained studies devoted to this aspect of his oeuvre – most notably Passavant’s Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler50 and, more recently, the studies by Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson51 – the question of which paintings should be attributed to the artist, and whether he was a painter at all, remains the subject of debate (though Syson and Dunkerton have clarified much). Attribution is an important issue too with regard to Verrocchio’s production as a sculptor, but recent research and analysis, most notably by Andrew Butterfield and Dario Covi, have established this aspect of the artist’s oeuvre with greater certainty.52 Previously unknown works by the artist have been brought to light, including the Bargello Crucifix (Figure  11), which was discovered in a storeroom in Florence in the 1990s by Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi;53 and the terracotta modello of the Executioner from the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist relief (Figure 12), which was also discovered in the 1990s (in a box with bric-à-brac at the Portobello Road market in London) and convincingly attributed to Verrocchio by Anthony Radcliffe.54 Individual conservation reports of these and other objects have revealed much new information about the artist and his working methods – in particular, his

Figure 12.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Bozzetto for the figure of the Executioner, terracotta, c. 1478, Private Collection.

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tendency to transfer tools and techniques from one medium to another.55 And studies on many of the artists associated with Verrocchio’s bottega have contributed to a much better picture of the role of his assistants, though at the same time, many questions remain.56 Despite significant advances, the scholarship on Verrocchio lacks a coherent picture of the extent of the artist’s unusual techniques and an assessment of what these practices might mean, which this study attempts to address.57 The challenge of dealing with these issues is twofold: one,Verrocchio’s oeuvre is vast, especially when taking into account the work of his assistants, with whom the artist’s production is often confused (this has led scholars to focus primarily on Verrocchio’s sculptural output); and two, how does one attempt a reconstruction of an artist’s thoughts without a written treatise or manifesto? As for the first challenge, I have decided to concentrate on certain key works that are documented – or at least widely accepted – as being by Verrocchio and to explore the artist’s theoretical interests and commitments through those case studies. By focusing on four works in different media made in the same decade (the 1470s), I aim to uncover the meanings behind Verrocchio’s unusual practices. For the second challenge (how to reconstruct how Verrocchio thought about his art), our evidence does not include any written statements by him on the subject of his art.While Leonardo recorded his ideas in a series of manuscripts, we have no such treatise by Verrocchio.58 But I will make the case that Verrocchio’s ideas about his art can be suggested through the material remains of his objects and via three little studied manuscripts made in his workshop. I.1  VERROCCHIO’S CAREER

Verrocchio was born c. 1435 in Florence to a family of artisans and laborers59 and died in 1488 in Venice, where he had moved two years earlier to make the bronze equestrian monument of condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni (Figure  6). The first material with which Verrocchio became expert may have been terracotta. The artist could have learned the skills for working in that material from his father, Michele di Francesco Cioni, who recorded in his 1446 catasto (tax assessment) declaration that he had worked for a fornaciaio, a term used for anyone who worked with a kiln, whether for bricks or ceramics.60 By 1446, when Verrocchio was somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve, his father had given up working as a fornaciaio,61 and in 1458 Verrocchio was recorded in his catasto declaration as having been a fattorino di bottega (shop boy) in goldsmith Antonio Dei’s shop (he was no longer employed there by that date).62 No goldsmith’s work by Verrocchio dates from the 1450s. The earliest object that can be securely dated is the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist panel (Figure 13) for the Silver Altar of the Florentine Baptistery, commissioned in 1478 by the Arte di Calimala, though attempts have been made to attribute other goldsmith

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Figure 13.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist relief, silver, c. 1478–83, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

work to him.63 After leaving the bottega of Antonio Dei sometime before 1458, Verrocchio probably worked as an assistant in a sculptor’s shop, most likely that of Desiderio da Settignano (though it is also probable that he moved between a few workshops). Apparently he was skilled enough in marble carving to enter a competition to make a marble tabernacle for a chapel in Orvieto Cathedral in 1461, though he did not win the commission.64 A note in a manuscript (Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 1591) made in the artist’s workshop records that Verrocchio had his own bottega by 1463. The book’s first proud owner declared on the frontispiece: “This whole book is paid for: it cost 10 lire. The painting cost three and a half lire from Andrea del Verrocchino whose shop is at the head of the Via Ghibellina.”65 The “Andrea del Verrocchino” mentioned is undoubtedly Andrea del Verrocchio, who, in the 1460s, was residing in his family’s home, located at the point at which via Ghibellina began.66 This record establishes that Verrocchio was an independent master by 1463 and also that he was producing illustrated zibaldoni (chapbooks or commonplace books) by that date.67 By 1464 Verrocchio had established himself as a leading sculptor in Florence and was by then working for the Medici. They were his most important patrons, and he devoted much of the rest of his career to working for them. Verrocchio was commissioned to make the tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici in San Lorenzo (Figure 14). Cosimo died in 1464, and the tomb was completed

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Figure 14.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb marker of Cosimo de’ Medici, porphyry, serpentine, marble and bronze, c. 1456–65, San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

c. 1465.68 Around the same time, he made the celebrated bronze David (Figure 15), also for the Medici (probably for Cosimo’s son, Piero).69 As John Shearman recognized decades ago,Verrocchio’s David is revolutionary because of the openness of both its design and psychology: the figure encourages the viewer to move around it and engage with the subject’s emotional state (far more than Donatello’s earlier David [Figure 16]).70 But a technical examination of the David suggests that Verrocchio may not have been greatly experienced in working with bronze when he cast it.71 Piero’s sons Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici later sold Verrocchio’s David to the Signoria in 1476,72 and this change in location led the artist to make certain compositional changes to the work. For its new position in the Palazzo della Signoria at the entrance to the Sala dell’Orologio (known today as the Sala dei Gigli), a smaller base was required,73 so the artist recast the head of Goliath and placed it between the legs of David (previously the head of Goliath was probably placed on David’s proper right side [Figure 17], farther back and in profile).74 Verrocchio was still experimenting as a bronze caster in the late 1460s, but he was experienced enough to receive the commission to make the bronze candelabrum (Figure  18) for the audience chamber of the Florentine town hall, dated May and June 1468 on its base.75 The candlestick was made of sections separately cast in bronze.The artist began by modeling core material in at least three, and possibly as many as six, individual sections in wax over clay (an approach that meant that any flaws in these sections would not make it necessary to cast the entire work again), strengthened by an armature of spiral iron

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Figure 15.  Andrea del Verrocchio. David, bronze, mid-to-late-­1460s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 16.  Donatello. David, bronze, between c. 1425 and 1460, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 17.  Andrea del Verrocchio. David, bronze, mid-to-late-­1460s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 18.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Candelabrum, bronze, 1468, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Open access.

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wire wound around an iron rod, visible at the top. When the different sections had been cast, they were soldered together and pushed over the iron rod.76 In 1466–67 Verrocchio won the competition to make the bronze Christ and St.Thomas (Figure 5) for Orsanmichele, one of his most celebrated sculptures,77 a commission that the Medici family was behind once again. Verrocchio was chosen to make the palla in 1468, and in that same year he was an unsuccessful contestant for the commission to paint seven Virtues for the audience chamber of the Palazzo della Mercanzia.78 There is considerable scholarly debate as to if, when, and to what extent Verrocchio worked as a painter.79 But contemporary sources make clear that he was a celebrated painter. Giovanni Rucellai refers to Verrocchio as a painter, as well as a sculptor, in his Zibaldone in 1457;80 a claim repeated by Benedetto Dei in his 1470 chronicle, Memorie Istoriche;81 Giovanni Santi in his rhymed chronicle, composed between 1484 and 1487;82 Ugolino Verino in his De Epigrammi of c. 1484;83 Gauricus in his De Sculptura of 1504;84 and the anonymous author of the sixteenth-­century Anonimo Magliabechiano.85 Some documents supplement these written sources. As we have seen, inventories of Verrocchio’s workshops in Florence and Venice drawn up after his death record ten paintings left in the workshops,86 while a list of works for which the Medici still owed payment upon Verrocchio’s death includes three paintings by the artist (a portrait of Lucrezia Donati and standards for Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici).87 There also exists the aforementioned document of 1485 that records a nearly completed altarpiece for San Zeno in Pistoia (Figure 8), the commission for which had been given to Verrocchio, though his authorship of the completed painting is often questioned.88 According to Vasari, Verrocchio executed two large-­scale paintings: the San Salvi Baptism, c. 1460s and 1470s (Figure 7) and the Madonna and Child with Saints, c. 1472 (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest). Vasari also records that Verrocchio painted (or at least designed) frescoes – none of which are extant – writing that the artist “made the cartoons of a battle of the nudes, drawn very well with the pen, to be painted with colors on a wall.”89 Of the two surviving paintings, none can be wholly attributed to Verrocchio, and it has been shown convincingly that Verrocchio very likely had no hand at all in the execution of the Budapest Madonna and Child with Saints.90 David Alan Brown asserts that Verrocchio took up painting only late in his career,91 a claim based on a record dating from 1472 for the artist’s entry into the Compagnia di San Luca, a religious and social group. Membership in the Compagnia di San Luca often followed entry into the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the painter’s guild in Florence, and Verrocchio’s name is registered in the company’s Libro Rosso as “Andrea del Verrocchio painter and sculptor.”92 However, the 1472 note is a record not of entry into the Compagnia di San Luca, but of Verrocchio having received credit for the payment of fees to offer candles on Candlemas, thus indicating his prior membership. In other words, the note does not record his beginnings as a painter.93

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Documents suggest that Verrocchio was working as a painter from the late 1450s. Rucellai’s record of him referring to him as “schultore e pittore” relates to a work or some works Verrocchio made for the merchant’s house and dates from 1457.94 The record for Lorenzo de’ Medici’s painted tournament banner for the joust of 1469 (included in a list of works drawn up by the artist’s brother, Tommaso, in 1495–96) indicates that the artist’s skills as a painter were sought by that date.95 And, as we have seen, another record of 1469 indicates that Verrocchio had tried but failed to obtain the commission to paint a series of Virtues for the Arte della Mercanzia. He received a payment for a design of Faith (generally associated with a drawing attributed to Biagio d’Antonio), but the execution of the pictures was given to Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo.96 The 1470s – the decade that this book concentrates on – was a particularly productive decade for Verrocchio and one in which he worked in many different media, including sculpture and painting. In 1471 he won a competition to make sculptures for the choir of the Duomo, though this was never completed.97 On the occasion of the state visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, son of the ruler of Milan, in that same year, Lorenzo de’ Medici made Verrocchio chief designer of festival decorations for the family palace. The artist also carried out permanent sculptural decorations for the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici and at Villa Medici at Careggi, which included his bronze Putto with a Dolphin (Figure  19).98 Early in the 1470s he was commissioned by Lorenzo and his

Figure 19.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Putto and a Dolphin, bronze, c. 1480–85, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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brother Giuliano de’ Medici to make the tomb of their father and uncle, Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici, the sons of Cosimo, in San Lorenzo (Figure  9).99 In 1475 he painted a tournament standard for Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano.100 After the murder of Giuliano and the attempted murder of Lorenzo in 1478, Verrocchio was commissioned to make wax votive statues of Lorenzo, which were dressed in Lorenzo’s clothing and placed in churches throughout the city.101 Around 1474 he was requested to paint the Madonna di Piazza altarpiece in Pistoia (Figure 8), also a Medici commission.102 The city of Carrara commissioned a painted banner from the artist in 1474, which has not survived.103 In 1476 Verrocchio won a competition to make the marble cenotaph for Niccolò Forteguerri in the cathedral of Pistoia (Figure  20), which he worked on c. 1481–83 and left unfinished at his death.104 In the late 1470s he was awarded a commission to make one of the reliefs for the Silver Altar of the Florentine Baptistery (Figure 21).105 And Verrocchio’s brother, Tommaso, and Vasari record that the artist restored a classical sculpture of Marsyas (now lost) in porphyry for Lorenzo de’ Medici in the 1470s or 1480s.106

Figure 20.  Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop. Forteguerri cenotaph, marble, 1481–88, San Zeno, Pistoia. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 21.  Silver Altar, silver and enameled relief, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

In the early 1480s Verrocchio won the prestigious competition overseen by the Venetian Senate to make an equestrian statue in honor of the condottiere, Bartolomeo Colleoni (Figure 6).107 The artist died in 1488 before the Colleoni monument was completed, but work was far enough along that models had been made. Alessandro Leopardi took over in 1490 after Verrocchio’s death and finished the sculpture in 1496.108 Throughout his career, but especially in the 1470s, Verrocchio moved between sculpture and painting. The ease with which he did this must be understood within the context of Florence’s peculiar guild system. In spite of the existence of statutes limiting crafts to members of a guild, there is considerable evidence of artists flouting the rules and working in particular crafts when they were not members of the guild. This is especially apparent in the case of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild of physicians, apothecaries, spice merchants, and painters. Botticelli did not join that guild until 1499, a quarter of a century after he began working as a painter. Perugino, too, entered the guild in 1499, after practicing as a painter for many years.109 And Ghirlandaio entered the guild in 1472, when he had already been an active painter for some time, at least since 1470 or 1471 and possibly from the last years of the 1460s.110 There are cases also of artists joining more than one guild. Giovanni di Ser Giovanni (Lo Scheggia, the brother of Masaccio), for instance, joined the painters’ guild in 1433, but shortly before that he had become a member of the Arte dei Legnaioli (the woodworkers’ guild).111 The flexibility

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of Florence’s guild system allowed Verrocchio to move between media, forming part of the background to his creation of some of most innovative works of the Italian Renaissance. I.2  VERNACULAR CULTURE IN VERROCCHIO’S FLORENCE

This study addresses the crucial question of why Verrocchio adopted his self-­ conscious attitude to art making and what the cultural conditions were that enabled it to happen. In part, the conclusion reached is that it was due to Verrocchio’s experimental attitude, which was itself the result of the competitive and innovative market in Florence. But another important reason was the rich and sophisticated vernacular culture of fifteenth-­century Florence, which provided Verrocchio with a foundation on which to develop his theoretical concerns, and a knowledgeable audience who could appreciate the artist’s ideas.112 The men of Florence were highly literate (perhaps more than any other community in Europe).113 The sons of most fifteenth-­century artisans, shopkeepers, and laborers were educated – most could read and write, and they kept their own accounts.114 Proof of this literacy, and also an interest in vernacular literature, can be found in the hundreds of surviving zibaldoni, popular compilations of literature and philosophical and religious tracts that were owned (and often commissioned) by citizens, including from the lower ranks of society.115 The content of artisans’ zibaldoni and inventories of artists’ goods indicate that many of them were literate and fond of contemporary vernacular literature, as well as classical literature translated into the vernacular. An inventory made after Verrocchio’s death records that he had in his possession the Triumphs of Petrarch, the Heroides of Ovid, a book referred to as the Cento novelle that can be safely identified as Boccaccio’s Decameron,116 a Bible in the vernacular, and an item referred to as “un moscino in forma.”117 The last has not been identified, but it has been suggested that it might be Leon Battista Alberti’s neo-­Latin Musca (a paradoxical encomium on a fly), Lucian’s Mosca (the model for Alberti’s Musca), a Latin translation of the Greek poet Moschus, or the pseudo-­Virgilian Culex, which could have been known under the title Mosca in an Italian edition.118 However, the description “in forma” indicates that the book was printed,119 making all of these texts unlikely candidates.120 Instead, as Luca Boschetto suggested to me, it is more plausibly the popular chivalric prose tale Guerrino il Meschino written by Andrea da Barberino, a Florentine about whom little is known, except that he recited compositions on the benches outside the church of San Martino a Vescovo in Florence, an important site for such performances in the early fifteenth century.121 An inventory contemporary with that of Verrocchio’s refers to the story as “meschino,” which is close to “moscino.”122 Guerrino il Meschino was extremely popular in the

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fifteenth century, especially among artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants, who transcribed the story many times.123 As Dario Covi has noted, the books listed in Verrocchio’s inventory are unusual in their predominantly secular subject matter. Although Verrocchio’s near-­contemporaries the Maiano brothers ­possessed more books (twenty-­eight in total), most of these were religious texts.124 Based on inventories we have of artists’ possessions, it would appear that artists tended to have more texts with sacred content than profane,125 though Filippino Lippi and Luca della Robbia, like Verrocchio, owned more secular texts.126 Vernacular translation made available classical literature to a wide audience, including those from lower social levels.127 Indeed, the extent of these translation efforts concerned many because of the concomitant effort to civilize the unlettered, which was perceived as a vulgarization of the ancients. In a story from an anonymous late thirteenth-­century Novellino, this is treated explicitly when a philosopher has a vision in which the goddess of knowledge and her ladies are in a bordello. When the philosopher asks the goddess what she is doing there, she responds: “[Y]ou are the one who put us here” (i.e., by translating texts into the vernacular). The tale concludes with the warning: “[Y]ou should know that all things are not licit to every person.”128 References in the writings of, and books owned by, the laboring classes indicate that they gained some knowledge of classical literature and philosophy through references in vernacular sources. Dante’s Commedia and the many vernacular commentaries on it, for instance, which were owned and read by members of all social rank, frequently discuss ancient texts and ideas.129 The barber-­poet Burchiello, though born into poverty, makes several references to Latin authors in his sonnets.130 In a tenzone (poetic exchange) addressed to Alberti, for instance, the barber-­poet refers in a complex and imaginative way to a line from Virgil’s Georgics.131 In another sonnet he refers to the competition between Sculpture and Liberal Education in Lucian.132 (As well shall see, examples of Burchiello’s poetry were included in the zibaldoni made in Verrocchio’s workshop.) Evidence suggests, however, that Burchiello was extraordinary; most barbers were not literate.133 Many artists, on the other hand, were not only literate, they were even participants in the vernacular literary culture of their day, some as composers of poetry, including Verrocchio. Evidence for Verrocchio’s literary ambitions consists of some lines of poetry inscribed in the artist’s hand on sheets of drawings by him (Figure  22).134 In this, Verrocchio can be placed in the company of other artists-­poets. Orcagna, for instance, was a poet as well as sculptor and painter. Brunelleschi composed sonnets and had close ties with vernacular poets like Burchiello and Giovanni Gherardo da Prato, with whom he exchanged sonnets (tenzoni).135 Brunelleschi probably authored the Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo (story of the fat woodcarver) – one of the most famous

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Figure 22.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Study of a Standing Bishop and Other Figures, verso, pen and wash, c. 1474–85, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. National Galleries of Scotland.

stories from Quattrocento Florence, which concerns a woodcarver who is tricked into believing that he is no longer himself and has become another person.136 Bertoldo di Giovanni wrote a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the style of Burchiello. And Andrea del Sarto allegedly composed a nonsense poem modeled on the pseudo-­Homeric Batracomiomachia.137 Brunelleschi is particularly pertinent to this discussion as a sonnet attributed to him is contained in one of the zibaldoni produced in Verrocchio’s bottega.138 Brunelleschi’s associations with volgare culture challenge the picture presented by Antonio Manetti in his fifteenth-­century vita of Brunelleschi as a humanist-architect.139 As Giuliano Tanturli has explored, while humanists celebrated Brunelleschi after his death, during his lifetime the architect lived in the vernacular, not the humanist, world and most humanists neglected, even disdained, the architect during his lifetime.140 In fact, the divide scholars have long assumed existed between vernacular and humanist literary culture is not accurate, as the work of Christopher Celenza, among others, has demonstrated.141

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Not all knowledge was acquired through reading; there is considerable evidence too of the importance of oral culture in Florence, providing ample opportunity for audiences to become knowledgeable about a range of topics, even if they were illiterate.142 Readings of Dante were regularly given in churches and at the Duomo, where men (and women) from many levels of society were in attendance.143 Two anecdotes in Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle suggest that Dante’s Divine Comedy was well known among the laboring classes and that his works were sung. In one of the tales, Dante passes the workshop of a blacksmith singing some of his verses.144 According to Sacchetti, Dante rebukes the man for singing the Divine Comedy, rather than reciting it as he had intended it and so ruining it. In the other tale by Sacchetti, an ass driver recites Dante’s works while striking his animal’s back.145 The practice of oral recitation among the popolani is suggested also by a letter from Petrarch to Boccaccio in which Petrarch deplores the performances of the ignorant masses in shops and in the marketplace. Oral recitation of the “three crowns” was clearly still common in the Quattrocento, as indicated by a comment in a letter from Niccolò Niccoli to Leonardo Bruni saying that he would remove Dante from the ranks of the learned and leave him with the fullers and millers.146 Florentines would have had access to vernacular tales and sonnets through performances at churches and in piazze. Here, on benches outside churches, popular poets and singers performed for informal audiences made up of every stratum of Florentine society, from the richest nobleman to the poorest laborer. These performances took place for half the days of every week, sometimes lasting several days in succession.147 Entertainers recited their own works or those of others, often accompanied by a simple melody played on a viola or chitarra, and the most talented performers were artisans, often shoemakers or barbers, like Burchiello. It was not only members of the popolani who participated in this vernacular culture. Members of many of Florence’s leading families wrote popular poetry, including Cosimo de’ Medici himself, whose popular poems, as Dale Kent has pointed out, have gone largely unnoticed.148 Patricians invited the popular poets who performed in piazze into their homes: in 1445 Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici chose Burchiello as the star performer for his entertainment of international ambassadors at his house in Rome, and in 1459 when the Medici held a dinner in honor of the young Galeazzo Maria Sforza, son of the duke of Milan, the vernacular poet Antonio di Guido provided the entertainment.149 As Franco Franceschi has convincingly shown, there were many meeting places where vernacular culture was on display in Florence.150 At these gatherings artists would have had an opportunity to become informed about and exchange ideas about philosophy and literature. Perhaps the most famous site was the bottega of the barber-­poet Burchiello on via Calimala, where men of different classes mixed. Here, humanists like Alberti, Leonardo

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Dati, and Cristoforo Landino allegedly rubbed shoulders with the barber and other members of the popolani and listened to Burchiello perform his satirical sonnets.151 In another bottega, that of cartolaio (book dealer) Vespasiano da Bisticci, men of state and well-­known humanists such as Donato Acciaiuoli, Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Giannozzo Manetti, and George of Trebizond were frequent visitors (despite the fact that Vespasiano was from a different social background). These men came together to discuss ideas in Vespasiano’s bookshop and to read the content of books before they were sold.152 Apparently visits to shops were not unusual. In the story of the Grasso Legnaiolo, the fat wood carver refers to the merchant, Giovanni Rucellai, who appears not to have recognized him, as “he who is always in my shop.”153 In fact, the premise of the story depends upon Grasso’s failure to attend an informal gathering made up of men of letters and artists at the house of Tommaso Pecori, and thus offers evidence for such meetings. Proof of Verrocchio’s engagement with vernacular literary culture – apart from the books recorded in the inventory of his goods made after his death and in the lines of poetry in his hand – can be found in the commonplace books made in his workshop. One of these (Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 1591) records that it was made in Verrocchio’s workshop. The book is a compilation of classical and contemporary writings (all in the vernacular): a letter from Seneca to Lucillus, king of Sicily, on behalf of the Romans, and Seneca’s treatise on the four cardinal virtues; the Evangel of Saint John by Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti; the Canzone alla Vergine by Antonio Megli, who was herald to the Signoria; a treatise on nobility by Buonaccorso di Montemagno; Aesop’s Fables; Geta and Birria; three sonnets by Stefano Finiguerra known as Lo Za, relation (possibly uncle) of the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra;154 and a response to one of these poems by the barber-­poet Burchiello. The illustrations in the book (Figures  23 and 25) do not resemble Verrocchio’s graphic style, so the artist must have employed assistants to carry out the decoration, whose identities are not known.155 But Verrocchio’s close involvement in the making of the book is suggested by his (probably close) acquaintance with the scribe of this manuscript, Piero dei Ricci: a document of 1484 records that Verrocchio and Guido di Piero dei Ricci, the son of the scribe, acted together as witnesses on a deed.156 Indeed, the connection becomes closer if Dario Del Puppo’s proposal is correct that the scribe of the manuscript was Guido, rather than Piero.157 Another manuscript, today in the Biblioteca Nazionale (ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87) and which closely resembles ms. 1591, was probably executed in Verrocchio’s workshop too. Like ms. 1591, the Biblioteca Nazionale manuscript includes excerpts from Aesop’s Fables, the story of Geta and Birria, and sonnets by Burchiello and others (including Brunelleschi and Alberti).158 Although the drawings in these manuscripts appear to have been executed by different artists, the illustrations for Geta and Birria and Aesop’s Fables are so closely

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Figure 23.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Illustration from Geta and Birria, pen and ink and wash, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, ms. 1591, fol. 56r. Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. Photo: Donato Pineider.

related to those in ms. 1591 (Figures 23–26) that a connection seems certain. Moreover, some of the illustrations for Aesop’s Fables in ms. 1591 were pricked (Figure 25), suggesting they were copied.159 A third manuscript can be associated with Verrocchio’s workshop: another codex in the Biblioteca Riccardiana (ms. 2805) that features Geta and Birria and Aesop’s Fables, both of which are illustrated, but in black and white, not color (whereas ms. 1591 and ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87 have illustrations in color).160 The drawings for Geta and Birria in ms. 2805 (Figure 27) are closest to those in ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87 (Figure 24), rather than ms. 1591 (Figure 23), and the similarities suggest one was copied from the other. Ms. 2805 was probably copied from ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87, rather than the other way around (because the illustrations in ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87 are much more refined), or both may have been copied from another manuscript. There are differences between ms. 2805 and Magliabechiano XXI, 87: ms. 2805 has a final image that is not in Magliabechiano XXI, 87, and 2805 does not include portraits of Geta and Birria. In the section with Aesop’s Fables the illustrator executed the same number of images with identical choices in subject matter and composition as ms. 1591 (Figures 25 and 28).161 Nevertheless, they do deviate at times, and their styles suggest that probably different artists made them. Despite this, their source in the same workshop is suggested by their common stock of scenes and the use of the same compositions. Evidence for the shared origin of these

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 24.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Illustration from Geta and Birria, pen and ink and wash, Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87 fol. 75r. Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze.

Figure 25.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Illustration from Aesop’s Fables, pen and ink and wash, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, ms. 1591, fol. 125v. Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. Photo: Donato Pineider.

books is provided by the fact that ms. 1591 and ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87 share the same watermarks; and for all three books the size of the pages is almost identical, and there is a correspondence of the same words on the pages.162

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Figure 26.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Illustration from Aesop’s Fables, pen and ink and wash, Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87, fol. 20v. Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze.

Figure 27.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Illustration from Geta and Birria, pen and ink and wash, Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 2805, fol. 5r. Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. Photo: Donato Pineider.

Verrocchio Experimentalist

Figure 28.  Workshop of Verrocchio. Illustration from Aesop’s Fables, pen and ink and wash, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, ms. 2805, fol. 51v. Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. Photo credit: Donato Pineider.

Although Verrocchio appears not to have carried out the decoration of the manuscripts made in his workshop personally, he may well have directed their illustration and writing, serving as cartolaio. Normally, a cartolaio would have instructed the scribe to leave room for the illustrations, which would be inserted later, but in the case of ms. 1591, the writing was executed after the drawings.163 This suggests that whoever oversaw the drawings (which I am arguing was Verrocchio) may have acted as cartolaio. It was not uncommon for illuminators to be cartolai: the illuminator Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico was a cartolaio, at least in his early years;164 Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato and his brother Monte acted both as cartolai and as illuminators;165 and the illuminator Bartolomeo di Domenico di Guido became a cartolaio after working for one of the most important Florentine cartolai, Zanobi di Mariano.166 Furthermore, the stories contained in the books made in Verrocchio’s workshop were well known among artists and artisans, supporting the possibility of Verrocchio having directed their production. The tale of Geta and Birria was sometimes attributed to Filippo Brunelleschi,167 and Leonardo was later recorded as possessing a copy of it (as well as Burchiello’s sonnets and Aesop’s Fables).168 The owners of the zibaldoni made in Verrocchio’s bottega are not

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known, but the Pieri family’s coat of arms is emblazoned on the flyleaf of ms. 1591.169 On the basis of his writing, the original owner of ms. 1591 may have been a humble artisan. The content of the zibaldoni made in Verrocchio’s bottega and the books recorded in his possession provide a rich discursive context and one within which we should consider Verrocchio’s works. Whereas his older contemporary, Donatello, is sometimes regarded as a quasi-­humanist and his sculptures read as expressions of concepts current among humanist elites of his day,170 Verrocchio tends not to be considered in an intellectual context at all. This is no doubt due in large part to Vasari’s vita of the artist, which ridicules him as the petulant sulk who threw away his paintbrushes, never to paint again, when he saw the divine angel created by his pupil Leonardo. Certainly Vasari’s account colored Kenneth Clark’s assessment to such an extent that he declared of Verrocchio’s painted figures: “[they] do not stir the imagination.Their forms are metallic, their colours unsubtle and bright. The world they create for us is the prosaic world of a practical man.”171 Rather than proposing that he was a humanist, this study will explore how Verrocchio engaged with the vernacular culture of his day.172 By considering Verrocchio’s works in the light of vernacular literature, we also gain a deeper appreciation for the mutual dependence of the visual and literary arts during the Renaissance. What emerges is a sense of how works of art were an opportunity to explore important social, cultural, and religious topics. How those objects were received tells us how works of art were not closed conveyors of meaning, but sites of interest and inspiration (just as Christine Smith has argued that early Renaissance architecture was for humanists).173 Artists of later eras left a wealth of theoretical writing. The challenge of investigating the thinking of artists who, like Verrocchio, left no treatise remains controversial, though pressing. I will argue for the power of techniques and materials as modes of representation and signification in Renaissance culture, instead of locating ideas only in texts. I read Verrocchio’s unusual techniques of making alongside contemporary writings with which he was familiar to provide a theory where a treatise is lacking. In uncovering the thinking in his art, we can extend backwards in time the reach of historian of science Pamela H. Smith’s paradigm of “artisanal epistemology,” the generating of abstract knowledge through material procedures of making, which it has been assumed began in Italy only after Verrocchio’s time.174 In this way, I hope that this study of Verrocchio will appeal to those interested in the history of materials and of materiality and artisan expertise.175 By paying close attention to the ways that Verrocchio used his materials and techniques to make his objects “speak,” we come to a better understanding of materiality during the Renaissance. My final aim is to use these novel methods in the service of an appropriate materialist intellectual history of late-fifteenth-century artistic practice.

1

VERROCCHIO’S INGENUITY

Throughout his career, Verrocchio demonstrated great inventiveness, evident in the palla (Figures 1–3), as we have seen, and many other works, products of a vibrant mind operating in the stimulating environment of fifteenth-­century Florence, a city where innovation was prized. For his monumental bronze sculpture Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 5), which Verrocchio worked on for much of his career (1467 [modern style]–83), the artist faced the challenge of fitting two life-­size bronze statues into a pre-­existing niche on the exterior of Orsanmichele (Figure  29). The site was one of the most important civic and religious buildings in Florence. All of the major city guilds commissioned paintings or statues with their patron saints for the niches on the building’s exterior piers. Commissioned by the Università della Mercanzia – the commercial tribunal of Florence  – Verrocchio’s sculpture was made for a space that had earlier held one statue, Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse (Figure  30; the Mercanzia purchased the niche from the Parte Guelfa  – for whom Donatello’s statue was made  – who were in financial difficulty). As a result of the limitations of the site of display, Verrocchio chose to cast his figures as two relief sculptures. Despite the monumental appearance they exhibit when viewed frontally, they are just shallow shells (Figures 31, 46, 111 and 112). Other sculptures at Orsanmichele, including Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse (Figure  30) and group sculptures such as Nanni di Banco’s Four Crowned Martyrs (c. 1416, Orsanmichele, Florence), were made in the round or very nearly so. Furthermore, each of Verrocchio’s figures was cast in bronze in 35

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Figure 29.  Orsanmichele, Florence. Fourteenth century. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 30.  Donatello. Saint Louis of Toulouse, gilt bronze, 1418–22, Santa Croce, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 31.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1476–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail of reverse of Thomas. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico e Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

a single pour – a feat of which Renaissance bronze sculptors were particularly proud.1 Verrocchio’s achievement in casting his statues in a single pour can be appreciated by examining the backs – each features a large block of metal at its base (Figures 31 and 46). As Massimo Leoni noted during the sculpture’s restoration in the 1990s, the figures’ bases suggest that the molten metal encountered a significant amount of turbulence during the casting phase, pointing to the difficulties Verrocchio faced in making them.2 These difficulties are visible only on the reverse sides; the fronts of the figures give no indication of the tremendous skill, and potential for failure, that Verrocchio overcame in casting his sculpture.3 Verrocchio demonstrated considerable ingenuity, too, in making the tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici (Figure 14) in San Lorenzo, Florence, which he began sometime after 1456.4 For this commission he faced the challenge of making a final resting place that was appropriately magnificent, but not ostentatious, for a very public figure, the quasi-­ruler of Florence. The result, as Andrew Butterfield has pointed out, “is unlike any other [tomb] in Florence,” both formally and technically.5 It consists of a tomb (Figure  32), a stone structure positioned in the

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Figure 32.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici, black and white marble, c. 1456–67, San Lorenzo, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo – Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut.

crypt below the church, set around a large pillar, which supports the vaulting of the crypt. Above this is a tomb slab (Figure 14), which is visible in the floor of the church’s transept crossing. Although tomb slabs were common in Florence,6 Cosimo’s is much larger than is typical, and its design – in the form of a circle  – and the combination of materials used for it are unique. The tomb itself was made from black and white marble and the tomb slab was made from white marble, red porphyry, serpentine (green porphyry),7 and bronze.8 While marble was commonly used for Florentine tombs, porphyry and bronze were not.9 Furthermore, the porphyry rota in Cosimo’s tomb is unusually large.10 Porphyry was an extremely rare and precious material, and it was notoriously difficult to work. It was not until the sixteenth century that artists in Florence mastered the skills for hardening steel in order to carve it (the Romans had specially hardened steel tools, but the knowledge of how they had done this had been lost).11 In the fifteenth century, artists working with porphyry were forced to use tools such as discs, probably of copper, attached to a drill and used with abrasives like powdered emery or diamonds embedded in the metal; reciprocal saws used by two people; picchierelli – double-­ headed axes; or tools made from stone or soft metal, as Egyptian sculptors had done centuries before, all in a time-­consuming process.12 Despite the difficulties of working with porphyry,Verrocchio used it again in his tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici (Figure 9), also in San Lorenzo, made

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 33.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of turtle, bronze. Alinari Archives, Florence.

c. 1472. Here he faced the sarcophagus using porphyry fragments (as is evident from the variation in markings and colors),13 cutting them into pieces and cleverly disguising the joins behind decorative bronze work. But the artist’s ingenuity did not rest there. For the bronze turtles on which the sarcophagus and marble plinth rest (Figure 33) and for the extraordinarily accurate plant forms in the bronze wreaths (Figure 34) that decorate both faces of the tomb, the artist appears to have made life casts from nature.14 Furthermore, the bronze rope above the tomb (Figure 35) is an impressive feat in bronze casting. To make it,Verrocchio would have had to keep the metal flowing for a long distance through thin passages.15 The tomb itself is also structurally impressive, built within an arch separating two spaces: the Old Sacristy and the Chapel of Cosmas and Damian (Figure 36). The artist’s inventiveness is evident too in his polychromed wood Crucifix (Figure  11), made for an unknown location, for which Verrocchio did not adopt the conventional approach to working with wood. He began by taking limewood,16 which he hollowed out to a precise width – a process that by this date was virtually obsolete in Florence17 – and tied the two pieces together with cord, an unusual approach to assemblage. The head, chest, and shoulders were made separately from cork and attached to the body with a method Verrocchio used in making armor. And instead of carving into the wood to define his figure’s features,Verrocchio modeled them up with layers of stucco.18

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Figure 34.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of wreath, bronze. Alinari Archives, Florence.

Figure 35.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of rope and diamond resting on a bowl of acanthus leaves with two large sea shells attached, bronze. Alinari Archives, Florence.

Verrocchio’s Beheading of St John the Baptist relief (Figure  13), which he worked on between 1477 and 1483, likewise departs from convention. It was made for the Silver Altar of the Florentine Baptistery (Figure 21) and commissioned by the Arte di Calimala, the cloth merchants’ guild, which was responsible for the maintenance and decoration of the Florentine Baptistery.19 Many of the greatest Florentine goldsmiths of the fifteenth century made reliefs for it, including Antonio Pollaiuolo,Verrocchio’s chief rival. Unlike his contemporaries working on the Silver Altar,Verrocchio made all of his figures separately and in repoussé. Pollaiuolo used repoussé for his panel too (Figure 37), but his

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 36.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, porphyry, marble, and bronze, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

Figure 37.  Antonio del Pollaiuolo. Birth of Saint John the Baptist, silver on wood support, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 38.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Detail of Youth with Salver, silver. Opera di S. Maria del Fiore/A. Quattrone.

was made from a single sheet of silver, save for the figure of the Visitor stepping forward.20 By contrast, each of Verrocchio’s figures was made from several pieces of silver, hammered and soldered together.21 The Youth with the Salver was made from seven pieces (Figure 38); the Captain with the Mace was made from six (Figure 39). Moreover, the soldering of the figures is of the highest quality. On the Executioner (Figure 40), for instance, it is disguised along the lines of his muscles.22 Repoussé enabled Verrocchio to manipulate the position of each figure so that light from the silver background reflected onto them, penetrating the tiny details added in finishing through hammering, punchwork, and chasing. The other reliefs for the Silver Altar, on the other hand, were made in the fewest pieces necessary.23 Verrocchio’s drawings demonstrate further proof of his innovations. Throughout his career he excelled as a draftsman, producing early and exquisite examples of drawings made as finished works of art and sketches for works to be executed in different media (a recent development in drawing).24 Verrocchio was also early to take up sketching, usually in pen and ink, to work out designs. Surviving examples suggest that some of these may have been part of a sketchbook, either for the artist’s own use or for members of

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 39.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Detail of Captain with Mace, silver. Opera di S. Maria del Fiore/A. Quattrone.

Figure 40.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Detail of Executioner, silver. Opera di S. Maria del Fiore/A. Quattrone.

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Figure 41.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Head of a Woman, recto, charcoal and black chalk with highlights in white chalk, mid-to-late-­1470s, British Museum, London, 1895-9-15-785. Copyright. The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

his workshop.25 In addition, Verrocchio was highly innovative from a technical standpoint, introducing sfumato (for instance, Figure 10), done with charcoal or black chalk, a technique commonly attributed to his pupil Leonardo da Vinci.26 Though black chalk had been used as a drawing instrument for some time,Verrocchio was one of the first Renaissance artists to recognize the potential of black chalk to create a sculptural tonal range in drawings.27 For his Head of a Woman (Figure 41),28 the artist began by outlining his figure with charcoal, which was reworked in black chalk. To create the subtle tonal effects, especially around the eyes, nose, and chin, he smudged and wetted the black chalk with a brush. He also added highlights in white chalk, visible especially around the eyes.29 Another example of Verrocchio’s innovations is his Head of a Woman (Figure  42),30 a silverpoint drawing on orange prepared paper that appears to be an early example of a drawing intended as a finished work of art. The artist would have begun by brushing the blank surface of his paper with finely ground chalk, bone gesso, or lead white tinted with pigment and bound with gelatin and hide glue (four or five layers of coating were recommended).When the paper had dried, it was burnished to produce a smooth and even surface.31 On to this Verrocchio drew with a thin, pointed stylus of silver. As

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 42.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Head of a Woman, silverpoint on orange prepared paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Cabinet des Dessins, 18.965. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

the point was applied, particles of silver were embedded in the paper’s grainy surface. Over time, the silver in Verrocchio’s drawing tarnished and the lines have become darker. As the technique of silverpoint was so limiting in terms of tonal range,Verrocchio added areas of highlighting with black and gray ink and white lead applied with a brush.32 Although it appears to have been used as the model for a figure in a painting,33 the drawing’s exquisite technique suggests that it was intended as a work of art in its own right. Indeed, remnants of mounting on the verso indicate that this was one of the examples that Vasari kept in his famous drawing album, his Libro di disegno.34 Verrocchio’s paintings are no less experimental. For his Baptism of Christ (Figure 7), both tempera and an oil-­based medium were used.35 The discrepancy in technique, along with differences in style, has led some scholars to suggest that at least three painters, and perhaps as many as five, collaborated on the Baptism and that it was executed in different stages.36 There are no documents regarding the painting’s commission.37 Antonio Natali has plausibly proposed that the commission of the altarpiece may have gone to Verrocchio as a result of his older brother Simone’s position as abbot of San Salvi, which occurred in 1468, 1471–73,

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and 1475–78, and that Simone’s broken tenure might explain the discrepancies in technique in the painting. This would suggest that the painting was carried out in separate campaigns, one beginning c. 1468 that was led by Verrocchio, when most of the composition was laid down in tempera, followed by a second campaign c. 1476, when the painting was completed and retouched using an oil-­based medium over the initial design that had been laid down by Verrocchio. Leonardo probably carried out the second campaign using oil.38 Despite the hesitation of many scholars to assign much (if anything) of the Baptism to Verrocchio, his personal involvement, not only for the finished areas in tempera, but also in the design that was later painted in oil, has been convincingly demonstrated by Jill Dunkerton, who has pointed out how the second campaign in oil was laid down over areas well advanced in tempera that can be attributed to Verrocchio.39 Furthermore, if Leonardo was an assistant in Verrocchio’s workshop in the mid-­ 1470s – which seems likely – Verrocchio may well have supervised the use of oil in the painting, even if he did not execute these sections himself. Verrocchio’s innovations as a painter can be seen also in his choice of support. Apart from conventional wooden panels, the artist painted on paper and on linen. Vasari mentions a “head of a woman, as finished as a drawing could be, painted on paper” that was in the collection of Don Vincenzio Borghini.40 It has not survived, but a painting on paper of Saint Jerome (Figure 43) has

Figure 43.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Head of Saint Jerome, tempera on paper, laid down on panel, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

been convincingly attributed to the artist. Paintings on paper are not unknown from this era. Paintings on paper were not uncommon in the Netherlands, and some of these were imported to Florence.41 The Florentine matriarch Alessandra Strozzi mentions them in a letter of 1460, in which she confuses them with paintings on cloth, but the fact remains that Netherlandish paintings on paper must have been fairly common by this date.42 Furthermore, Cennino Cennini and others mention paintings on paper. They describe how the paper would be oiled (Cennino mentions linseed oil), mounted on a pre-­ existing design (either a painting or model drawing), and an outline made on it through tracing. The tracing paper would be then glued to a panel, the traced lines repeated, and a painting made on top of the design.43 A few surviving examples correspond to this technique of carta lucida. However, Verrocchio’s Saint Jerome does not appear to be an example, because there are no signs that it was mechanically copied from a pre-­existing work. Verrocchio’s intentions in making his Saint Jerome are not known.44 Verrocchio also produced unusual paintings on linen, consisting of drapery studies, executed in gray and white wash (Figure  44).45 While some can be

Figure 44.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Drapery study, brush and gray tempera highlighted with white, on gray prepared linen, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence. Alinari Archives, Florence.

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linked to finished paintings or sculptures, others may have been created as works of art in their own right.46 These works demonstrate an interest in the properties of light and texture, and because of that, it has been suggested that they were made in response to the example of Flemish painting.47 Presumably Verrocchio became acquainted with Flemish paintings on cloth in the Medici collection. The Medici are known to have amassed a substantial collection of such works, which they displayed in their palace and at their villas (indeed, the villa at Careggi was decorated almost exclusively with Netherlandish paintings on cloth, and they were displayed in almost every room),48 though the Netherlandish paintings on cloth do not appear to have been drapery studies.49 In addition to his innovative approach to art making, the breadth of Verrocchio’s expertise in such a wide range of media during the course of his career was remarkable.Vasari praised the artist for this, noting: “[he] was in his day a goldsmith, a master of perspective, a sculptor, a carver, a painter, and a musician.”50 Although it was not unusual to work in more than medium – indeed, one could argue that it was the norm – early sources did highlight the exceptional nature of Verrocchio’s breadth of skill. Giovanni Rucellai, writing in 1457, refers to him as a sculptor and painter.51 Benedetto Dei did too in his chronicle, Memorie Istoriche, of 1470.52 Giovanni Santi in his rhymed chronicle, La vita e le geste di Federico di Montefeltro duca d’Urbino (written between 1484 and 1487), presents Verrocchio as a master of different media, describing him as “the clear source of humanity and inborn gentility that is a bridge to painting and to sculpture, over which he, Verrocchio, passed with skill.”53 In 1488, the year of Verrocchio’s death, Ugolino Verino praised the artist in his De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae, writing: “Nor to you, Lysippus, is Tuscan Verrocchio unequal: whatever painters have, they have drunk from that fountain; almost all those whose fame now circulates through the towns of Tuscany, Verrocchio taught as disciples.”54 And Verino celebrates Verrocchio as a painter and a sculptor in an epigram found in a volume of his Latin verses (1483–91): “Nor is our Verrocchio inferior to Phidias: in this one thing he excels since he paints and melts bronze.”55 Pomponius Gauricus in his De Sculptura (1504) mentions that Verrocchio was highly reputed both as a sculptor and a painter.56 1.1  VERROCCHIO’S WORK BETWEEN AND ACROSS MEDIA

Another feature of Verrocchio’s practice  – and one that has received scant attention from either his contemporaries or art historians – was his tendency to transfer tools and techniques from one medium to another. In preparation for the marble Forteguerri cenotaph (Figure 20),Verrocchio made a small model in terracotta (Figure 45) on which he used a metalpoint stylus and a quill to draw literally into the clay. The technique is visible especially in the definition of the upper figures and the cherub below Christ and in the vague

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 45.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Modello for the Forteguerri cenotaph, terracotta, c. 1476, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. V & A Images, London/Art Resource, NY.

form of the draperies, created with the flick of a stylus.57 The effect achieved is the spontaneous appearance of a graphic sketch, and scholars have marveled at the work’s quality of “scenic dynamism,” to use Günter Passavant’s phrase.58 For his relief of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Figure 13),Verrocchio made a terracotta modello for the figure of the Executioner (Figure 12) in which the artist cut into a slab of clay, rather than modeling up from the background in the usual manner of terracotta sculpture.59 This practice resembles Leon Battista Alberti’s description in his De statua (c. 1466) of sculptors working with marble (but not terracotta), who work only by taking away, and in so doing, they remove “the superfluous to reveal the figure of the man they want which was hidden within a block of marble.”60 In this way,Verrocchio challenges Alberti’s dictum that those working with clay do so by adding and taking away.61 Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 5) defies the limits of sculpture, as it is an object between two and three dimensions. Although they resemble a monumental sculpture in the round when viewed frontally, the statues are reliefs (Figures 31 and 46). Furthermore, their bronze surfaces were carefully prepared to heighten their pictorialism with a high degree of polishing designed to produce a lustrous effect, counterbalanced by the intense chiaroscuro created through the careful positioning of the sculpture within the niche. To achieve

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Figure 46.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail of reverse of Christ. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico e Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

these effects,Verrocchio depended on both two- and three-­dimensional models as he prepared his sculpture, a practice that was often employed by painters, but less common among sculptors.62 A drapery study executed in gray and white wash on linen (Figure  44), convincingly attributed to Verrocchio by Passavant, was preparatory for the figure of Christ.63 Verrocchio would have made his study on linen after a model constructed from wax or clay onto which cloth dipped in gesso was arranged.64 The lights in Verrocchio’s drapery study were presented in broad washes with a more restricted tonal range than the other studies on linen, perhaps referring to its intended object, a bronze sculpture. After studying the fall of light on a three-­dimensional model and expressing what he found in a painting in wash, Verrocchio then translated those effects into a sculpture in bronze.65 In Verrocchio’s drawing of a Head of a Young Woman (Figure 47), the artist blocked out the head as a sculptor would in his initial step before carving in stone or modeling in clay or wax. The artist began by making some general lines down the center of the nose and across the forehead using the sharpened point of black chalk, reinforcing these with darker lines. The role of this

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 47.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Head of a Woman, verso, charcoal on paper with a layer of cream-­colored preparation, mid-to-late-­1470s, British Museum, London, 1895-9-15-785. Copyright. The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

practice, as it was for the sculptor, was to emphasize the major abstract planes of the form.66 And in the case of the palla (Figures 1–3),Verrocchio transferred his talents as a goldsmith. It was created by repoussé, a technique employed for small-­scale works in metal. To make it, Verrocchio hammered copper sheets over a stone mold, soldered the sheets together, and gilded the resulting ball. As we shall see in Chapter 5,Verrocchio’s tendency to transfer techniques can be seen most dramatically in his Crucifix (Figure 11).67 Before turning to possible explanations for the artist’s practice, let us first consider Verrocchio’s workshop. 1.2 VERROCCHIO’S BOTTEGA

Verrocchio, like other Renaissance artists, did not work alone or in isolation. He controlled a large workshop where collaboration was the norm, even in the smallest objects,68 and sometimes his assistants made objects without his direct intervention.69 This has led some scholars to go as far as to assert that Verrocchio was more business manager than artist.70 The picture is also colored by the presence of some celebrated assistants in his bottega, which has meant that some art historians have assigned the most impressive parts of Verrocchio’s

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works – even those objects for which documents name Verrocchio as the artist responsible – to his assistants (especially Leonardo).71 This is most egregious in discussions of Verrocchio’s paintings, where his expertise is often discounted.72 Technical analysis has established, however, that although Verrocchio collaborated with other artists (as other masters did), often giving his assistants a certain amount of autonomy and taking advantage of their particular talents, he does appear to have been the chief designer in the workshop, and he seems to have intervened personally in the most important works (including the paintings) created in his bottega.73 Renaissance workshops often consisted of a master, apprentices, salaried workers, assistants, and “guest” masters.74 The number of assistants in a bottega depended on the types of objects produced there, and workers frequently moved from one workshop to another to find employment.We know from the valuable Ricordanze (1453–75) of painter Neri di Bicci that he had twenty-­two different assistants over nineteen years. Sometimes there were as many as six or seven helpers in his shop at one time, but more often only two or three.75 These fluctuations reflected how busy the painter was at a given moment.76 This was typical: artists tended to enter into contractual agreements when their volume of commissions increased.77 It is not known precisely how large Verrocchio’s workforce was at any one time. For the construction of the copper palla, the commission for which we have the greatest number of documents outlining the nature of the work and the workers involved, Verrocchio depended on many helpers. Over the course of construction, Verrocchio turned to assistants to hammer the copper, construct the armature onto which the palla was shaped, gild and polish the palla and the bottone on which it was placed, operate the bellows, and help with the transportation of materials.78 Assistants and apprentices would have contributed to a variety of duties in Verrocchio’s workshop. Some would have helped in the laborious preparatory stages in the production of paintings, such as applying grounds to panels and grinding and mixing pigments.79 Some may have performed the role of a type of personal assistant, as Bernardino Basso did for Michelangelo. His tasks included running errands, roughing out marble, and serving as a witness for payments Michelangelo made to other assistants.80 Throughout his career Verrocchio collaborated with other artists on projects large (like the palla) and small (drawings, for example).81 Some of these were minor artisans, recorded only once or twice in documents; others went on to become leading artists of the next generation. Verrocchio is also praised explicitly as a teacher of painters by Verino in his De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae, who writes: “whatever painters have, they have drunk from that fountain [i.e., Verrocchio]; almost all those whose fame now circulates through the towns of Tuscany,Verrocchio taught as disciples.”82 Vasari mentions Leonardo,83 Perugino,84 Francesco di Simone,85 Agnolo di Polo,86 Lorenzo

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

di Credi,87 Orsino Benintendi,88 Giovanni Francesco Rustici,89 and an artist referred to as “Nanni Grosso”90 as associates (discepoli or allievi) of Verrocchio, and the presence of some of these artists in Verrocchio’s workshop is supported by documentary evidence. It has been proposed, based on stylistic grounds, that other artists may have been associated with Verrocchio and his workshop, despite a lack of documentary evidence. These include Sandro Botticelli,91 Domenico Ghirlandaio,92 Francesco Botticini,93 Biagio d’Antonio,94 and Pietro Torrigiani.95 Some of them may have been apprenticed to Verrocchio.96 Leonardo appears to have been apprenticed to Verrocchio.97 He very likely began working in the bottega as an apprentice c. 1468,98 and by the 1470s he seems to have been serving as an assistant.Verrocchio and Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, were certainly acquainted by 1465, when Piero served as notary for a dispute between Verrocchio and his brother Tommaso over their paternal inheritance.99 When Leonardo is recorded in the red book of the Compagnia di San Luca in 1472 – for neglecting to pay his member’s subscription and for not having bought his candles for St Luke’s Day100 – he is called dipintore (a term used to refer to both a painter still in training and an independent painter).101 In 1476, when Leonardo was among those charged with having committed sodomy with Jacopo Saltarelli, a seventeen-year-old apprentice in a goldsmith’s workshop, documents of April 9 and June 7 record that he was residing with Verrocchio.102 In the light of these documents and Leonardo’s entry in the libro rosso, it does seem likely that in the 1470s Leonardo was working as a collaborator, rather than an assistant, in Verrocchio’s bottega.103 Vasari mentions Lorenzo di Credi in his vita of Verrocchio, referring to him as the master’s favorite.104 According to a list of claims filed by Tommaso, Verrocchio’s brother, Credi had been a member of Verrocchio’s bottega since at least 1473, when he (Credi) had “painted an altarpiece of Our Lady and other things,” for which he received 26 large florins.105 This is supported by a note by Credi’s mother in her catasto declaration of 1480 that records how her son was a member of Verrocchio’s bottega.106 In 1486 Credi describes himself as a painter employed in Verrocchio’s workshop in a contract for the rental of a house from the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.107 And two notes further demonstrate Credi’s presence in Verrocchio’s workshop in the late 1480s: the first on a sheet from a sketchbook by an artist associated with Verrocchio’s workshop (possibly Francesco di Simone Ferrucci), recording that the anonymous writer of the note was owed money for two putti which he had made for a certain “Giovanni cartolaio” (book seller), based on a design of a putto by Verrocchio that had been lent to him (the writer) by Credi108; and the second, a list of claims filed by Verrocchio’s brother Tommaso in 1490 against Credi after Verrocchio’s death.109 Verrocchio evidently held Credi in great esteem. On his departure for Venice in 1486, Verrocchio left his assistant in charge of the Florentine workshop. Later, he made Credi an heir and executor of his will,

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recommending in his final testament that Credi be appointed by the Signoria to complete the Colleoni monument.110 After his master’s death, Credi signed contracts to arrange for the completion of the Forteguerri cenotaph and the Colleoni monument, both begun by Verrocchio, though Credi is not known to have had any expertise as a sculptor.111 Francesco di Simone was probably not Verrocchio’s pupil, as he was two years older than Verrocchio.112 But the precise nature of the relationship between Francesco di Simone and Verrocchio remains a knotty problem.113 Although Verrocchio appears to have had many assistants in his workshop, they may not have been fixed to his bottega. The sculptor Giuliano d’Andrea, for instance, who is referred to as an assistant of Verrocchio’s in documents dating from 1483 about the installation of the Christ and Saint Thomas, wrote of himself in his 1480 catasto declaration: “I am a sculptor, when I can find the work.”114 Ghirlandaio, who appears to have spent time working in Verrocchio’s bottega based on stylistic evidence, was an itinerant artist during his early career. Jean Cadogan has pointed out that in one version of his 1480 catasto declaration, Ghirlandaio’s father said of Domenico: “he is a painter here and there; he doesn’t keep a workshop.”115 Ghirlandaio’s situation appears to have been typical for the period.116 One of the most intriguing sources for information on Verrocchio’s bottega is the so-­called Verrocchio sketchbook. This collection of twenty-­nine sheets contain sketches, many of which are copies of works by Verrocchio117 and his contemporaries, including Antonio Pollaiuolo,118 Desiderio da Settignano,119 Lorenzo di Credi,120 some sketches of antique cameos,121 and some notes.122 Three of the sheets bear the date 1487,123 while another records the year 1488.124 The author of the sketches and writings has not been identified, but it is generally agreed that the sketchbook was produced in the workshop of Francesco di Simone Ferrucci.125 Verrocchio is mentioned on one of the sheets used for accounts, together with a “lorenzo dipintore,” probably Lorenzo di Credi.126 In addition, several other artists associated with Verrocchio’s bottega are mentioned in inscriptions.127 The notes and sketches contained in the so-­called Verrocchio sketchbook suggest that workers associated with Verrocchio  – like those in other Renaissance workshops – moved frequently between botteghe and that Verrocchio’s workforce was not fixed. The nature of Verrocchio’s relationships with his assistants was therefore varied, and the number of assistants in his workshop fluctuated. What do we know about the physical organization and location of Verrocchio’s workshop? In his earliest years as an independent master (in the 1460s), Verrocchio’s workshop was very probably within, next door to, or at least close by the artist’s family home, which we know was located at the corner of via dell’Agnolo and what is now via de’ Macci, near the church of Sant’Ambrogio.128 This was the home in which Verrocchio had grown up.

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We know little about this property, except that it was four stories high. Here Verrocchio supervised the production of zibaldoni, and, very probably, made his modello for the competition for the marble tabernacle in Orvieto. Documents discovered by Alessandro Cecchi indicate that sometime between 1469 and August 4, 1471, Verrocchio had moved to another house with a workshop in the parish of San Michele Visdomini.129 He kept his old property at Sant’Ambrogio, which he rented out, often to artisans.130 Verrocchio’s second residence was probably that owned by the Bischeri family, which we know from the artist’s catasto declaration of 1480 that he was renting by that date. This was the same workshop previously inhabited by Michelozzo and Donatello, located directly behind the Duomo, on the corner of what is today via dell’Oriuolo.131 Although the buildings Verrocchio rented from the Bischeri family have long since been replaced by the Palazzo Guadagni (now the Palazzo Strozzi di Mantova), we know from the contract drawn up between the owner of the buildings with Donatello that it consisted of a house with a garden, a bottega, and other buildings.132 Drawing from scholarship undertaken on workshops in Florence in general, one can reach some conclusions about Verrocchio’s second bottega. We know, for instance, that rents for workshops were based on the dimensions of the buildings, and because we know that Verrocchio rented the Bischeri casetta for sixteen florins a year, only slightly higher than the average fifteen florins for sculptors, it is likely that his workshop was equivalent in size to that of an average sculptor. (Painters’ workshops, by contrast, were substantially cheaper, at seven florins on average, and presumably smaller.)133 We know that Verrocchio lived above his bottega, probably for tax reasons.134 Other artists did this too, though many kept their workshops distinct from their living quarters.135 Inventories made of Verrocchio’s possessions in 1490, two years after his death, tell us that he was producing paintings and sculpture in marble in the same location.136 We know that he had materials delivered to his workshop for the palla, implying that the hammering of the copper sheets went on there (this is also suggested by the presence of a model of the cupola recorded in a document listing items in his workshops after his death).137 Verrocchio’s mixed-­ media workshop contrasts with those of other artists, who, if they worked in different media, tended to do so in separate workshops. The Maiano brothers, for instance, had three different workshops, according to their 1480 catasto ­declaration: a sculpture workshop on via del Castellaccio (where they made works in marble) and two in the adjoining via dei Servi, one for objects in wood, and the other subletted to the wax worker Orsino di Niccolò.138 Donatello and Michelozzo rented a double workshop on via dei Servi from 1427 until 1433, one for works in marble, the other for casting bronze.139 In a small number of cases, inventories made of artists’ workshops suggest that

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they were producing work in a variety of media, like Verrocchio, but this was not the norm.140 Florentine workshops in general must have been extremely cramped and uncomfortable work spaces, because of the typically small size of the site and the number of goods kept inside – which included materials and tools for future works, completed work waiting to be sold, and models and work in progress141 – but Verrocchio’s must have been exceptionally crowded. The unusual nature of Verrocchio’s bottega, where he carried out work in different materials in the same space (including painting and sculpture), may explain in part his practice of moving between media. 1.3  EXPERIMENTAL FLORENCE

Despite Vasari’s claim that Verrocchio worked with different materials to avoid boredom,142 surely it was due in large part to the vagaries of the art market of fifteenth-­century Florence. In order to survive in this highly competitive world, artists had to be innovative, entrepreneurial risk-takers.143 Renaissance Italy witnessed an explosion in technologies and artistic formats that were either new or revived after many centuries. These included large-­scale bronze casting, large-­scale sculpture in terracotta,144 three-­dimensional marble sculpture divorced from its architectural setting, drawing in ink and in chalk, drawings as finished works of art, various engraving technologies,145 glazed terracotta,146 and painting in oil.147 Many of these developments appeared for the first time on the Italian peninsula in Florence, or were taken up there quickly. Not only were new technologies introduced, Florentine artists (including Verrocchio) were also innovative in the ways they made their objects. Painters such as Alesso Baldovinetti, Benozzo Gozzoli, and Piero Pollaiuolo experimented in oil painting. Baldovinetti’s Annunciation (Figure 48) for the cardinal of Portugal’s chapel in San Miniato al Monte was painted in oil directly on panel, without the conventional preparatory layer, and laid down on oak in the Flemish manner, instead of poplar, which was more typical in Florence.148 When the Pollaiuolo brothers (or perhaps just Piero) painted the altarpiece for same chapel (Figure 49), it was executed in oil on oak with a very thin preparation that included lead white.149 And later, when Piero Pollaiuolo painted his David (Figure  50), he applied the paint directly onto the poplar panel without a gesso ground.150 For his frescoes for the cardinal of Portugal’s chapel (Figure 51), Baldovinetti used lead white, a technique that proved nearly disastrous.151 And Benozzo Gozzoli painted his murals for the Medici palace chapel (Figure 52), completed in 1459, a secco (on dry plaster) in tempera and oil.152 Fifteenth-century Florentine sculptors were just as experimental as painters. When Donatello wanted to create an impressive altar for il Santo in Padua (Figure 53), he did not have the skills to cut the notoriously hard porphyry, so he painted pietra di Nanto (limestone from Vicenza) to imitate it.153

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 48.  Alesso Baldovinetti, Annunciation, oil on oak, c. 1466, Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal, San Miniato al Monte, Florence. Detail. Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Figure 49.  Antono and Piero Pollaiuolo. Altarpiece for the Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal, oil on oak, c. 1466–67, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 50.  Antonio Pollaiuolo, David, tempera and oil on poplar, 1460s, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: Jörg P. Anders.

Figure 51.  Alesso Baldovinetti, Annunciation, fresco, c. 1466, Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal, San Miniato al Monte, Florence. Detail. Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Donatello’s bronze Saint Louis of Toulouse (Figure 30), made for the exterior of Orsanmichele (for a niche that Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas later came to fill), was technically audacious and unconventional. Made from ten principal parts, cast separately and fire-­gilded, it was then assembled and held together by copper pins.The very task of fire gilding such a large object posed a

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 52.  Benozzo Gozzoli. Adoration of the Magi, fresco, 1459–60, Palazzo Medici, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 53.  Donatello. Deposition of Christ, pietra di nanto, 1447–50, Basilica del Santo, Padua. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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significant problem that Donatello overcame through his assemblage of smaller parts.154 Sculptors working in terracotta likewise experimented with assemblage, which enabled them to avoid the risk of defects from casting in a single piece.155 For them, it was a solution for creating sculptures of unprecedented size. Surviving examples of glazed terracotta reliefs by Luca della Robbia from the 1440s show that he was refining his technique as he employed it (the reliefs vary significantly in the success of their firing and glazing).156 Sculptors of wood overcame the challenges of their medium. A number of Florentine sculptors during the last third of the Quattrocento chose not to carve from a single block of wood and instead invented a method of assemblage from multiple pieces.157 But this assemblage was by no means a straightforward method because these wooden sculptures were made from many separate pieces (sometimes more than twenty),158 and artists faced the formidable challenge of attaching all the parts together.159 When Filippo Brunelleschi made his wooden Crucifix for Santa Maria Novella (Figure 54), he carved it from half a trunk of pear wood – an unusual

Figure 54.  Filippo Brunelleschi. Crucifix, polychromed pear wood and linen, c. 1410–15, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Photo: George Tatge, 1998.

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

choice for wooden sculpture made in Tuscany. But the trunk was too small for his life-­size statue so he was forced to include the pith (the central part of a trunk and the main source of radial cracks). As a result, his Crucifix features radial cracks that are especially apparent at the groin area (Figure 55). Because of this, Brunelleschi made the innovative decision to make his figure’s loin cloth from real linen, stiffened with glue to hold its folds, instead of carving it from wood as earlier sculptors had done (including Donatello for his Crucifix in Santa Croce (Figure 56), with which Brunelleschi was competing, if we are to believe Vasari’s famous account).160 As Peter Stiberc has emphasized, by doing this, Brunelleschi established a convention for using linen rather than wood for the loin cloths of large-­scale crucifixes for Florentine crucifixes that followed.161 Artists experimented with techniques resulting in a huge variety, even within one medium. As Edilberto Formigli has pointed out, the diversity in bronze casting techniques in fifteenth-­century Florentine sculpture suggests that there was no standardization and that instead, “each founder seems to have developed his own casting technology.”162 Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (Figure 57) was cast using a

Figure 55.  Filippo Brunelleschi, Crucifix, polychromed pear wood and linen, c. 1410–15, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Detail of radial cracks in groin area. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico.

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Figure 56.  Donatello, Crucifix, polychromed pear wood, 1412–13, Santa Croce, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 57.  Donatello. Judith and Holofernes, bronze, c. 1455, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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particularly idiosyncratic technique.163 Instead of building up his wax model over a shaped clay core, Donatello made his model from combustible material (save for the iron armature) that included real linen stiffened in wax, over which he formed a clay mold in three or four pieces. After firing, the combustible materials burnt out and the mold sections were taken apart, lined with wax, then reassembled and packed with wet core material (with core pins inserted through the wax from the inside).The result was a bronze made with little modeling and that required little chasing. The Judith and Holofernes would have been quick to produce, and it may have been time that dictated the unusual procedures by which it was made.164 In wooden sculpture, too, there was a diversity of methods. Artists employed different means for attaching the pieces of their statues (primarily heads and hands) to the rest of the body. These ranged from dowels and glue to metal bands.165 And in early engraving the surviving evidence suggests that there was considerable variety in how prints were made, leading Sean Roberts to assert: “no two artisans produced these prints in exactly the same way,” including in Florence.166 Roberts explains the diversity among early prints as a result of artists keeping careful guard of their technical knowledge.167 This attitude of secrecy was not exclusive to printmakers. Brunelleschi famously kept his work secret, advising his friend, inventor and engineer Mariano Taccola (known in his day as “the Sienese Archimedes”), during a visit to Siena: “Do not share your inventions with the many, share them only with the few who understand and love the sciences. To disclose too much of one’s inventions and achievements amounts to the same thing as downplaying one’s own genius.”168 And according to Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi became a master of engineering (in preparation for the building of the dome of Florence’s cathedral) “in secret, while pretending to do something else.”169 Although he (Brunelleschi) was in Rome with Donatello when he acquired this knowledge, he did not share his ideas with his companion.170 This clandestine attitude to methods of making is evident too in the arbitrations drawn up by the Finiguerra family to ensure Maso Finiguerra’s sulfur casts for niello prints, loose sheets, and books of drawings would remain in their custody.171 As well as facing the challenges of their medium, artists had to deal with the daunting expectations of patrons. Most famously, perhaps, is the case of Brunelleschi’s dome for the Florentine Duomo. The planned cupola (Figure  1; on which Verrocchio’s palla was positioned later) was to be higher and wider than any pre-­existing example, and no trees tall enough existed to provide a scaffold for it as it was being built. Brunelleschi’s dome is a feat of engineering whose secrets of construction still are not fully understood (the humanist Carlo Marsuppini praised Brunelleschi’s achievement on the vault as “Daedalian” – after the mythic craftsman who flew with wings he had invented – in an inscription composed for the artist’s funerary monument).172 When the Opera del Duomo commissioned Donatello to create a colossal sculpture for the exterior of the Duomo (his Joshua, 1410–12, now lost), he made the innovative choice of working

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Figure 58.  Lorenzo Ghiberti, Saint Matthew, bronze, finished 1422, Orsanmichele, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

with pieces of terracotta, faced in stucco and painted in lead white instead of marble. This decision solved the challenge of installing a marble sculpture (the conventional material for large-­scale works at this time) high up on the exterior of the Florentine Duomo, without the danger of it being destroyed during installation or afterwards. Terracotta also made it light enough to be installed.173 When Lorenzo Ghiberti was commissioned in 1419 by the bankers’ guild to cast a statue in bronze of Saint Matthew (Figure 58) – a large-­scale figure – he was requested to make it in one or two pieces.174 The suggestion that it could be done in a single pour was extraordinary considering that this had never been done before (even ancient bronzes of comparable size were cast in sections and then pieced together).175 Despite Ghiberti’s best efforts, the Saint Matthew was made in parts.176 Ghiberti’s experience was not uncommon. Not only were artists experimental in their approach to making, but adjustments and mistakes  – even failures  – were typical. When Ghiberti was unsuccessful in casting his Saint Matthew in a single pour, he was forced to recast the defective upper body. He cut away the upper area with chisels and then recast onto the lower part of the statue that had been cast successfully the first time.177 His Saint John the Baptist (Figure 59) and Saint Stephen (Figure 60) similarly feature evidence

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 59.  Lorenzo Ghiberti. Saint John the Baptist, bronze, 1412–16, Orsanmichele, Florence. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 60.  Lorenzo Ghiberti. Saint Stephen, bronze, 1427–28, Orsanmichele, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

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Figure 61.  Lorenzo Ghiberti. North Doors, gilt bronze, 1421/22–24, Baptistery, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

of casting problems: there are several large areas of repair in the Saint John the Baptist, including the fingers on the right hand and a large section of drapery on the right leg178; the face and hair of Saint Stephen were attached after casting, and there is a large casting in repair on the saint’s chest.179 When Ghiberti was making his North Doors of the Baptistery (Figure 61), he was forced to call in expert founders from Burgundy for help after his first casting.180 (That said, Ghiberti cast many works without problems.)181 A horse’s head in bronze (Figure 62), long thought to be ancient but recently dated to the Renaissance and attributed to Donatello, was left incomplete, perhaps because the casting of the rest of the body was unsuccessful.182 Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (Figure 57) is not a failed cast, but it does bear the marks of flaws in its model, most notably, the fragmenting of the lower part of the band that encircles Judith’s head, which was made by impressing real linen into the wax.183 Recent restoration of Nanni di Banco’s marble Four Crowned Martyrs found evidence of interventions that must have been done after the statues were installed in the niche.184 Apparently Leon Battista Alberti tried, but failed, to carve porphyry.185 And anonymous artists responsible for some early engravings in Florence ­(evidently unaware of how to correct their copper plates) made prints with some fairly egregious errors.186

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

Figure 62.  Donatello, attributed to. Horse’s head, bronze, mid-­fifteenth century, Museo Archaeologico, Naples. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio’s expertise in a wide range of media must be understood in this environment of innovation, experimentation, and competition. That context may also explain his tendency to work across media, for Verrocchio was not the only Florentine artist to do this. Masaccio may have been a sculptor as well as a painter187; Donatello,188 Luca della Robbia,189 Lorenzo Ghiberti,190 and Matteo Civitali (who trained in Florence)191 are all recorded as painters as well as sculptors; Desiderio da Settignano worked in terracotta, wood, pietra serena, and marble (and many of his sculptures were polychromed)192; and the partners Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono painted clothes hangers as well as frescoes and cassoni.193 The Pollaiuolo brothers produced goldsmith work; panel, canvas, and fresco painting; painted confraternity standards; designs for embroidery; terracotta; engraving; painted and gilded gesso shields; parade armor; small bronzes and bronze tombs; and a polychrome crucifix made from cork, linen, gesso, and tow. According to Vasari, they also produced enamels, jewelry, and objects in wax.194 In the fourteenth century, Arnolfo di Cambio filled the eyes of his marble Madonna (Figure 63) for the exterior of the Duomo with glass paste.195 Donatello, Bernardo Rossellino, and others often painted their sculptures.196 Sculptors including Antonio Rossellino and Desiderio da Settignano made gesso squeezes from molds taken from their relief sculptures in marble.197 Donatello went so far as to make a bronze relief (known as the Chellini Madonna, Figure 64), from the reverse of which could be made replicas in glass.198 And a number of sculptors working with wood in the late fifteenth century – including Verrocchio, but also Donatello and Michelozzo – modeled up the forms of their figures in gesso, rather than carving into the wood, an additive approach taken from works in stucco, terracotta, and wax.199 Apart from the competitive market, workshop practices also explain the tendency to move between media. It was the norm, rather than the exception, for assistants to move between various botteghe specializing in different media, thus

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Figure 63.  Arnolfo di Cambio. Madonna, marble and glass, c. 1300, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Nicolo Orsi Battaglini/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 64.  Donatello. Chellini Madonna, before 1456, bronze,Victoria and Albert Museum, London. V & A Images, London/Art Resource, NY.

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acquiring skills in working with diverse materials through necessity.200 And masters often turned to the help of workers in other trades for equipment or expertise, as attested to in contracts and evidence from works of art.201 Cadogan has gone as far as to suggest that Florence was unusual in the freedom artists had to move from one medium to another. This situation, she argues, was the result of the arrangement of Florentine guilds “into loosely related groups for political purposes [that] meant that the regulation and protection of craft activity that were the normal functions of medieval guilds were secondary, and the rigidity and provinciality of artisan activity found in other cities was lacking [in Florence].”202 It may have been as a result of this movement that artists were sometimes prompted to take an effect from one medium and attempt to re-­create it in another, as we have seen Verrocchio did. For his Piot Madonna (Figure  65), Donatello surrounded the lightly fired terracotta relief of the Madonna and Child with small glass roundels with putti and amphorae in finely worked white wax set on a layer of translucent red wax with lozenge-­shaped areas in green wax between them (unfortunately most of the glass roundels were replaced with Plexiglas replicas in the 1959 restoration campaign).203 These details, combined with the gilded surface, suggest Donatello was evoking the work of a goldsmith.204 Artists including Donatello, Ghiberti, and Luca

Figure 65.  Donatello. Piot Madonna, terracotta, wax, glass, partially gilded, c. 1440, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Copyright. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Stéphane Maréchalle.

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della Robbia damascened in gold and silver some of their works in bronze, a technique taken from metalwork.205 Donatello’s gilded bronze Saint Louis of Toulouse (Figure 30), as we have seen, was made in several parts held together with rivets, a technique adopted from metalworkers.206 The materials and methods of his bronze Judith and Holofernes (Figure 57) made, as I have discussed, from tow and paste over an iron armature and dressed in linen cloth finished with wax and tallow, resemble ephemeral sculptures.207 Charles Avery has proposed that Donatello may have encouraged the use of stiacciato relief for many of the marble sculptures produced by his workshop because it was so easy to make casts from them (and thus make it easier to replicate the designs), an argument supported by the existence of faithful copies of Donatello’s Pazzi Madonna.208 And we have seen how Donatello’s bronze relief known as the Chellini Madonna (Figure 64) was made for reproductions in glass.209 Giancarlo Gentilini has proposed that Luca della Robbia developed his invention for glazed terracotta from his experience with gold enameling as a goldsmith and his contact with glass makers at the Opera del Duomo (Gentilini goes as far as to suggest that Luca may have been trying to create a medium that could compete with the effects of the lost art of mosaic).210 The artist responsible for the terracotta Madonna and Child in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, known as the Kress Madonna (Figure 66), used linen fabric to fill a gap

Figure 66.  Unknown Florentine Artist. Kress Madonna, polychromed and gilded terracotta on poplar backing, c. 1425, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, open access.

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

between his terracotta figures and the wooden poplar backing (a technique that mimics that employed by painters preparing large panel paintings) and applied fine hatching in the flesh tones to suggest three-­dimensionality (similar to methods in engraving and painting).211 And it has been argued that the taste for antique cameos during the Renaissance inspired Florentine sculptors to include inlays in blue glass or mosaic in their reliefs and to place them against colored stone.212 The tendency for Renaissance artists, including Verrocchio, to work between media and to transfer tools and techniques must be seen also against the backdrop of the taste among Florentine patrons for works that displayed their processes. The roughness evident in many of Donatello’s bronzes points to an interest in the model (for instance, the texture from the linen fabric used in the original model for the bronze Judith [Figure 57]). Nicholas Penny has read this feature in Donatello’s oeuvre as a kind of guarantee of the artist’s hand (perhaps because they were cast by others), but it is also proof of a taste for the unfinished and of process. This practice is evident also in some works by Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Desiderio da Settignano. Penny has argued that a large plaquette by Francesco di Giorgio (Figure 67) whose

Figure 67.  Francesco di Giorgio. The Judgment of Paris, bronze, 1480s or 1490s. Samuel H. Kress collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, open access.

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surface is covered with tiny pimples (caused by casting and usually cleaned away) was left this way to provide a “sfumato” effect and was clearly deliberate because it recurs in other works by Francesco.213 Antonio Rossellino’s marble portrait bust of Giovanni di Antonio Chellini (Figure  68) similarly features details that suggest a fascination with how objects were made, in particular, the detailed wrinkles and veins and the sagging flesh, which may have been achieved through the use of a life mask. The precisely realized ears, which art historians for generations have asserted were achieved by transferring into marble the ears from a life cast of Chellini, were unlikely to have been included in a life cast. Nevertheless, as Peter Dent has recently argued, the detail of the ears does “reproduce the experience of the [life] casting process,” to remind the viewer of a technique of replication, which Rossellino has not employed and has in fact exceeded in skill by replicating Chellini’s ears through carving.214 Although Chellini’s bust probably was not made from a death mask, Jeannette Kohl has drawn attention to many other portrait busts in stucco and terracotta that were, and furthermore, these do not disguise their derivation from casts

Figure 68.  Antonio Rossellino. Portrait bust of Giovanni di Antonio Chellini, marble, 1456. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. V & A Images, London/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio’s Ingenuity

after death masks.215 Whereas Kohl has claimed that this tendency suggests a taste for the factual and a crisis of the “self,”216 an alternative proposition is that it is proof of an interest in process. Another practice that might be interpreted as suggesting this fascination is the making of relic casts – casting rough wax models in order to make them permanent.217 The art of fifteenth-­century Florence was remarkably experimental, the result of intense competition between artists – and also between patrons – to outdo each other; the development of technologies (including new ones); and a fascination with process on the part of viewers. This environment provided fertile ground for Verrocchio, whose unusual workshop – in which he produced both sculptures and paintings – was the context in which he moved between media, often transferring tools and techniques from one material to another, producing objects whose making was crucial for their meaning.

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VERROCCHIO’S MEDICI TOMB: ART AS TREATISE What can a tomb, which is a mute thing, do for a wise man? LEONARDO BRUNI1

Verrocchio’s Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici in San Lorenzo (Figures 9, 36, and 69), made for the uncle and father of Lorenzo il Magnifico, is one of the most opulent burial monuments of the fifteenth century. The use of materials and forms suggests an iconographical reading was intended, but the precise nature of this reading has remained elusive.2 In general, scholars agree that the tomb’s iconography concerns themes of regeneration and resurrection and refers to the Medici.3 The interpretation proposed here instead draws attention to Verrocchio’s emphasis on materials and metaphors of making in his tomb. I argue that the monument presents Medici wealth as something worthy and Medici entrepreneurship as the means by which the family could access heaven and hope for resurrection. Significantly, these arguments are framed through Verrocchio’s acumen and skill, thus presenting the success of Medici ambition as dependent on the artist. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Verrocchio used metaphors of making to express his claims, and thus the tomb stands as a visual expression of the artist’s theory and practice. 2.1  TOMB AS ORATION AT SAN LORENZO

The tomb is positioned within the aperture of an arch in the church of San Lorenzo (Figures 9 and 36).The opening is filled with a roped net in bronze that ends in tassels below a sarcophagus (Figures 9, 36, and 70), and the arch is framed in marble, decorated with alternating palm fronds and olive branches within 74

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 69.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence.View of tomb set into the wall of the Old Sacristy. Alinari Archives, Florence.

Figure 70.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of bronze tassels and marble platform ornamented with red porphyry ellipses and circles. Alinari Archives, Florence.

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Figure 71.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of arch decoration, marble. Alinari Archives, Florence.

diamond rings attached to bound vines. The vines are set in vases at the base of the arch and the vases are adorned with putti, harpies, small lions’ heads, putti heads, garlands, diamond rings, palm fronds, shells, rams’ heads, acanthus leaves, and lions’ feet (Figures 71 and 72). A bronze diamond in a rosette marks the arch’s apex (Figures 9 and 36).A pietra serena frame surrounds the marble arch, and above this, on the chapel side, is a marble stemma bearing the Medici palle (Figure 36).4 The tomb rests upon a pietra serena plinth on top of which is placed a large triple cross in white marble. Above this are four bronze turtles (Figures 33 and 73) and resting on their backs is a hollow marble plinth, the upper surface of which is ornamented with pieces of red porphyry and serpentine (green porphyry)5 and gilt bronze or brass disks (Figure  70). The marble plinth is inscribed: “LAURENT ET IUL PETRI F / POSVER/ PATRI PATRVO QUE / MCCCCLXXII” (Lorenzo and Giuliano sons of Piero erected this for their father and uncle, 1472). Four bronze legs in the form of acanthus leaves and lion’s feet (Figure  72) surmount this and support a brick or terracotta sarcophagus that is faced with red porphyry. Two green serpentine roundels placed within bronze wreaths decorate the main faces of the sarcophagus, with

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 72.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, Florence, San Lorenzo. Detail of marble arch decoration, bronze lions’ feet, and acanthus leaves. Alinari Archives, Florence.

Figure 73.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, Florence, San Lorenzo. Detail of turtle, bronze. Copyright. 2018. Photo SCALA, Florence.

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an inscription naming the deceased, followed by the initials of a Roman tomb formula on one side and an inscription with their ages at the time of their death on the other (Figures 74 and 75).6 The lid of the sarcophagus is made from marble and porphyry decorated with bronze netting, on top of which is placed an elaborate bronze decoration consisting of a diamond resting on a bowl of acanthus leaves to which two large sea shells are attached and out of which fall bouquets of fruits, leaves, and seeds (Figures 35 and 76). The monument is thus an impressive demonstration of Verrocchio’s mastery of a wide range of materials and the techniques required for working with them. Located a stone’s throw from the Medici palace (Figure  77), Verrocchio’s tomb is situated in the family’s parish church of San Lorenzo. The Medici had played an important role at San Lorenzo since the early fifteenth century. Construction on the new church began around 1419 following a design by Filippo Brunelleschi. Although the idea of enlarging the church was probably motivated by the desire of several patrician families to have family chapels where divine offices could be celebrated for their souls (and those of their

Figure 74.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, Florence, San Lorenzo. Detail of inscription facing the Old Sacristy. Alinari Archives, Florence.

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 75.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, Florence, San Lorenzo. Detail of inscription facing the chapel of Cosmas and Damian. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo - Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

Figure 76.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, Florence, San Lorenzo. Detail of cornucopia and netting, bronze. Alinari Archives, Florence.

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209 156 67

51 79 195

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43

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Figure 77.  Detail of Fra Stefano Buonsignori. View of Florence, showing the Medici palace and the church of San Lorenzo in 1584, etching printed on six sheets of glued paper, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, 2614 (st. sc.). The Medici palace is at 156 and San Lorenzo is at 79 on the map. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo - Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

ancestors and descendants), the Medici (and their allies) soon took control.7 In 1421 Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici commissioned Brunelleschi to build a sacristy (later known as the Old Sacristy, Figure 69), originally separate from the church itself, which would serve as a burial site for the family in addition to functioning as a sacristy. A few years later the Medici (probably Giovanni di Bicci) commissioned the adjoining chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian (Figures 78 and 79).8 The sacristy and chapel were linked liturgically from their earliest foundation, with the same canons and deputy canons overseeing services in both.9 Verrocchio’s tomb was situated in the extraordinary position of the open arch in the wall between these two spaces, thus visible to anyone standing in the nave.10 In his life of Verrocchio, Vasari included architecture among the artist’s many skills and mentions it specifically in relation to the tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici,11 suggesting the possibility that it was Verrocchio who was responsible for breaking down the wall to create the arch. However, Francesco Caglioti has argued that the arch had been occupied earlier with another Medici tomb, that of Lorenzo di Giovanni di Bicci, younger brother of Cosimo de’ Medici. Lorenzo’s tomb was referred to as double-­sided (“urna bifrons”) in a poem by Gentile de’ Becchi of c. 1454, and the logical place for such a monument is in the space later taken by Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero.12 In any case, the position of the tomb, between the Old Sacristy and the chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian, invited viewers to connect the spaces.

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 78.  Anonymous, Plan of San Lorenzo, c. 1500, Archivio di Stato,Venice. 1: Old Sacristy. 2: Chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian. Photo courtesy of the Photo Reproduction Unit of the Archivio di Stato,Venice, and published with acts no. 7563, December 19, 2017 and 5464, October 19, 2018.

Figure 79.  Chapel of Cosmas and Damian, view from the crossing (Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero is on the right wall of the chapel), San Lorenzo, Florence. Alinari Archives, Florence.

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This was further made possible by Verrocchio’s bronze grille, which made the spaces of the family’s mausoleum and chapel visible from each.Verrocchio also linked the tomb and sacristy through his use of materials, which echo those employed for the freestanding tomb of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, probably made by Andrea di Lazzaro Calvalcanti (called Buggiano), Brunelleschi’s adopted son, at the center of the Old Sacristy (Figure 69). This marble tomb is positioned below a marble table, itself decorated with a porphyry roundel and Medici emblems in bronze. By echoing the materials for Giovanni di Bicci’s tomb in the Old Sacristy in his monument for Giovanni and Piero (which uses porphyry, marble, and bronze), Verrocchio emphasized the dynastic link between them. Moreover, common to both tombs was the implicit claim of sanctity of those they commemorated. In Giovanni di Bicci’s case, this was conveyed through the position of the tomb below a table, evoking an altar with saint’s relics below, while the form of Verrocchio’s tomb, as we shall see, deliberately recalls reliquaries to make the same connection.13 In 1442 the Medici again intervened at San Lorenzo when Cosimo de’ Medici granted 40,000 florins for the continued construction of the church, funds for which were running out rapidly. In exchange, the canons of San Lorenzo made the astonishing promise to Cosimo that he could be buried directly in front of the high altar and that no other family could display their heraldry in that space. The promise was kept, and after his death Cosimo was buried in a tomb beneath the floor of the crossing of the church (Figure 32), its place indicated in the floor above with a magnificent tomb marker made from marble, porphyry, and bronze, attributed convincingly to Verrocchio (Figure  14).14 As Paolo Giovio remarked (writing in the sixteenth century), in this position, “[Cosimo guaranteed that he] had an entire church as his gigantic sepulcher.”15 In fact, the Medici were the only family that could be buried in the church proper (the tombs of other families were consigned to the crypt), an extraordinary prohibition that separates San Lorenzo from all other Florentine churches.16 For the congregation standing in the nave, the use of the same materials for Cosimo’s tomb marker and the tomb of Giovanni and Piero would have invited a dialog between them. Also near Verrocchio’s tomb was Desiderio da Settignano’s marble Taber­ nacle of the Sacrament (completed 1461, Figure 80).The tabernacle was originally in the chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian (Figure 79), adjacent to the tomb (the tabernacle was later moved to the nave), and probably commissioned by the Medici.17 The chapel was dedicated to Sts Cosmas and Damian, but from at least 1475 (and possibly earlier) it was known as the “capella del corpo del christo.”18 There seems no doubt that the tomb of Giovanni and Piero was supposed to be viewed in relation to Desiderio’s tabernacle: the principal face of Verrocchio’s monument was on the chapel side, indicated by the presence of the inscription naming the deceased (Figure 75)19 and the escutcheon displaying

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 80.  Desiderio da Settignano. Tabernacle of the Sacrament, marble, completed 1461, San Lorenzo, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

the Medici heraldry (Figure 36). Desiderio’s tabernacle (Figure 80) served as the focus of rituals during Corpus Domini and Holy Week, when the Host was buried in the altar below it, as well as for regular memorial services for the Medici family, which predated the tabernacle, going back to the early fifteenth century.20 The tabernacle was located on the wall of the chapel, probably where the present Baroque altar is positioned (in other words, on the wall adjacent to Verrocchio’s tomb). Furthermore, several features of Verrocchio’s tomb invite the viewer to see a connection with Desiderio’s tabernacle: for example, the decoration on the sides of the tabernacle, which resembles the marble decoration on the arch surrounding the tomb of Giovanni and Piero (Figure 71).21 Some scholars have gone as far as to propose that the Medici conceived of the crossing of San Lorenzo as a programmatic whole that included Cosimo’s tomb, Desiderio’s tabernacle, and two bronze pulpits by Donatello.22 As we have seen, however, the tabernacle of the Sacrament was made for the chapel of Cosmas and Damian (not for the capella maggiore, as some have claimed), and Donatello’s pulpits were probably not brought to San Lorenzo until after 1515 (before that, a wooden pulpit attached to the southern pier of the crossing was used).23

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Medici control of San Lorenzo continued after Cosimo’s death in 1464. A year later the church’s chapter granted Piero permission to assign the nave chapels to whomever he wished.24 The Medici family’s interest in the church continued after Piero’s death in 1469. As well as commissioning the tomb for his father and uncle, Lorenzo granted 6,570 florins to the church between 1476 and 1480, presumably to complete the building begun by his grandfather, Cosimo.25 Evidence also reveals the considerable influence that Lorenzo wielded at San Lorenzo, from clerical appointments;26 to the liturgy itself, with the purchase of special offices to be said for himself and members of his family, a tradition that had begun with Cosimo;27 to even commissioning the vestments worn by the clergy, which were decorated with scenes from the lives of Medicean saints, Lorenzo, Cosmas, and Damian.28 Records indicating the dates of construction of Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero have not survived. The tomb is inscribed within one of the wreaths with the date 1472 (Figure 74), which has been taken as proof of the year of the tomb’s completion. But Lorenzo mentions the monument in a letter dated 1472 and seems to suggest the tomb was not yet complete.29 It must have been completed circa 1473, and records indicate that it was admired from an early date. For instance, an early ricordo apparently mentions that upon the tomb’s unveiling, all of Florence “flocked to see it as though it were a wonder of the world.”30 Certainly its importance was recognized by the mid-­ 1470s when Naldo Naldi wrote a poem about it, dedicated to Lorenzo il Magnifico, in which Naldo compared it to the sepulcher Aeneas built for his father Anchises and to the mausoleum of Halicarnussus: Desinat Eneas celebrarier amplius, olim Anchisen quanquam substulit ille patrem, Ossa pia quanquam genitoris condidit urna Atque patri, sapiens, annua sacra dedit, Neve sepulchra suis deducta per aera summum Laudibus in caelum Cares, ut ante ferant: Ipse ducem sacro Phrigium quia vincis honore, Inferias patruo dum facis atque patri. Marmore praeterea quod surgit et aere polito Iam nunc arte nova quod tibi constat, opus Laurenti, superat Cariam superatque laborem Icareum, Medices dum capit urna sacros.31

[Let Aeneas cease to be celebrated so greatly, although he once carried his father Anchises, although he buried his father in a pious urn and, wise man, gave annual sacrifices to his father, nor let the Cares exalt that sepulcher to highest heaven with their praises, as before:You surpass the Phrygian leader in this sacred honor, while you make offerings for your uncle and father. In marble and polished bronze it hereafter rises, and even now with new art it is established by you, a work of Lorenzo; and it surpasses the labor of Caria and the labor of Icarus, so long as the urn holds the sainted Medici.]

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

With this commission, Verrocchio faced the considerable challenge of how to memorialize and eulogize two members of the Medici family at a time of political upheaval and make a case for Lorenzo il Magnifico’s right to rule as leader after his father’s death. At the moment when Verrocchio’s tomb was created, the Medici hold on power in Florence was uncertain. Piero was buried in San Lorenzo on December 3, 1469 (the day after his death) with little public ceremony.32 Early sources note the lack of pomp. Scipione Ammirato (1531–1601), for instance, records that Piero’s funeral was without ostentation, “perhaps because he had in his lifetime given directions to that effect; or because the parade of a magnificent interment might have excited the envy of the populace toward his successors, to whom it was of more importance to be great, than to appear to be so.”33 After Piero de’ Medici’s death, the family’s ascendency was not secure. Indeed, many Florentines believed the constitutional government would be restored, but this was not the case. On the night of Piero’s death, the Medicean amici held a meeting made up of hundreds of rank-and-file supporters to call for the preservation of the family. Although the meeting did not have any official standing, it served to ensure the safe passage of a bill securing the Medici hold on power by the Signoria a few days later (and succeeded in doing so).34 Years after the fact, Lorenzo recorded how on the night of his father’s death, the city’s principal citizens had come to his house to ask him to assume the governance of the state.35 Lorenzo, a mere twenty years old, faced considerable opposition in Florence at this moment because of his youth, and for many years the threat of assassination loomed. Lorenzo wrote in his ricordo that he was reluctant to accept the role of leader left vacant after his father’s death, “as it was contrary to my age, and on account of the great responsibility and peril it involved.”36 However, although Lorenzo may not have appeared keen to take over the leadership of the city, he fully intended to do so. His apprenticeship had begun well before his father’s death and through that the young Lorenzo had become well aware of all the responsibilities that would befall him as leader.37 Indeed, there is no sense that Lorenzo did not plan on accepting the role. The day before his father’s death he wrote to the Duke of Milan requesting protection (the same that had been granted to his father). Even so, Lorenzo’s hold on power remained tenuous throughout the 1470s, and Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero must be viewed through this lens.38 Verrocchio’s monument played the important role of expressing through visual form a eulogy for the deceased Giovanni and Piero in terms acceptable to its audience during a period of unrest for the Medici and also of proclaiming Lorenzo as a suitable leader. The tomb did something, therefore, that was not possible in any other form: through its materials and iconography it expressed ideas that could not be stated outright because of the political atmosphere of the time. Verrocchio made a complex argument using the

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language of materials and nonfigural iconography that avoided the problem of direct expression, which would have been both dangerous and unwise.39 Unfortunately, because Verrocchio’s “argument” was never explained verbally at the time, its meaning has been lost, and modern art historians have had difficulty comprehending the tomb’s complex iconography. The form of Verrocchio’s tomb is unusual though it does resemble earlier examples. In particular, it recalls a type known as the avello, which consists of a chest surmounted by a stone canopy in a Gothic arch. Sometimes, as in the fourteenth-­century avelli in the Bardi and Baroncelli chapels in Santa Croce (Figure 81), such tombs are positioned in a wall between two spaces with a grille filling the aperture, a feature that Verrocchio’s tomb recalls.40 The avello was a form of tomb favored by knights and members of important families, but by the time Verrocchio’s tomb was constructed, this type of tomb monument

Figure 81.  Giovanni di Balducci (attributed to), Baroncelli monument, marble and bronze, after 1328, Santa Croce, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 82.  Anonymous, Tomb of Onofrio Strozzi, marble, c. 1422, Santa Trinita, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Photo courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali, 1990.

had been out of fashion for some thirty years (though family members are known to have been buried in older avelli for decades afterwards). The Medici tomb also resembles the arcosolium, a variation on the avello form (Figure 82). The arcosolium differs from the avello, in that the tomb chest is separate rather than engaged, and the arch is rounded, not pointed. Arcosolia were reserved for the most powerful men in Florence, and common to all of them, including Verrocchio’s, is an inscription recording the status of the interred as a knight.41 Unlike most arcosolia, though, Verrocchio’s tomb is not located in a niche; it is positioned in a wall between two spaces. In this, the tomb of Maso di Luca degli Albizzi (d. 1417), attributed to Donatello or Lorenzo Ghiberti, from San Pier Maggiore, and the anonymous tomb of Onofrio di Palla di Jacopo Strozzi (d. 1418) in Santa Trìnita (Figure 82), are important precedents.42 The peaked lid of Verrocchio’s sarcophagus also recalls a tomb type known as “the house of the dead,” consisting of a chest that resembles a miniature building, developed in Asia Minor for burials of important personages (Figure 83), that became popular in Italy during the thirteenth century.43 And the decision to face Verrocchio’s tomb with fragments of red and green porphyry recalls the earlier practice of incorporating classical marble tombs in the Middle Ages.44 Many of the details of Verrocchio’s monument occur in other Renaissance tombs, but their particular combination is unique. Porphyry had been used in tombs before, but it was a material reserved for the tombs of imperial family

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Figure 83.  Unfinished pagan sarcophagus, second century ce, garden of San Vitale, Ravenna. Photo: Debra Pincus.

members in antiquity45 and later for popes, saints, and bishops.46 It was used only rarely during the Renaissance, appearing in tombs of people of political eminence and rarely in sarcophaguses.47 Porphyry was so unusual that its use was noted in the case of Cosimo de Medici’s tomb slab (Figure 14) by the men responsible for constructing it, who, according to a 1464 account, claim that “since this material is never used anymore, it will be extremely worthy and dignified.”48 Bronze was used rarely in Renaissance tombs and generally not as extensively as it was in the tomb of Giovanni and Piero. It featured on some secular tombs where it was reserved for inscriptions or heraldic decoration. Only the tomb of Baldassare Coscia, the anti-­pope Pope John XXIII, by Donatello and Michelozzo in the Florentine Baptistery (Figure 84), compares to Verrocchio’s in the use of bronze, but that monument was dedicated to a person of religious significance.49 The net that fills the aperture above Verrocchio’s tomb (Figure  36), which Vasari singled out for praise,50 features in some earlier tombs, such as those in the Bardi and Baroncelli chapels in Santa Croce, as we have seen.51 And it was a characteristic of some chapels housing relics, such as Michelozzo’s balustrade around the tabernacle protecting the miraculous image of the Annunciation at Santissima Annunziata (Figure 85), the chapel enclosure for the miraculous image of the Virgin at Santa Maria dell’Impruneta by Luca della Robbia and Michelozzo

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 84.  Donatello and Michelozzo, tomb of Baldassare Coscia, marble, bronze and gilding, 1422–28, Baptistery, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 85.  Michelozzo. Balustrade around the tabernacle protecting the miraculous image of the Annunciation, marble and bronze, 1448, Santissima Annunziata, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 86.  Michelozzo and Luca della Robbia. Enclosure for the miraculous image of the Virgin, marble and bronze, 1450s, Santa Maria dell’Impruneta, Impruneta. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

(Figure  86), and the grille of the Capella della Sacra Cintola enshrining the Virgin’s sacred girdle relic in the Cathedral of Prato by Maso di Bartolomeo and Pasquino da Montepulciano.52 Certainly Verrocchio would have been ­familiar with the first of these enclosures, which was in Florence, and the last, because in 1473 he went to the Duomo in Prato to appraise the pulpit, for which he may have made the harpies at the base.53 In all of these cases the net marked a boundary point between the profane world of the beholder and the sacred realm of a relic, an allusion that Verrocchio sought to suggest with his tomb.54 This hypothesis is strengthened by considering the position of the tomb between the Old Sacristy and the adjoining chapel of Sts Damian and Cosmas (Figure 69), with its principal face on the chapel side as we have seen (Figure 36). In addition to serving as the location for memorial services for the Medici, the chapel was the site where the feast of Corpus Domini was celebrated, and probably also the consecration of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, when the altar in the chapel became the Altar of Repose, where Christ in the form of the consecrated Eucharist was buried symbolically in anticipation for the Mass on Good Friday (when transubstantiation cannot take place).55 The

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 87.  Lorenzo Ghiberti. Reliquary of Saints Protus, Hyacinth, and Nemesius, bronze, 1428, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

focus of these Eucharistic rites was Desiderio da Settignano’s Tabernacle of the Sacrament (Figure  80) on the wall adjacent to Verrocchio’s tomb. Given the rituals associated with the adjacent chapel and the position of Verrocchio’s tomb, it is likely that Verrocchio intended his viewers to interpret it in relation to Christ’s death and resurrection.56 The position and appearance of the tomb likewise invite the viewer to regard Giovanni and Piero as sacred personages, specifically as martyrs. As we have seen, the netting above the tomb recalls the decoration of holy spaces, marking the boundary between sacred and profane. And some features of Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero are reminiscent of Renaissance reliquaries, further encouraging this connection. In particular, the peaked lid, the acanthus ornamentation, the lion’s feet, and the shape of the sarcophagus resemble the reliquary form of the coffret.Verrocchio’s tomb is especially close in design to Ghiberti’s reliquary of Saints Protus, Hyacinth, and Nemesius (Figure 87),57 a commission delegated to Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo de’ Medici by Ambrogio Traversari.58 Ghiberti’s reliquary was originally set in an arched opening between the monk’s choir and the chiesino of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a location strongly reminiscent of the position of Verrocchio’s tomb.59 And Verrocchio may have used another reliquary, that of San Giordiano, in the tesoro of the Badia as a model for his monument.60 Verrocchio’s tomb is also close in design to a wood, hard stone, and silver reliquary casket (Figure 88), generally dated c. 1460–70, from the Baptistery, which may be an autograph work by Verrocchio.61

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Figure 88.  Andrea del Verrocchio, attributed to. Reliquary casket, hardstone, c. 1460–70, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Florence.

These connections between the tomb, reliquaries, and sacred spaces marked by bronze nets are not simply formal borrowings on Verrocchio’s part. They suggest a link between the Medici and sacred remains, a connection reflecting how the family grounded their rule in claims of sacred authority and models.62 After Lorenzo’s birth on January 1, 1449, his parents delayed their son’s baptism so that it would fall on January 6, the feast of the Magi (Epiphany), thus establishing a link between Lorenzo and Christ, and between his godparents and the Magi (to whom the Medici had a special dedication);63 and in 1466 one contemporary called the Medici regime a “governo santo” (holy government) after Piero had successfully quashed a challenge to his authority.64 2.2  TOMB AND COLLECTION: A PORTRAIT THROUGH MATERIALS

Considering that the tomb was a Medici commission, it is not surprising that much of its iconography alludes to the Medici family, and to Giovanni and Piero specifically, and also to Lorenzo, the monument’s primary patron. The tomb was the first significant commission by Lorenzo who, along with his brother

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Giuliano, had it built for his father and uncle.65 Although the inscription on the tomb declares Giuliano and Lorenzo as joint patrons, Lorenzo appears to have been the major driving force. This is suggested by Naldo’s poem about the monument, in which he declares that it was an “opus Laurenti.” Moreover, Vasari calls Lorenzo the patron of the monument in a letter of 1569, with no mention of Giuliano.66 The diamonds on the tomb allude to the Medici. Large pyramidal bronze diamonds appear on the top of the sarcophagus and at the apex of the arch on both sides of the aperture, and smaller ones in marble are depicted atop rings in the repeated pattern decorating the arch (Figures 9, 35, and 36). By the mid-­fifteenth century diamonds had become a Medici device, specifically the diamond ring, which was a symbol of eternity.67 Verrocchio’s diamonds may refer to examples in the Medici collection: there are twenty-­seven pointed diamonds listed among Piero’s possessions in the inventory of 1465.68 The turtle (Figures 33 and 73), on whose back the sarcophagus and marble plinth rest at each corner, may be read as a Medici symbol. They recall the favorite motto Festina lente (make haste slowly) of Roman leaders, which was familiar to the Medici certainly by the sixteenth century, and probably earlier too. It would have appealed to the Medici because of its use by Augustus, whose political situation, as an emperor who governed a republic, was similar to theirs.69 The colors of the tomb (red, green, and white) refer to the Medici family. By 1459 these colors had become Medici symbols.70 And the repeated motif of alternating palm fronds and olive branches in the marble arch surrounding the tomb (Figures 71 and 72) refers to the “palme e ulive” supplied by the Medici every year on Palm Sunday. The branches and fronds were stored close to the tomb of Giovanni and Piero, in the Old Sacristy, in anticipation of their use. Also, the representation of the metamorphosis of acanthus into cornucopia on the lid of the sarcophagus (Figure 76) was a symbol of the return of the Golden Age, expressed in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, with which, from the 1450s onwards, the Medici were associated. Lorenzo il Magnifico, in particular, was regarded as a ruler of a saeculum aureum: his motto for a joust in 1469 was “le tems revient,” for which Verrocchio designed his banner, he described the return of the Golden Age in his poem Selve d’amore (1460s/70s), and acanthus transformed into cornucopia were a feature of much of his heraldry.71 In addition to the allusions through the use of symbols,Verrocchio expressed ideas about the Medici through the tomb’s materials. The porphyry sarcophagus may be read as a pun on Piero’s name. One of the devices of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici (Piero di Cosimo’s grandson) was a stone, sometimes represented in the form of porphyry specifically held between two wheels (Figure  89).72 The device referred to the fine qualities of Piero di Lorenzo (“petrus”), and the shape of the porphyry created with wheels and the sheen

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Figure 89.  Device of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici showing porphyry between wheels, Plut. 18.6, fol. 1r, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. Su concessione del MiBACT e la Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze.

produced by polishing with diamond abrasives served to emphasize the fine qualities of the stone.73 Verrocchio may have been making the same pun with reference to Piero di Cosimo (this Piero could hardly have been oblivious to the stony connotation of his name, given Petrarch’s allusions to his own name (Petra/Petrarch) in his poetry;74 Piero owned a lavishly illuminated manuscript of Petrarch’s sonnets).75 Porphyry was associated also with the Magi (to whose confraternity the Medici belonged), who were “wise men,” a link deriving from Lactantius (whose writings were collected by the Medici), who connected porphyry with wisdom, specifically sophia, or prephilosophical wisdom.76 The frequent use of porphyry in Medici commissions (including the pavement of the Medici palace chapel) was part of a scheme by Piero to present the young Lorenzo de’ Medici as an occidental Porphyrogenitus (“born to the imperial purple”), the most honorific of Byzantine imperial titles.77 The prevalence of bronze on Verrocchio’s tomb, which, as we have seen, was unusual, may be read in the light of Medici ambitions too. In one of his poems, the Selve d’amore, Lorenzo refers to bronze specifically, noting that the metal preserves fame.78

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

The materials of Verrocchio’s tomb would have been understood also by the original audience as metaphors for the virtues of Piero, Giovanni, and Lorenzo. Porphyry resists fire and hammer and was famous for the difficulty it presents stone carvers who cut it.79 This led some – such as Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco Colonna  – to claim that it conveys the virtue of patience.80 For Vasari, hardstones in general express constancy and resolve in the face of challenges, and Vasari compares them to Duke Cosimo for this reason.81 The diamond, which appears in bronze in Verrocchio’s tomb, nestled within a bed of acanthus atop the sarcophagus (Figure 35), may have been read as an allusion to certain virtues. The late eleventh-­century to early twelfth-­century bishop and poet Marbode of Rennes, for instance, notes the strength of the diamond, which could withstand the assault of iron and fire,82 and Agostino del Riccio, the Florentine naturalist and Dominican friar, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, notes that the diamond took its name from the Greek word meaning indomitable virtue83 and that those who wore them were daring and virtuous.84 Paolo Giovio compares explicitly Lorenzo’s fortitude in the face of the 1466 Pitti–Neroni conspiracy to the diamond: “the firmness of the aforesaid Magnificent in the face of the conspiracies and intrigues of messer Luca Pitti was as miraculous as that attributed to the diamond’s capacity to resist the assaults of fire and hammer”;85 and an anonymous poem compares Lorenzo to the diamond after the death of Piero, writing: “This [Lorenzo] is the diamond, or rather the fiery pyrope.”86 That the Medici intended the materials of Verrocchio’s tomb to be interpreted in terms of their qualities as metaphors for the virtues of Piero, Giovanni, and Lorenzo is suggested also by Lorenzo’s use of inscriptions with his own name on his collection of hardstone vases. This practice has vexed scholars, who have been shocked by Lorenzo’s arrogance in endangering antique vases (Figure 90).87 These acts of apparent vandalism are more understandable (though no less arrogant) if we consider the vases as self-­portraits of Lorenzo, who wanted viewers to see a conflation between himself and the precious materials from which they were made. In the case of the vases specifically, the inscriptions can be read also in the light of the belief in the talismanic power of stones, which was frowned upon by some (such as Petrarch), but shared by others (including Marsilio Ficino, with whom Lorenzo was close in the 1470s).88 Talismans often featured inscriptions, a favorite referring to the three Magi, with whom the Medici were associated, and Christ, with whom Lorenzo was connected (which may explain the “R” – generally regarded as an abbreviation for REX – on several of Lorenzo’s vases).89 That there was a belief in a connection between Lorenzo and his collection of gems is suggested by a contemporary legend that tells how his death was predicted by the actions of a spiritello trapped inside his ring, which escaped and wreaked havoc on the

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Figure 90.  Anonymous, sardonyx ewer with fifteenth-­century mount, Museo degli Argenti, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Duomo, bringing down to the ground great slabs of marble from the lantern shortly before Lorenzo died.90 The choice of porphyry, serpentine, marble, and bronze in Verrocchio’s tomb speaks to the taste of the Medici, who collected objects made from precious stones (such as Lorenzo’s hardstone vases) and metals and material fragments.91 Although Giovanni and Piero were both deceased by the time Verrocchio was making the tomb, it is worth exploring how the monument expressed their taste, even if it was filtered through the patronage of Lorenzo il Magnifico. In his Trattato di architettura (1461–64), Filarete describes how Giovanni delighted in antique gemstones (“d’intagli antichi”) at the Medici villa at Fiesole.92 Giovanni had two agents who worked for him in Rome, searching for antiquities on his behalf: Carlo, his half-­brother, whose acquisition for Giovanni of thirty “medaglie d’ariento” from the studio of the recently deceased Pisanello was prevented by Cardinal Pietro Barbo, future Pope Paul II, who stole them from him;93 and Bartolommeo di Paolo di Giovanni Serragli, who wrote about objects that Giovanni might want to acquire in twenty-­three surviving letters, with references to various antiquities, including ancient marble statues and heads.94

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

From the Medici inventories of 1456, 1463, 1464, and 1465, we know that Piero was a keen collector of vases, cups, and other objects made from precious materials.95 Filarete celebrates Piero’s love for such objects in his famous verbal portrait in the Trattato di architettura, a description of the contents of the Medici scrittoio (study), in which Filarete notes that the materials from which the works of art in Piero’s collection were made (gold, silver, bronze, pietre fine, marble, etc.) “fill him [Piero] with delight and pleasure at their sight.” On looking at his jewels and precious stones specifically, Filarete says, Piero “takes great pleasure and delight in looking at those and in discussing their various powers and excellences.” And the vast quantity and variety of objects in the scrittoio was such that “it would take him a whole month [to see them all].”96 Inventories indicate that among the objects collected by the Medici (including Piero, but not only him) were material fragments. For instance, in the 1456 inventory, a piece of jasper is listed, as well as a Byzantine sacred stone, which was composed of pieces of jasper, surrounded by relics and mounted in silver.The 1465 inventory indicates that Piero had acquired eight Byzantine mosaics by that year.97 A selective reading of Piero’s acquisitions and commissions has suggested to some that his taste can be characterized as “decorative.” Francis Ames-­Lewis, for example, building on Ernst Gombrich’s assessment of Piero, presented him as a lover of surfaces, details, colors, and imagery that alluded to his family.98 Verrocchio’s tomb could be read in this way, especially in the light of the choice of materials and in their presentation. As we have seen, the diamonds on the tomb may allude to gems in Piero’s collection, and the porphyry, serpentine, and marble would have appealed to Piero, who collected objects, including fragments, made from hard stones.Yet more recent scholarship on Medici patronage has emphasized how Piero’s taste was not as distinctive as previously thought and that it was in line with that of other members of his family (and, indeed, with other Renaissance patrons). Piero’s collection of hardstones continued a tradition of Medici collecting begun by his father, Cosimo, but practiced also by other early Renaissance men, such as the humanist Niccolò Niccoli and collectors north and south of the Alps. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that Piero’s interests in art collecting went beyond the merely “decorative.”99 Like his ancestors, Lorenzo valued unusual objects, even as a boy when, as his biographer, Niccolò Valori, reports, Lorenzo showed a fascination for “anything precious and rare.”100 During the very years when Verrocchio was working on the tomb of Giovanni and Piero, Lorenzo was developing his taste for the antique, which included objects in different materials. Letters published by Gino Corti and Laurie Fusco establish that Lorenzo was interested in acquiring coins and ancient marble statues from as early as 1465.101 In 1471, during a diplomatic mission to Rome, when Lorenzo served as ambassador, he and Donato Accaiauoli toured the ancient ruins with Alberti,102 and in September

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Figure 91.  Tazza Farnese, sardonyx-­agate, second to first century bce, Museo Archaeologico, Naples. Copyright.Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY.

of the same year Lorenzo recorded that he had acquired various antiquities, including marble heads, a dish of carved chalcedony (the Alexandrian Tazza Farnese, Figure 91), and many gems and coins. These specific acquisitions of Lorenzo’s had belonged to the great collector, the recently deceased Paul II, and they were not “bought.” Instead, Lorenzo received them from Pope Sixtus IV to cancel past papal debts and as new loans.103 In addition, Lorenzo added hardstone vases to the fifteen already in the collection, bringing the total number to sixty-­three, making the Medici collection the largest of the fifteenth century. Like his ancestors, Lorenzo also procured stone fragments, a tendency he shared also with other late fifteenth-­ century collectors. The 1492 inventory refers to fragments made from marble, porphyry, Soria jasper, alabaster, and multicolored serpentine and porphyry. Lorenzo also purchased mosaics, adding three Byzantine mosaics to the seven or eight owned by his father. And he acquired five modern mosaics by Davide Ghirlandaio, a taste that apparently was not shared by his father or uncle. In addition, Lorenzo collected objects made from valuable metals, including archaeological fragments such as bronze nails from an ancient ship and a

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

bronze tablet excavated from San Lorenzo near Panisperna. Lorenzo’s collection of gems, which numbered 127, was not the largest of the fifteenth century, but it was certainly the most famous. As well as objects in precious materials, Lorenzo and Piero both acquired inscriptions.104 Lorenzo’s appreciation for objects and their materials served as inspiration for his poetry. In his Selve d’amore, he compares the beauty of his beloved to different materials (gems, silver, and gold) and to works of art (painting, sculpture, and mosaic) and nature, concluding that she is more impressive than anything else.105 As well as referring to the Medici collection of hardstones, mounted gems, vases, and reliquaries through his use of materials and forms,Verrocchio’s tomb sought to link the two spaces of palace and church. Two poems dating from c. 1459 suggest that many contemporaries would have recognized a link between the Medici palace, its collection, and the tombs in San Lorenzo on the basis of their materials (though it is only the tomb of Cosimo that was under construction at the time the poems were written). In one, Giovanni Avogadro gives a verbal description of the Medici palace, emphasizing its materials: “The top is taken up by shining alabaster,/ the right-­hand side by porphyry,/ the left is of the stone which our ancestors called/ serpentine in the vulgar tongue.”106 In the other anonymous poem, which was probably Avogradro’s source, the same description is given but the subject is works in the Medici collection, rather than the palace itself.107 (By applying the materials to the exterior of the palace, rather than to the sculpture collection, Avogadro was taking artistic license with his source, perhaps to describe the ideal noble palace.)108 In their concentration on materials (and in the choice of colors, which were associated with the Medici), the poems allow us to see how contemporaries would have connected the palace, its collection, and Verrocchio’s tombs in San Lorenzo.109 The tomb enabled the Medici to allude to their collection of hardstone vessels without displaying it, something about which they seem to have been concerned.110 At the same time, the tomb of Giovanni and Piero would have satisfied the need for restraint, expressed by a fictional Cosimo in Bartolomeo Platina’s De optimo cive owned by Lorenzo:111 in Platina’s tract “Cosimo” advises his grandson to devote himself to completing and adorning buildings begun by his ancestors, thereby “avoiding suspicion of lordly aspirations.”112 Through its collection of materials and the particular virtues conveyed via their specific combinations,Verrocchio’s tomb served as a kind of portrait of its patron (Lorenzo) and those whom it commemorated (Giovanni and Piero). In this sense Verrocchio’s monument is similar to a scrittoio or studiolo, that space within a Renaissance palace that contained the owner’s most precious possessions, notably manuscripts, coins, and gems and which expressed, as Paula Findlen has explained (about the Venetian Giacomo Contarini), “in its most essential sense, . . . his self. In his studio in Venice, the core of his very being was on display.”113 Indeed, one could argue that Filarete’s description of Piero’s

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scrittoio was a sort of portrait of the ruler through materials and objects. In its profusion of materials and techniques, and the sophisticated metaphorical language it used to communicate, Verrocchio’s tomb recalls Filarete’s description of the contents of Piero’s study.Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero would have stimulated its viewers to remember those it commemorated through references to their personalities and characters via symbols and an iconography of materials common to several monuments in San Lorenzo, thus realizing one of the chief aims of Christian burial: conscious remembrance.114 2.3  ARTISANSHIP AS MAGNIFICENCE

The value Lorenzo placed on certain objects can be reconstructed from a letter of 1480 from Antonio da Montecatini describing how Lorenzo showed cardinal Giovanni d’Aragona (1456–85) his collection in the Palazzo Medici. The climax of the visit was the display of hardstone vases, two basins overflowing with coins, and a box of jewels and gems.115 And in a series of re-­created scenes describing Lorenzo’s hospitality to visitors to his collection in his Vita (1513–15), Valori characterizes the realization of Federico da Montefeltro of Lorenzo’s collecting impulses during a visit as being based on knowledge, effort, money, and passion, writing: “What zeal and love can accomplish!”116 Although Valori’s text should be treated with caution, as it belongs to the genre of lives of illustrious men (which tends toward exaggeration), there is much that can be corroborated.117 Valori also reports that Galeazzo Maria Sforza (while lodging at the Palazzo Medici in 1471) said of Lorenzo’s collection: In every kind of magnificence Lorenzo had surpassed not only himself but any King you might name. He [Galeazzo] could not help marveling at the extraordinary wealth and abundance of everything for someone of private means: the gold, the jewels/gems [gemmas], the royal household furnishings. [He said] he himself could show treasures of money, but the most noble objects had flowed together into Lorenzo’s private domicile from all over the world.118

Valori’s use of the expression “magnificence” in describing Lorenzo’s collection points us to one of most important concepts linked to Renaissance collecting and one that can be usefully employed for understanding Verrocchio’s tomb. Although the accumulation of wealth was frowned upon during the fourteenth century, a change took place during that century and accelerated in the following century, as has been noted many times.119 This change in attitude is summed up, for instance, in Alberti’s On the Family (1430s), where he writes: “Fame and influence can be obtained with wealth, when it is used with magnanimity and magnificence to do great and noble things.”120 The idea of magnificence as an appropriate virtue for a ruler derives from Aristotle’s Nichomachean

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Ethics and is used, for instance, by Galvano Fiamma in his fourteenth-­century chronicle about the Milanese duke, Azzone Visconti, Since it behooves a magnificent prince to outlay large expenditures for the sake of the whole community – as the philosopher [Aristotle] states in the Ethics, the common good has something in common with the good sacred to God, for the divine good is defectively presented in a single person, or private or particular individual, but in the whole community devotion to religion or to the divine religion or to the good shines forth more beautifully. . .121

Thus, expenditure was celebrated in some circles as a demonstration of a ruler’s virtue and as a contribution to the good of the broader community.122 Verrocchio’s own knowledge of contemporary debates about the virtue of magnificence is suggested by one of the texts contained in a manuscript made in his workshop, a vernacular translation of the popular Treatise on Nobility, composed sometime before 1429 by humanist Buonaccorso da Montemagno.123 In it, one of the speakers (Publius Cornelius Scipio) recognizes that wealth was a useful accessory for nobility by blood. With wealth the nobleman could exercise liberality: “A family’s nobility is enhanced by its wealth and made more apparent through its domestic appearance: it is also the means by which friendships outside the family are maintained  . . . It therefore follows that to exercise magnificence, one must be wealthy . . . Thus an abundance of goods is the greatest help in the enhancement of nobility.”124 The next step of understanding how magnificence operates in Verrocchio’s tomb opens up larger questions about spending and the motivation behind the acquisition of goods during the Renaissance in general. For Richard Goldthwaite, the Renaissance was a period when “people entered into a new world of goods as they became more self-­conscious about taste and extended taste throughout the material world.” Economic developments that brought wealth to many more people than ever before created the context in which consumption became “a cultural force [with which patrons] . . . could construct a cultural identity.”125 Consumption also begat behavior: for instance, luxury tableware motivated a revolution in the way people ate their food. The desire for collecting, Goldthwaite argues, was the result of the demand for new things, an outcome of the economic developments during the Renaissance. And it was with taste, according to Goldthwaite, “that one established social credentials”; it was a product of consumption through which a patron refined his or her appreciation for objects.126 Nevertheless, there remained strong misgivings about wealth and spending during the fifteenth century. A number of sources from the early-to-mid-­ fifteenth century express consternation about Medici spending, with accusations centering on how Cosimo was paying for his building projects with

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communal funds, rather than his own; that the family’s stemma was emblazoned on the buildings he constructed; and that his sumptuous palace was built for his family, not for the common good.127 Furthermore, one night during the construction of the Medici palace someone rebuked the family by vandalizing the entrance with blood.128 Suspicion was especially acute for wealth acquired through usury. As the chronicler Giovanni Calvalcanti reports, despite the Medici family’s acknowledged generosity toward ecclesiastical institutions, like Cosimo de’ Medici’s toward the Augustinian convent and church of the Badia at Fiesole, the presence of the family’s heraldry (the palle) all over those buildings was criticized and made all the worse because the Medici had used other people’s money to fund it.129 Lorenzo took note of this, insisting that in the case of his patronage at the Benedictine convent of Le Murate in the early 1470s, neither his “heraldic arms nor anything else should reveal what God alone knew and had given” (according to a chronicle written by Giustina Niccolini, a nun at the convent, in 1597, drawing from historical correspondence between Lorenzo and Le Murate’s abbess).130 It was in the early 1470s too that Lorenzo accepted Bartolomeo Platina’s De optimo cive (1473–74) from the author. Although usually parsimonious toward writers of unsolicited works, Lorenzo rewarded Platina with one hundred florins, a demonstration of his approval of the book’s contents, which warned of restraint in expenditure.131 Verrocchio’s awareness of adverse attitudes toward Medici wealth is supported by the inclusion of a sonnet by Burchiello in one of the commonplace books made in the artist’s workshop, which Alessandro Polcri has identified as one of a number of negative commentaries on Cosimo from the mid-­fifteenth century composed in Latin and the vernacular. In Burchiello’s sonnet, the quasi-­r uler is referred to as the “unjust and perfidious tyrant” with “your great treasure” (“iniquo e perfido tiranno  . . . [col] tuo gran tesoro”), and the poem’s concluding lines concern a dove, which, after consuming a meal, turns into a predatory vulture.132 Although there has been a general acceptance of a celebratory attitude toward the accumulation of objects during the Renaissance, a closer examination of primary textual sources reveals wariness about spending, especially as a means to cultivating the self.133 2.4  MAKING AS A DEFENSE OF MEDICI WEALTH

As a visual statement in a public setting, a tomb had the potential to announce something about the interred. In the case of Venice in the thirteenth century, the ducal tomb was the preeminent site for political expressions, coinciding precisely with the moment when that city was experiencing a unified political unit in the form of the doge during a period of tremendous economic development and international importance.134 As we have seen, because the Medici hold on power was particularly uncertain at this moment, Verrocchio’s tomb

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

served as a permanent funerary oration through materials and iconography, especially for Piero, who was buried with little public ceremony, and a declaration of Lorenzo’s right to rule.135 The tomb can also be read as an assertion of Medici authority through decorous noble expenditure. Their wealth was the basis of their hold on political power, which was in turn dependent on their cultural program, expressed through their commissioning and ownership of objects, both for public display and private enjoyment.136 Indeed, Piero went as far as to identify Verrocchio’s tomb for Cosimo as proof of the latter’s modesty: “He was buried in the tomb ordered for him in the ground at the church of San Lorenzo without any funerary honors or pomp.”137 It is noteworthy that in this description – which in its entirety concerns all of Cosimo’s commissions – Piero does not mention the family palace, a deliberate attempt to avoid any charge of princely ostentation.138 One solution to the problem of spending as a means for cultivating a sense of self was the creation of art that “professe[d] to disclose a certain kind of knowledge: knowledge de rerum natura, of the nature of things.” In this way objects become enlivened (and productive), rather than lifeless.139 This strategy can be identified in the Medici tomb where Verrocchio used his materials and references to techniques of making to argue how art could serve as a defense of the accumulation of wealth as natural. What exactly was the nature of the Medici attitude to money, spending, and wealth, and how was this expressed in the tomb? Magnificence was a term used in a variety of contexts to refer to the spending of the Medici family.140 Several times references are made to how members of the Medici family expended vast amounts of money. In his description of Piero’s scrittoio, for instance, Filarete emphasizes the importance of the monetary value of the collection: “for worthy and unusual objects, he does not look at the cost.” And he describes Piero looking at his books as if they were a “solid mass of gold.”141 A now-­lost inscription on the reliquary of Saints Protus, Hyacinthus, and Nemesius by Ghiberti (Figure 87) proclaimed the brothers Cosimo and Lorenzo as its patrons and declared: “Those most notable men, the brothers Cosmas and Laurentius, looked after the honouring of the long neglected relics of the holy martyrs with religious zeal and holy piety, and laying them up in bronze caskets at their own expense.”142 A similar concern with cost is evident in the inscription on Piero’s tabernacle for Santissima Annunziata that reads “costò fiorini 4,000 el marmo” (the marble cost 4,000 florins).143 Often these discussions of cost were situated within the framework of the Aristotelian doctrine of glad and generous spending.144 For instance, in his ricordo, Lorenzo writes: I find we have spent a large sum of money from 1434 up to 1471, as appears from an account book covering that period. It shows an incredible sum, for it amounts to 663,775 florins spent on buildings, charities

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and taxes, not counting other expenses, nor would I complain about this, for though many a man would like to have even part of that sum in his purse I think it gave great luster to the state and this money seems to be well spent and I am very satisfied.145

The Medici bank played a major role in the acquisition of objects for the family. On occasion members obtained goods taken as collateral for loans for collectors. After the death of collectors, the goods were accepted by the Medici if the heirs did not pay off the debt.146 And Leonardo Vernacci, who served as assistant bank manager in Rome between 1448 and 1461, also found antiquities for Giovanni and Piero. In its use of expensive materials, one can imagine that Lorenzo approved of the way that Verrocchio’s tomb expressed the same attitude toward spending that he espoused in his note to his sons:“I think it gave great luster to the state.” Despite the restricted access to the tomb (on the side in the Old Sacristy), the monument’s position between the Old Sacristy and the chapel of Cosmas and Damian meant that Verrocchio’s tomb would have been visible to any visitor to the church. As we have seen, the materials used in Verrocchio’s tomb are various and splendid, and they resemble the gems and hardstone vases in the Medici collection. As such, the monument serves as a declaration of the generous spending of the Medici in a church. Another important component of appropriate spending was the workmanship that went into objects, and it is here that Verrocchio’s artistry takes on special importance. Before we turn to the artist’s role, let us first consider the centrality of making to magnificence and its relevance to Medici commissions and collecting practices. In his description of the objects and buildings of the duke of Milan, Fiamma draws attention to their materials and to the ingenuity and skill of the artists who made them.147 Similarly the Neapolitan court humanist and secretary, Giovanni Pontano, in his treatise De splendore (one of a series of treatises begun in the 1460s and published in 1498 but worked on and circulated in the years between), notes that the splendid man should acquire domestic furnishings that are of the most excellent quality, evident from the superior artistry that went into making them and their materials.148 Pontano goes on to praise a collection of cups that is made up of objects that represent variety: Some should be in gold, silver and porcelain; and they should be of different forms, some as chalices, some as bowls for mixing wine, some in the form of a jug, or as plates with long or short handles . . . Some should be made precious by their cost and size, others exclusively by the refinement and rarity which comes either from the hand of the artist or from some other reason.149

Pontano’s treatises were not written with a specific ruler in mind  – indeed they were dedicated to members of Pontano’s literary circle – and De splendore

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

concerns splendor as distinct from magnificence (splendor is a quality conveyed through domestic furnishings and personal dress, whereas magnificence finds expression in buildings), Pontano’s ideas nevertheless communicate a certain attitude toward splendor and collecting that can be usefully employed as a backdrop to understanding some of the issues at work in Verrocchio’s tomb.150 Begun in the 1460s by a writer who had spent time in Florence, De splendore characterizes attitudes to spending during the very period when Verrocchio’s tomb was made.151 A fascination with technical mastery was an important aspect of both Piero’s and Lorenzo’s taste in objects. In Filarete’s description of Piero and his collection, he emphasizes Piero’s pleasure in objects as consisting of two parts: his appreciation for the subject represented and “for the worthy mastery of ancient and angelic spirits who, through their sublime talent, have made such base things as bronze, marble and similar materials be valued greatly.” And on the collection of hardstone vases specifically, Filarete says of Piero, “[h]e delights greatly in these, extolling their dignity and the mastery of their making.”152 We get a sense of Lorenzo’s appreciation for artistry in a letter to him from Nofri Tornabuoni about a cornelian he was considering acquiring: “I think the carving is very subtle and full of artistry, and truly you are right to want it.”153 Luigi da Barberino wrote the following about the Phaethon intaglio in Lorenzo’s collection in a letter addressed to Niccolò Michelozzi: To me it seemed a very artful thing, but then this man to whom it belonged [Giovanni Cimpolini] . . . showed me the artistry and difficulty of every detail, it seems to me still more wonderful. One has to consider every part, and one will see what a hand and what an eye and judgment the artist had . . . There are so many things and so perfectly finished.154

And in his Orationes (late 1480s–1492), Angelo Poliziano praised Lorenzo’s Tazza Farnese (Figure 91) as an “excellent thing owing to its own brilliance, a gift of Nature, but the hand of the craftsman made it worthier still.”155 As well as an appreciation for the technical mastery of ancient artists, Piero and Lorenzo cultivated certain techniques among the artists of their day, including many that had been lost. Lorenzo encouraged master intagliatori to settle in Florence to encourage the production of hardstones.156 Piero di Neri Razzanti, for instance, was exempted from taxes in 1477 on condition that he teach the art of cutting precious stones to local artists.157 The Medici commissioned mounts by contemporary goldsmiths for many of their antique vases, including Verrocchio, inviting comparisons between antique and contemporary artists. And Lorenzo sponsored the work of medalists, metalworkers, mosaicists, and gem cutters.158 Lorenzo also made available objects in the Medici collection to Florentine artists.159 In a letter to Isabella d’Este of 1502, Francesco Malatesta reported that Leonardo da Vinci,Verrocchio’s pupil, was apparently well acquainted with the

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collection of hardstone vases.160 The interest in encouraging ancient techniques should be seen in the light of the Medici interest, especially Lorenzo’s, in elevating Florentine cultural traditions so that they were on a par with that of antiquity (and signorial dynasties throughout Italy).161 In making a connection between the Medici collection in their palace and the tomb of Giovanni and Piero in San Lorenzo,Verrocchio also realized a plan that the Medici had considered many decades earlier. According to Antonio Billi, in his biography of Brunelleschi, the architect had planned a palace for Cosimo de’ Medici, “which was to have been sited on the piazza of San Lorenzo so that the portal of the palace would have faced the portal of San Lorenzo. . .”162 According to Billi, Cosimo rejected the plan (much to Brunelleschi’s fury) because it was too sumptuous. Isabelle Hyman has more plausibly argued that Cosimo did not dare accept the proposal, as it would link the Medici palace with what was ostensibly a Medici church across a Medici piazza, a design that would rival that of a bishop’s residence and cathedral, or a town hall and cathedral.163 If he had accepted the plan, Cosimo would have been sending the message that his family’s authority was on a par with the religious and civic institutions of the city, a comparison Cosimo, who preferred to be seen as a citizen, not a ruler, was keen to avoid. Although the design was rejected, the building of both church and palace was undertaken under the guidance of the same architect (probably Michelozzo) between 1446 and 1452, materials were acquired from the same places, decorations were carved at the same locations, and many of the same laborers were employed at both sites, as a ledger in San Lorenzo demonstrates. And although it was never realized, the Medici desire to connect church and palace continued well into the sixteenth century.164 If it had succeeded, the design would have declared powerfully and explicitly that San Lorenzo was the Medici family church. Through his use of materials that referred specifically to the Medici palace and collection, Verrocchio’s tomb realized the connection between the spaces of church and palace that Brunelleschi had proposed, but communicated it less overtly than the original plan would have. Verrocchio’s tomb also engages with the fundamental message of Filarete’s verbal picture of Piero, which is a defense of wealth through the suggestion of how brute metals could be turned into virtues. The monument expresses this idea through its emphasis on artistic processes and material transformations. It is here that the sophistication of Verrocchio’s iconography becomes clear. For it is thanks to the artist’s intervention that materials come to acquire their value. As Filarete put it about Piero’s collection in the Medici scrittoio: “Valuable things such as gold and silver have become even greater through their mastery, for, as it is noted, there is nothing, from gems on, that is worth more than gold. [Gold] they have made worth more than gold by means of their skill . . . they have made those materials more base than gold worth more than gold itself.”165

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Filarete’s emphasis on transformation in his description of Piero’s collection serves not simply as a defense of wealth but of usury specifically, the practice on which Medici wealth depended, and Verrocchio’s metaphors of making in the tomb serve the same end. During the Renaissance usury was regarded as unnatural because, by breeding money, it was seen to perform a function that stood in marked contrast to procreation in the natural world.166 Many medieval scholastics held that money was sterile and barren, and that therefore it could not breed.167 Nevertheless some thinkers proposed ways in which money could be seen to be fruitful. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), for instance, observes that money did breed, but it did so in a way that was unnatural (money’s purpose was as a medium of exchange; when money increases – or breeds, it should be used for the acquisition of natural objects, not for money). Richard of Middleton (c. 1249–c. 1302) proposes how money could be made fertile: if money can be said to produce human industry, human industry can be said to produce money. Richard’s claim had wide currency and was used explicitly by Renaissance critics of scholastic usury theory.168 In some theological discussions of usury, namely William of Auxerre’s enormously influential Summa aurea (of or c. 1220), money’s ability to produce fruit was contrasted with human labor and industry, the former being “accidental,” whereas the latter was “true.”169 But for others, it was through human intervention (industry) that money becomes fruitful. In this branch of writing on usury, the entrepreneur becomes an active agent in money’s ability to fructify based on his sagacity. As Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Adam Smith’s first teacher of economics, put it: “Labor employed in managing money in trade, or manufactures, will make it as fruitful as any thing.” Although Hutcheson was writing in the eighteenth century, the idea he expresses was one widely shared during Verrocchio’s day. It is echoed, for instance, by the Franciscan theologian Astesanus of Asti (d. c. 1330), who claims that wealth does have the potential to become fruitful: “Money does not have any fruit from its nature but only from the user’s industry. . .”170 This quotation comes from Astesanus’s Summa de casibus (commonly known as Astesana, c. 1317), which was widely read during the Renaissance and often mined by confessors.171 Hutcheson’s idea also finds expression in works by archbishop Antoninus of Florence (1380–459) and sermons of Bernardino of Siena (1380–444). According to Antoninus: “though the circulating coin might be sterile, money capital is not so because command of it is a condition for embarking upon business.”172 Bernardino admits that money is barren in one sermon, but he argues in another that it can be fruitful when it assumes “the purpose of seeding profit . . . [, which] we commonly call . . . capital.”173 The idea of wealth being used productively was also addressed in the life of Saint John the Evangelist in The Golden Legend, which was well known in Florence among all social strata. In it, John chastises a philosopher who had ordered two wealthy brothers to acquire priceless gems with

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their patrimony and then demonstrate their renunciation of worldly goods by destroying them in the public square. The apostle’s response was to denounce the gems’ destruction and to call for a more productive transformation of wealth: converting their material richness into spiritual currency (by selling them and giving away the proceeds to the poor).174 The story demonstrated to a wide audience how material splendor could (and should) be harnessed for spiritual benefit, a message shared with Verrocchio’s tomb, which showed how Medici wealth could be transformed into something spiritually beneficial through its materiality. Verrocchio’s defense of Medici wealth is framed within his demonstration of his own artistic virtuosity, which is a meditation de rerum natura (on the nature of things), in particular through the prevalence of metaphors of creation and enlivenment. For instance, the net that encases the sarcophagus ends in tassels that appear to be waving in the wind (Figure 70). This feature occurs in no other tomb, as far as I know. In suggesting that his bronze can move, Verrocchio is playing with the idea that the metal was alive, a common conceit during the Renaissance, when bronze was regarded as a petrified material, formed by congealed water trapped beneath the earth’s surface and brought back to life by the metallurgist.175 As Antonio Allegreti, the sixteenth-­ century dilettante alchemist, later put it: “[Metal is] a hard and dense material holding within it that living spirit which infuses all created things and which alone gives them life, motion, and sense. It cannot show its forces unless its hot and lively virtue is quickly freed from where it lies, encumbered.”176 The tassels below Verrocchio’s sarcophagus that seem to rustle gently as if awakening present the bronze as a slumbering material and serve to emphasize Verrocchio’s role as the enlivener who will bring it back to life, making it molten and forming it. The allusion to the generative aspect of bronze was further made by Verrocchio in the lifelike turtles on which the marble plinth rests (Figures 33 and 73), and in the fruits, seeds, and leaves that adorn the wreaths on the sarcophagus (Figures 34, 74, 75, 92, and 93), which were cast from life.177 By casting them from nature, Verrocchio again played the role of the creator, petrifying life but drawing attention to the potential within the material for re-­enlivening, which could be done by the bronze caster.178 Verrocchio was celebrated in precisely these terms in an inscription in Renaissance script on one of his drawings, his Studies of Infants (Figure 94). It reads: Viderunt equum mirandaque arte confectum Quem nobiles Veneti tibi dedere facturum Florentiae decus crasse mihi crede Varochie Qui te plus oculis amant dilliguntque [sic] coluntque Atque cum Jupiter animas infuderit ipsi Hoc tibi Dominus rogat Salmonicus idem Vale et bene qui legis.179

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 92.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of fruits, seeds, and leaves that adorn the sarcophagus, bronze. Alinari Archives, Florence.

Figure 93.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, c. 1473, San Lorenzo, Florence. Detail of fruits, seeds, and leaves that adorn the sarcophagus, bronze. Alinari Archives, Florence.

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Figure 94.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Studies of Infants, recto, pen and brown ink with faint traces of black chalk or leadpoint, late 1460s or 1470s, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Paris, RF 2. Copyright. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photo: René-­Gabriel Ojéda.

[They have seen the horse wrought with wondrous skill, Which the noble Venetians gave to you to make A glory to Florence, believe me, stout Verrocchio Who love you, delight in you and esteem you more than just with their eyes. And as Jove has infused spirits into it [the horse], the Lord Salmonicus asks the same regard for you. Fare you well who read this]

The horse in the poem must be Verrocchio’s Colleoni monument (Figure 6), which was left incomplete at the artist’s death in 1488, indicating that the inscription must have been written sometime after the 1480s. In the poem, the writer – probably an early owner of the drawing – compares Verrocchio to Jove, thus underlining the artist’s role as creator. Moreover, the term “animas,” used in the same phrase, refers not only to souls but also serves as a pun on the artist’s technique, as the word “anima” was used for the solid core in hollow metal casting.180 The bronze caster and metalworker’s tasks were often compared to those of God or of a Magus. For instance, the metalworker’s crucible, in which metals were melted, was described in Renaissance treatises as a “matrix” (womb), and the metalworker’s task was compared to Mother Earth, bringing the ores to term.181 Albertus Magnus (whose works were popular in

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 95.  Benvenuto Cellini. Perseus, bronze, 1545, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Renaissance Italy), quoting Hermes Trismegistus’ Emerald Table, describes the process of liquefaction of metals as follows: “The Mother of metal is Earth, that carries it in her belly.”182 And in his well-­known account of the casting of the Perseus (Figure 95), Cellini describes the act of casting (not the Perseus but another work of art) as bringing something back to life: “owing to my thorough knowledge of the art [of bronze casting], I was here again able to bring a dead thing (un morto) to life.”183 Thus, the netting and the plants and animals on Verrocchio’s tomb, which appear to be slumbering, awaiting regeneration from the artist, serve as a metaphor for Giovanni and Piero de Medici’s resurrection, just as their souls await resurrection from God. And it is Verrocchio who presents himself as a kind of Magus figure, foregrounding his creative role as the means through which the metaphor for Medici resurrection operates. The artist’s foregrounding of his own artistic practice occurs also in his presentation of porphyry. Porphyry’s markings signified blood, a connection deriving from the etymology of the word porphyry, which received its name from a dye (“sea purple”), made from the blood of the murex.184 Porphyry was also associated specifically with the sacrificial blood of Christ and of the martyrs (including Saint Lawrence, patron saint of San Lorenzo).185 Evidently

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Verrocchio was acquainted with the idea of porphyry as blood, as he used the material in a sculpture to represent flayed Marsyas’ bloody state for his celebrated renovation of an ancient statue in the Medici garden that has not survived.186 Vasari praised Verrocchio’s use of the markings in the porphyry for his Marsyas for “certain delicate white veins . . . carved by the craftsman exactly in the right place, so as to appear to be little nerves, such as are seen in real bodies when they have been flayed; which must have given to that work, when it had its original finish, a most lifelike appearance.”187 Johannes Fichard, a Frankfurt jurist who saw Verrocchio’s statue in 1536, admired the artist’s use of porphyry to represent Marsyas’ flayed body.188 Verrocchio’s sarcophagus for the tomb of Giovanni and Piero at San Lorenzo is covered with acanthus leaves, and this can be read as a witty reference to the artist’s skill, in this case, in working with porphyry. According to Domenico Buoninsegni, in a recommendation to another artist composed before 1533, acanthus gives steel a good hard “temper,” necessary for tools for working with porphyry. Giuliano da Sangallo records a similar recipe, also using acanthus, in his Taccuino Senese (before 1516).189 By encasing his porphyry sarcophagus in acanthus, Verrocchio was punning on his own technique: he had mastered the difficult challenge of working with porphyry and presents this to the viewer. A similar idea is suggested by the presentation of the bronze diamond on top of the porphyry sarcophagus. Here one may read porphyry’s associations as an allusion to blood’s use as an ingredient for cutting stones and gems (such as diamonds).190 The material metaphors of the tomb, and the emphasis on artistry, also suggest a specifically Christian message was intended, as they recall Marsilio Ficino’s neo-­Platonic use of workshop and material metaphors to describe the Christian soul, as laid out by Ficino in a letter to Cardinal Bessarion: You are well aware, venerable father, that when our Plato discoursed on beauty in the Phaedrus with such insight and at such length, it was beauty of the soul he sought from God, which he called wisdom and most precious gold. When this gold was given to Plato by God, it shone in him most brilliantly, because he was so pure in heart. Although this great brilliance is revealed in his words and writings, yet the treasure became enveloped by darkness in the mind, and difficult to see, as if covered with a cloak of earth. It lay hidden from any man who did not have eyes like a lynx. For this reason some men of narrow learning were once deceived by the outer crust and, since they could not penetrate to the core, they despised the hidden treasure. But when that gold was put into the workshop first of Plotinus then of Porphyry, Iamblichus and eventually of Proclus, the earth was removed by the searching test of fire, and the gold so shone that it filled the whole world again with marvelous spendour [. . .] 191

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Ficino’s imagery resonates with Verrocchio’s use of materials in his tomb of Giovanni and Piero: like Plato’s soul, those of the Medici are presented like precious treasure. Although Ficino’s “artists” are all ancient philosophers, it is significant that he uses the metaphor of the artist’s workshop and that it is only here, according to Ficino, that the materials (which had become obscured) are transformed and fill the world “with marvelous splendor.” The precious stones on Verrocchio’s tomb are mounted as they would be in a jewel or vase, and Verrocchio, of course, was a goldsmith. Although no jewelry by him survives, his talents in this area were recognized by Vasari, who singled out bottoni da piviali (clasps for priestly vestments) for praise in his vita of the artist.192 Verrocchio may have been responsible for producing mounts for some of the antique vases in the Medici collection, and he drew from this experience in making his tomb. Surviving examples of mounts for Medici vases, one of which can be attributed to Verrocchio on stylistic grounds, serve as a useful comparison for the way that the artist’s gilt bronze decoration on the San Lorenzo tomb presents the porphyry sarcophagus, the serpentine roundels, and the bronze diamond on top of the sarcophagus, like gems mounted in a precious piece of jewelry  – for instance, the attribution to Verrocchio of a mount for a sardonyx ewer that formed part of the Medici collection (Figure  96), which consists of a stepped, raised base, lid, and handle.193 Two

Figure 96.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Mounting of a sardonyx ewer, c. 1465–77, Museo degli Argenti, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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other Quattrocento mounts of antique vases by unknown Florentine goldsmiths originally in the Medici collection indicate how Verrocchio’s tomb imitates contemporary goldsmith’s settings: a double cup in amethyst mounted in gilded silver (Figure 97) and a rock crystal Reliquary of San Nicola in a gilded silver mount (Figure 98). Like the acanthus leaves on Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero, the gilded metal leaves of the mounts of these objects support and present the precious materials (in this case, amethyst and rock crystal) to the viewer.Verrocchio’s tomb also resembles some of the hardstone vases in the Medici collection in the presentation of the sarcophagus, with its marble cornice separating the top and bottom of the structure and with the elaborate decoration on the top of the sarcophagus that culminates in a diamond. Several of the hardstone vases in the Medici collection (including some known only from sixteenth-­century drawings, Figure 99) featured mounts around their centers, though admittedly in gilt metal rather than in marble, and similar decoration.194 In his presentation of materials for the Medici tomb, Verrocchio evoked contemporary gem settings, drawing from his own experience.

Figure 97.  Double cup in amethyst with silver-­gilt mount, fifteenth century, Museo degli Argenti, Florence. Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, NY.

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

Figure 98.  Florentine goldsmith active in Rome, Reliquary of San Nicola, rock crystal with a silver-­gilt mount, early sixteenth century, San Lorenzo, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

Figure 99.  Fifteenth century, double cup, jasper, with silver-­gilt mounts, recorded in a sixteenth-­century drawing, detail, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, Cod. Palatino C.B. 3, 27. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze.

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More than that, though, the settings of materials in his Medici tomb also make an assertion about the role of the artist in bringing out and improving his gems. This corresponds to contemporary claims made about setting jewels, such as a late fifteenth-­century verse praising the jeweler Caradosso by the Florentine Bernardo Bellincioni: “Nature does not tie an apple to the branch/ Or Spring the flowers to the grass./ As well as precious stones from the hand of/ Caradosso come forth/ Set in jewelry for the person who judges them.”195 Here the poet praises the jeweler’s ability to surpass nature. Cellini makes a similar assertion in his Trattati: employing foils and coatings, the Renaissance jeweler, according to Cellini, could enhance a gem’s sparkle or color. Although Cellini regards only the ruby, sapphire, emerald, and diamond as true jewels and worthy of the jeweler, his contemporaries considered the range to include many more, and jewelers employed at the Medici court in the sixteenth century also set hardstones, like those found on Verrocchio’s tomb, into jewelery.196 Verrocchio’s tomb makes a visual statement of how Medici money could become worthy through the artist’s acumen and skill, and how Medici entrepreneurship could be turned into the means to access heaven and hope for resurrection. The mind and products of the maker (Verrocchio) serve as ornaments for the Medici. As Manuel Chrysoloras explained in his consideration of why one finds “beauty not in living bodies but in stones, marbles, and images” (Chrysoloras was thinking of the antiquities collections of Renaissance Rome, but his argument can be extended to materials and art in general), “It is that we admire not so much the beauties of the bodies in statues and paintings as the beauty of the mind (νοῦς) of their maker.”197 Verrocchio’s emphasis on metamorphosis and the enlivenment of materials serves to demonstrate how brute matter, like money, could be transformed into something else, thus echoing the procreative workings of nature.198 This suggests an attitude toward artistic production that aligns it with theological discussions of usury that privileged work and making. But whereas some scholastics, most notably William of Auxerre (d. 1231), contrasted human industry with money’s ability to accumulate, on the tomb Verrocchio’s labor is the means through which Medici wealth – much of which was obtained through usury (considered unnatural) – is transformed into something virtuous. Verrocchio’s monument can be read as a treatise on the artist’s theory and practice, a demonstration of how practice (materials and techniques) can express complex ideas, achieved metaphorically on the tomb, and of Verrocchio’s wide and varied expertise. What Verrocchio achieved in his tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici was a monument that presented the interred as something like a sacred relic, thus promoting the Medici family socially and spiritually. Through its position in San Lorenzo, close to the family palace, and in its evocation of the Medici treasury through its use of opulent materials, the tomb presents a portrait of the family as generous spenders, a declaration of

Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb: Art as Treatise

their magnificence in a church. And in case any of their many enemies wanted to accuse the Medici of greed and ostentation, the tomb uses puns on materials and making to suggest how wealth is not always evil; used productively, money can become like nature, procreative. By framing Medici wealth in this way,Verrocchio asserts the power of the artist, who can manipulate matter and present it so that the powerful Medici family can benefit from it spiritually, experiencing resurrection and regeneration after death. If Verrocchio’s message has been obscured, it is because he was working at a time when overt communication about Medici ambitions (spiritual or political) was dangerous. Verrocchio’s tomb was a clever and witty solution to the challenges facing the Medici and their allies, expressing the family’s right to govern, claiming that the death and resurrection of family members was like that of saintly martyrs, and arguing through visual, material, and technical puns that Medici banking was the basis of their ability to be generous spenders and spiritually beneficial.

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BRIDGING DIMENSIONS: VERROCCHIO’S CHRIST AND SAINT THOMAS AS ABSENT PRESENCE

What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it, a metal image, a teacher of lies? For the workman trusts in his own creation when he makes dumb idols! Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a dumb stone, Arise! Can this give revelation? Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it. But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him. (Habbakuk 2:18–20)1

Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 5) is an unusual representation of a subject that was well known during the Renaissance. Most depictions are pictorial rather than sculptural and show Thomas touching Christ’s wound (for example, Figure 100). By contrast,Verrocchio’s work consists of two relief sculptures and shows Thomas reaching in as if to touch Christ’s wound but he does not do so. These differences are significant and demonstrate Verrocchio’s solution to the challenges of the work’s site of display: a preexisting niche, built decades earlier. Moreover, Thomas’ encounter with Christ’s side wound serves as a metaphor for the soul’s yearning for mystical union with God, understood as the desire for wisdom and knowledge with implications for the patron, the Mercanzia  – the commercial tribunal of Florence, an institution dedicated to searching for the truth. It will be proposed here that by showing Thomas reaching forward to touch Christ but not doing so,Verrocchio is emphasizing that Thomas’ realization was indirect (he came to understand Christ’s state at the Resurrection without touching), just as Verrocchio’s experience of his material was indirect (his hands created the model from which the bronze 118

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Figure 100.  Unknown artist. Christ and Saint Thomas, Palazzo Comunale, Scarperia, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Comune di Scarperia. Photo: Luigi Artini, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut.

sculpture was made, but he did not touch the bronze directly during casting). Thomas is presented, therefore, as an analog for the sculptor working in bronze.2 3.1  THE COMMISSION FOR CHRIST AND SAINT THOMAS

Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas is one of the best-­documented sculptures of the Quattrocento. It was commissioned by the Florentine Università della Mercanzia, the institution that regulated trade and the guilds, and served as the city’s highest court of commercial law. Made for the exterior of Orsanmichele (Figure 29), a church and former grain warehouse and market, it was placed in the most prestigious position, at the central pier of the eastern (and most visible) facade.3 The decoration of Orsanmichele’s other niches had been commissioned by the city’s twelve major guilds and the Parte Guelfa (which represented the city’s merchants), and consisted of representations of the institutions’ patron saints.The Mercanzia acquired their niche from the Parte Guelfa, which negotiated the sale in 1459 and 1460, though they formally transferred their rights only in 1463 (the Parte Guelfa being forced to give up their space because of lack of

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Figure 101.  Luca della Robbia. Stemma, glazed terracotta, 1463–64, Orsanmichele, Florence. Alinari Archive, Florence.

funds). Thus, Verrocchio’s sculpture was made for a preexisting site: the niche was completed by 1422, and Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse (Figure 30) was placed there in 1425,4 where it stood until 1451/52.5 It was sold to Santa Croce on December 29, 1459. The Sei of the Mercanzia (the executive board of the tribunal) appointed five operai, a group of men who were responsible for the commission of the new statue, in 1463.6 In January or February of that year the Mercanzia commissioned Luca della Robbia to make a stemma (crest; Figure 101) to be placed above the niche, replacing that of the Parte Guelfa,7 and final payment to Luca for his work is recorded on March 22, 1464. This same document indicates that the sculpture for the niche was to be of bronze. Money was set aside for the purchase of the metal (bronze, along with copper) from the Arte di Calimala (the cloth merchants’ guild) in 1464, the price of which was negotiated by Piero de’ Medici and came to a total of 400 gold florins.8 Initially the operai left open the possibility of one statue or two for their niche.9 A document of 1464 refers to a figure or figures,10 indicating that the decision had not yet been made, and documents up until 1476 variously mention one or two statues.11

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It appears that no artist had been selected until January 15, 1467 (modern style), when Verrocchio is first mentioned.12 Certainly as late as May 14, 1466, a document records that the sculpture had not yet been commissioned.13 Giorgio Vasari claims that the operai had planned to give the commission to Lorenzo Ghiberti or Donatello (and that Donatello made the marble tabernacle with the intention of filling it with two statues but did not complete the commission because he could not agree on a price).14 As Ghiberti died in 1455, this cannot be correct (though it is possible that the operai hoped to entrust the sculpture to his son, Vittorio, who continued the Ghiberti workshop). The operai indeed may have intended to choose Donatello, but he died on December 13, 1466.15 Material evidence suggests the possibility that Luca della Robbia may have been involved in the commission for the statues, as well as for the stemma: a small-­scale terracotta group of Christ and Saint Thomas plausibly attributed to him (Figure 102) may have been a model for the sculpture,

Figure 102.  Luca della Robbia. Model of Christ and Saint Thomas, terracotta with traces of polychromy, 1463–65, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. Copyright. Szépmüvészeti Múzeum – Museum of Fine Arts, 2018.

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a proposal first set forth by Paul Schubring.16 The model also provides possible proof of a competition for the commission. In any case, by January 15, 1467, it was decided that Verrocchio was to make the sculptures. Beginning on April 24, 1468, Verrocchio was paid a monthly salary of twenty-­five lire, and on August 2, 1470, the Sei ordered the bronze and other metals be reweighed for one of the sculptures in the presence of two of its members.17 By August, 1470 the statue of Christ was ready for casting, which occurred sometime between then and March, 1476.18 The model for Saint Thomas appears to have been brought to a finished state sometime between 1476 and 1479. It was cast in 1479 and chased between then and fall or winter of 1480.19 Work on the sculpture was suspended in March, 1481, and nothing further was done until April, 1483, when the Signoria intervened to convince Verrocchio to finish the sculptures in time for the Feast of Saint John the Baptist (June 24).20 The sculpture was unveiled on June 21, 1483, as the apothecary Luca Landucci records in his diary.21 A document of January 2, 1488 (which postdates Verrocchio’s death) indicates that an additional inscription was intended for the sculpture:Verrocchio’s brother, Tommaso, and Lorenzo di Credi were asked to add a gilded inscription, though there are no records that this happened. It is unlikely that this was the inscription on the hem of the figures’ robes; more probably, it was one intended for the base of the sculpture. Unfortunately, its content is unknown.22 Christ and Saint Thomas was a popular subject for law courts and government assembly halls in Tuscany (for instance, Figure  100), including that of the Mercanzia itself.23 As Andrew Butterfield has noted, the story expressed two key attributes of the ideal magistrate: clemency and the desire for truth. Therefore, Verrocchio’s sculpture can be read as emblematizing the essence of one of the Mercanzia’s most important functions (its role as a tribunal for commercial law in Florence).24 Like many institutions in Florence during the late fifteenth century, the Mercanzia was controlled by the Medici. Lorenzo il Magnifico used it to grant favors to allies and to punish enemies. In the very years that Verrocchio was making his sculpture, the Mercanzia, like all branches of the Florentine judiciary, was being reformed, thanks to the intervention of Lorenzo. And the specific group from the Mercanzia responsible for the commission of the sculpture for Orsanmichele (the operai) was a board made up of five men, each one a representative from the major guilds of Florence, and all members of the Medici inner circle.25 The subject of Doubting Thomas appealed to the Medici, who were the principal patrons of the church of San Tommaso Apostolo; Cosimo de’ Medici emphasized the importance of Thomas by declaring the saint’s feast day a communal holiday in 1435 while serving in the Florentine government. Given Lorenzo’s important role in reshaping the Florentine legal sphere at this time (and because all of the Sei were members of the Medici inner circle), the sculpture has been read as serving to convince

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the Florentine people that Lorenzo was a wise ruler who governed for the common good, an issue about which there was much debate at the time.26 There is no denying the importance of the Medici and their allies as motivators for the iconography of Verrocchio’s sculpture, but what has too often been overlooked is the artist’s own crafting of a particular presentation of his subject that would have appealed to his patrons, expressed through his engagement with the material from which it was made (bronze) and the method by which it was constructed (modeling in wax and casting in bronze). By attending to this aspect of the sculpture, we gain a deeper appreciation for the sophistication of the sculpture’s theological message – a commentary on the nature of faith – and Verrocchio’s role in fashioning that. In Verrocchio’s sculpture (Figure 103), Christ stands in contrapposto, facing frontally with his proper right arm raised. His head is tilted downwards and his gaze is lowered. With his proper left hand, Christ pulls open his robe to reveal the wound in his side. In its original location in the niche, Christ was positioned near the center but slightly to the right, standing on a step installed by Verrocchio. Outside the niche and on the step below Christ was Saint Thomas

Figure 103.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Alinari Archive, Florence.

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whose lower body faces out but twists toward Christ so that his upper body is in profile and his head is seen almost in reverse. The multitude of folds on the drapery of both figures captures our attention and invites a slow viewing experience.Visual echoes between the figures encourage us to read each in relation to the other: both are in contrapposto, both have a sweeping lower lip of drapery, both hold a bulk of fabric at their centers, and their hair is similarly curly. The pose of Thomas suggests a moment unfolding in time as he turns away from the viewer and toward Christ, reaching in as if to touch Christ’s wound. As Thomas moves toward him, Christ appears to respond by raising his arm and opening his garment. The artist carefully choreographed the relationship between the two figures, so precisely, in fact, that Thomas’ middle finger is just half a centimeter from Christ’s garment and only six centimeters from his wound (Figure 104).27 Nevertheless, Thomas does not touch Christ (though

Figure 104.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail. Alinari Archive, Florence.

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the composition encourages the eye to see that as the implied next moment of the narrative – and in fact Vasari makes the mistake in his Lives of assuming that Verrocchio’s Thomas touches the wound, writing “he [Thomas] put his hand into the wound of Christ.”)28 Instead, Thomas turns and looks directly at the wound and though his hand hovers near, it never touches it. How are we to interpret Verrocchio’s intention here? Can we see the superiority of sight over touch, as one might expect on the basis of much exegesis of the Gospel story of the Doubting Thomas? The sculpture does not encourage this reading. Although Thomas does not touch Christ, it is the logical next step in the implied narrative taking place. Moreover, we do not see Thomas being reprimanded by Christ for reaching forward to touch him. Indeed, Christ responds to Thomas’ movement toward him by lifting his arm and opening the tear in his garment to facilitate Thomas’ gesture. Most of Verrocchio’s contemporaries depicted Thomas actually touching the wound (for example, Figures 100 and 105),29 and it is striking that Thomas is not touching it in Verrocchio’s group. Because of this, it does not seem obvious to read it as a judgment on touching when Thomas is shown not touching (and, indeed, in other versions there is little to suggest a judgment against touching, even when they are touching; Christ, for instance, is often shown holding open his

Figure 105.  Bicci di Lorenzo. Christ and Saint Thomas, fresco, c. 1439, Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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garment to aid Thomas or giving him the sign of benediction; see Figures 100, 102, 105–08).30 But what alternative interpretation of Verrocchio’s representation is there? Unlike other examples, Verrocchio shows the very moment when Thomas reaches forward as if to touch Christ’s wound.Verrocchio dramatizes this specific moment and suggests a correspondence between seeing and touching as the means to reaching a higher truth. What Verrocchio is depicting is Thomas focusing his entire attention and desire, of which his intention to touch and his gaze seem to be different aspects in parallel.This implies that touch, when properly directed, can be usefully employed toward understanding and knowledge. With its emphasis on touching and seeing, Verrocchio’s representation of Doubting Thomas accords with the interpretation of the Gospel story of two prominent writers in the vernacular with whose works Verrocchio would have been familiar. In a verse inscribed below a late fourteenth-­century fresco of Doubting Thomas (now lost) that was painted above the door outside the audience chamber of the Signoria in the Florentine town hall, the poet Franco Sacchetti wrote: “Touch the Truth as I do, and you will believe . . . Direct your

Figure 106.  Ottonian, Diptych: Moses and Christ and Saint Thomas, ivory, c. 990, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Skulpturensammlung. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Antje Voigt.

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Figure 107.  Christ and Saint Thomas from the Salerno ivories, ivory, eleventh to twelfth century, Museo Diocesano, Salerno. Museo Diocesano, Salerno. Photo: Roberto Sigismondi, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut.

Figure 108.  Christ and Saint Thomas from Epistolae et Evangelia, Florence: Lorenzo Morgiani and Johannes Petri, for Piero Pacini, July 27, 1495, folio LXXII left side, Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C., DSQ-010990-2

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hand to the Truth and your eyes to heaven.”31 And in the life of Saint Thomas in his well-­known Golden Legend, Jacopo da Voragine notes how Thomas’ name (which means twofold, the Greek for which is didimus) mirrored his dual understanding of Christ’s Resurrection: “He is called twofold because he came to know the Lord’s resurrection in two ways – not only by sight, like the others, but by seeing and touching.”32 In both of these well-­known sources, touching and seeing are regarded as equals in the quest for knowledge.33 Another useful source for considering how Verrocchio may have approached his subject is the story of Geta and Birria, contained in the three commonplace books made in the artist’s workshop. This widely known vernacular tale is a comedy of mistaken identity and tells of a servant named Geta, who is tricked into believing that he is no longer himself after returning from Greece, where he had accompanied his master for study. On their return home, Geta is welcomed by a voice that declares that Geta is already at home (it is Arcas, who is guarding the door, while his father, Jove, cavorts with the master’s wife inside). This sends Geta into confusion, and he concludes that he has been turned into nothing. As he ponders his situation, he considers the value of knowledge through touch: “Even though I speak, I hear, see and feel, and from this I detach myself . . .; then if I touch myself saying ‘By God, I touch myself,’ how can this be that my being has been extinguished?”34 For readers of this vernacular tale, the conclusion presented is that philosophical knowledge – of the sort that Geta and his master received in Greece – was of no use and that it is only through sensory experience, and the judgment that follows, that one can reach the truth. The tale of Geta and Birria presents knowledge through the senses – especially through touch – as superior to all other forms (when Geta tries to determine whether he exists or not, he employs the sense of the touch). Apart from via vernacular tales, Verrocchio would have been familiar with the supremacy of touch through other means too. It was fundamental to spirituality in vernacular devotional manuals, such as the enormously popular Meditations on the Life of Christ, which instructed readers to kiss, touch, and hold the Infant Christ Child.35 Tactility often formed part of devotional experiences for the laity, for instance, those who handled life-­size wooden figures of Christ in rituals for Holy Week, which were taken down from their crosses on Good Friday, carried and mourned over in the church, and buried in altar-­tombs (as we shall see, Verrocchio’s Bargello Crucifix may have been made for this purpose).36 It was also experienced during the Mass when the laity pressed their lips to a pax, a small board, often decorated with the Crucifixion, passing it among themselves after it was kissed by the priest.37 Touch played a role in the power of cult objects via secondary objects that had come into contact with the original, such as prints and tokens, which retained the power of the original and was experienced by devotees through touching (in this case, the devotee touched something that

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Figure 109.  Andrea di Buonaiuto, People Reaching Up to Touch Saint Peter Martyr’s Marble Sarcophagus, fresco, 1366–67, Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

itself had touched a cult object, and the experience was regarded as equivalent to direct contact with the original).38 In healing miracles touch likewise played a crucial role. According to the Pistoian chronicler Luca Dominici, for instance, it was only when a man with a withered hand touched a miraculous Crucifix that he was healed.39 As a result, devotees were anxious to touch relics and reliquaries because of their healing powers.40 Artists emphasized the power of touch to heal in countless representations (including Andrea di Buonaiuto’s fresco in the Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella showing people – including some with crutches and bandages – reaching up to touch Saint Peter Martyr’s marble sarcophagus [Figure 109] and Gentile da Fabriano’s Pilgrims Visiting the Shrine of Saint Nicholas of Bari [Figure 110]).41 Touch could be important also in verifying sacred presence in miraculous objects. When Dominici witnessed a miraculous tear in the eye of Saint John the Evangelist in a painting of the Crucifixion, he confirmed the tear’s material presence by touching it.42 Mystics were often rewarded for their devotion with being able to touch and hold the Infant Christ Child, whose appearance evoked the carved wooden holy dolls common in

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Figure 110.  Gentile da Fabriano, Pilgrims Visiting the Shrine of Saint Nicholas of Bari, tempera on panel, 1425, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., open access.

religious devotion; or with embracing Christ crucified.43 And as Roger Ekirch has explored, touch was essential to a premodern person’s understanding of the world at night (when they had to pinch, prod, and push to comprehend their surroundings and to find their way in the dark).44 Touch was also fundamental to the Renaissance physiological explanation of falling in love in which little spirits (spiritelli d’amore) were believed to pass from the beloved’s eyes into those of the lover, impressing an image of the beloved on the lover’s heart. We will discuss this further in the chapter that follows, but suffice it to say Verrocchio was familiar with the theory, as it was basic to descriptions contained in vernacular love poetry.45 The importance of tactility as a concept may also have been accessible to Verrocchio from texts in the vernacular, or in Latin, the contents of which the artist could have become familiar with via his patrons, the members of the operai that commissioned the Christ and Saint Thomas. Among Verrocchio’s patrons were a number of humanists, who conceivably could have discussed theology or ancient philosophy with him, just as Ambrogio Traversari, Poggio Bracciolini, and

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Niccolò Niccoli conversed with Lorenzo Ghiberti as he prepared the Florentine Baptistery Doors.46 Niccoli also discussed these matters on a more casual basis with Ghiberti and his other artist-­friends Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia.47 A significant strand of thought dating from antiquity up until the Renaissance held the tactile in equal esteem with, and sometimes superior to, the visual in the quest for knowledge and understanding.48 The ancient Stoics used touch as a metaphor for vision. According to Galen, in his criticism of their theory of vision, Stoics held that the operation of sight was like touching with a walking stick.49 The belief in an essential connection between seeing and touching existed also in the theory of vision known as “extramission,” introduced by Euclid, developed by Ptolemy, and widely held during the Renaissance, whereby sight occurred because a ray was emitted from the eye that “felt” (“impressed” according to Adelard of Bath) the object it encountered and then returned to the eye.50 Piero della Francesca, to name one prominent fifteenth-­century artist, describes the theory of extramission.51 Lucretius, whose poem De rerum natura was rediscovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini,52 claims that touch was the basis for all the senses and describes sight using the metaphor of touch: sight strikes the eyes.53 Augustine’s influential tripartite scheme of vision, which moves from the corporeal to the spiritual to the intellectual,54 was often understood in “embodied, even tactile terms,” as Jacqueline Jung has written,55 and in his commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, Augustine notes that sight is a kind of touch because one says “touch it, and see how hot it is.” Therefore, Augustine argues, when the Resurrected Christ says “‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands:’ . . . what else does He mean but,Touch and see?”56 Augustine’s exegesis on the Resurrection was widely available, thanks to its incorporation into Jacopo de Voragine’s Golden Legend.57 The Scholastic philosopher Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253) compared intellectual dexterity to seeing, where sight is considered an active, physical sense that delves into its object, implying a mode of seeing that touches: Sollertia [intellectual dexterity] is the penetrating power in virtue of which the mind’s eye does not rest on the outer surface of an object, but penetrates to something below the visual image. For instance, when the mind’s eye falls on a colored surface, it does not rest there, but descends to the physical structure of which the color is an effect. It then penetrates this structure until it detects the elemental qualities of which the structure is itself an effect.58

Grosseteste’s disciple, Roger Bacon (1214/20–92), developed a theory of vision that explains how in seeing, the species of the object – a corporeal form produced in the air or other transparent medium (light, water, or the humors of the eye) – brings about a transformation in the viewer that involves touch.59 Vision “receives the species of the thing seen, and exerts its own force in the

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medium as far as the visible object.”60 Significantly, this experience of seeing was, for Bacon, a form of physical touching (and a painful one at that). According to Bacon, sight involves a change in the humors and membranes of the eye, a kind of penetration: “[The anterior glacialis] must be somewhat thick, in order that it may experience a feeling from the impressions [species] that is a kind of pain.”61 Bacon’s Opus maius was known in artist circles in fifteenth-­century Florence – Lorenzo Ghiberti cites it in his treatise on art, the Commentaries.62 Verrocchio’s pupil Leonardo da Vinci describes touch in his treatise on the Paragone as “the older brother of sight,”63 explaining a few chapters later how touch and sight worked hand in hand in the appreciation of beauty and naturalism in painting. Leonardo cites the comment of King Matthias of Hungary, who reproached the poet with the words: Give me something I can see and touch and not only hear, and do not blame my choice to put work under my elbow while I hold the work of the painter with both hands to place it before my eyes. For, on their own, my hands have taken your work away in order to serve the more honorable sense [sight].64

Therefore, although sight was important in the medieval and Renaissance sensory apparatus, touch was important too. But touching was more than just equivalent to sight; there was a belief that touch enabled a form of understanding that was not possible through sight. Some medieval theologians went as far as recognizing the unreliability of vision as a means of knowing in favor of the tactile.65 Jeffrey Hamburger has stressed how visions inspired by works of art [during the Middle Ages (but also true of the Renaissance)] . . . [were] objective in that their imagery becomes insistently and increasingly concrete, corporeal, and material; they insist, often not without embarrassment, on the truth as something material, sensible, even tangible, in short as accessible to the imagination. Rather than insisting on the incorporeality of vision, they stake their claim to truth by referring to corporeal images seen with corporeal sight, in particular reliquaries and cult images in the form of statues. The naked truth is no longer invisible; it can be seen and has a body.66

In accounts of visions from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the final reward on earth is often experienced through touch.67 Jacopone da Todi, for instance, describes the body of Saint Francis of Assisi at the stigmatization as being impressed – that is, touched – with the wounds of Christ: “Francis’ deep desire was such that he was incorporated into him [Christ], his heart was softened like wax for a seal, impressing on it that [Christ] into whom he was transformed.”68In his De anima Aristotle celebrates the sense of touch in its ability to convey information, comparing the hand to the soul, and writing: “The soul, then, acts

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like a hand; for the hand is an instrument which employs instruments, and in the same way the mind is a form which employs forms, and sense is a form which employs the forms of sensible objects.”69 Bernard of Clairvaux uses touch as a metaphor for faith, writing that “faith . . . grasps what cannot be measured, takes hold of what is least expected, and in a way encompasses even eternity itself in the limitless bosom of its garment.”70 For Bernard, drawing from the language of the Song of Songs, it was with touch (and taste) that we know God. Using the metaphor of touch, Bernard explains how true understanding occurs when the wisdom of God touches the Christian and the faithful responds by grasping and touching God.71 According to Bernard, Christ encourages the devotee to touch him “with the hand of faith, the finger of desire, the embrace of love; you will touch me with the mind’s eye.”72 The sense about which Bernard writes is spiritual, not physical, but he implies that the bodily senses must be employed to reach spiritual and divine things.73 In spiritual union, according to Bernard, the individual soul “adheres” to God in an “embrace” or a kiss, “to whom adhering in a sacred kiss, we are made one spirit by his merits.”74 The basis of this spiritual touching is another tactile metaphor: the Incarnation was a touch (a kiss).75 Bernard’s works were well known in the vernacular, evident from their presence in a number of Florentine zibaldoni.76 A number of other mystical theologians – including several whose works were available in the vernacular and widely referred to in vernacular sermons – took the Song of Songs as their point of departure to argue for a spiritual hierarchy of the senses in which spiritual touching toppled the supremacy of spiritual seeing and hearing.77 Bonaventure ranks the spiritual sense of touch as the highest in service of mystical union because, drawing from Bernard, “it unites the most to him who is the highest spirit. This is why it is said in I Cor 6: ‘Who adheres to God is one spirit with him.’”78 This sense of touch, though spiritual, is also experienced bodily: “in this transition it is necessary that all intellectual operations are suspended, and the ‘apex affectus’ (the highest part of the soul) is completely transferred and transformed into God.”79 Bonaventure’s works were widely known, including in the vernacular, having been copied in a number of Florentine zibaldoni.80 In his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, Thomas Aquinas asserts that tactuality (the ability to touch and to be touched) would be possible after the Resurrection.81 And Thomas claims that touch is superior to vision because touch is distributed throughout the body, which leads to greater intellectual understanding.82 Thomas’ ideas were well known in Florence  – his works were contained in the libraries of San Marco and Santa Croce  – and disseminated widely. His Summa Theologiae was recommended by influential Archbishop Antoninus as the primary source for preachers to turn to for doctrinal matters,83 and the fourteenth-­ century Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa popularized the Summa Theologiae in many of his sermons, which he preached to a lay audience at the studia of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce in Florence.84 Proof of Thomas’ influence on Renaissance preaching can be found in an amusing story

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told by Antoninus, clearly based on a vernacular source, of the Devil masquerading as a preacher and preparing for his sermon by consulting Thomas’ Summa in the convent’s library.85 Aldobrandino da Siena, in his thirteenth-­ century vernacular treatise Trattato dei cinque sensi dell’uomo, writes that touch is distributed throughout the body and that other senses depend upon it (for instance, tasting with the tongue and mouth).86 Lorenzo Ghiberti, in the third book of his Commentaries, claims that touch can supersede sight in comprehension: he describes an encounter with an ancient statue excavated in Florence, whose many fine details, he stresses, cannot be comprehended by sight; only the hand, in touching the statue, can perceive these refinements.87 And in the Codex atlanticus Leonardo refers to touch as that which directs information to the senso comune but is also an extension of senso comune: “Even in the sense of touch,” he writes, “which derives from the senso comune, one does not see its power reaching only as far as the finger-­tips for, as soon as the finger-­tips have touched the object, the sense [of touch] determines whether it is hot or cold, hard or soft, sharp or flat.”88 It is worth noting, too, that the word apprehensio has the dual definition of taking hold of something and becoming cognizant of it,89 something that Verrocchio seems to be playing with by placing unusual emphasis on Thomas’ knowledge of Christ as both tactile and visual. Saint Thomas’ encounter with Christ after the Resurrection was frequently employed specifically as an example for explaining the power of touch as a means to knowledge and understanding. Augustine acknowledges that it was through touch that Thomas became convinced of Christ’s resurrection.90 Bonaventure makes a similar point, singling out Thomas as an exemplum for the soul in its desire for God and celebrating Thomas’ tactile experience: Draw near, O handmaid, with loving steps to Jesus wounded for you . . . Gaze with the Blessed Apostle St Thomas, not merely on the print of the nails in Christ’s hands; be not satisfied with putting your finger into the holes made by the nails in his hands; neither let it be sufficient to put your hand into the wound in his side; but enter entirely by the door in his side and go straight up to the very Heart of Jesus.There, burning with love for Christ Crucified, be transformed into Christ . . . [T]ransfixed by the lance of the love of your inmost heart, pierced through and through by the sword of the tenderest compassion, seek for nothing else, wish for nothing else except dying with Christ on the Cross.91

Anthony of Padua compares all Christians to Thomas in one of his sermons for the Easter cycle and presents touching as a form of understanding and belief: “[M]ay he [Christ] imprint in our minds faith in his passion and resurrection, so that with the apostles and the faithful of the Church we might merit to receive eternal life.”92 Girolamo Savonarola emphasizes the importance of touch for Saint Thomas in a sermon, pointing out how touch is a powerful

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means of comprehension, one that is different from (and can be more powerful than) understanding through words. Drawing from the Song of Songs, Savonarola claims that the touching and handling about which Saint John writes concerning Thomas is the Christian soul’s desire for mystical union with Christ, an experience that depends on both the intellect and love: The loving heart is consumed with desire to become dissolved [with Christ], just as the bride says: ‘I implore you, daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, tell me, because I am consumed with love for him [Cant. 5]. I want to be dissolved with and be with Christ [Phil. 1]; and that is my only desire.’ Therefore I tell you that this is touching and handling the Word, because this knowledge and love can only be from God; because it is beyond nature that man, leaving all things that are tangible [behind], follows with all his heart those invisible things with so much light, so much love and desire.93

Thomas thus serves as an exemplum for the faithful who are unable to see Christ (because of historical circumstances), yet desire to do so.94 3.2  VERROCCHIO’S EXEGESIS

The common assumption made for centuries was that Thomas believes in the Resurrection because he touches Christ’s body.95 Augustine, for instance, whose writings were well known in Renaissance Florence, writes that Thomas “saw and touched the man [Christ] and confessed the God whom he did not see and did not touch.” According to Augustine, Thomas touched the flesh of man (Christ), not the word (God).96 In a sermon based on John 20:19–31, Gregory the Great – whose sermons were widely known in fifteenth-­century Florence – claims that Thomas had touched the Resurrected Christ and that this was a privilege brought about by divine dispensation.97 Thomas Aquinas notes that Thomas not only saw but also touched Christ’s flesh.98 The claim is made too in vernacular sources.The author of the Meditations on the Life of Christ declares: “Thomas, prostrating himself, touched the wounds of the Lord and said, ‘My Lord and my God’. For he saw the Man and believed in the God.”99 And The Golden Legend states that Christ “let himself be touched [at the Resurrection].”100 In fact, according to the Gospel (including the version in the widely available Tuscan Gospel harmonies and the first printed vernacular editions of the Vulgate [Venice, 1471]), although Thomas states that unless he could put his fingers into the wounds left by the nails and thrust his hand into Christ’s side, he would not believe in the Resurrection,101 Thomas comes to believe without touching Christ.102 As Glenn Most has noted, Thomas’ demand for tactile proof of Christ’s resurrection rests on his desire for “incontrovertible evidence of Jesus’ full physical materiality.”103 This sets up an aporia in the text of the Gospel of Saint John that is resolved only by Christ offering his body

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to be touched (suggesting that it can be touched and therefore is a truly living body, though never actually proving that) and by Thomas responding by withdrawing his demand that he will believe only by touching Christ’s body. Significantly, then, Thomas comes to believe without the nature of Christ’s materiality being revealed, and Thomas’ revelation is of Christ’s absent presence.104 As Jean-­Luc Nancy has explored, the story of the Doubting Thomas is one of several encounters of Christ’s followers with the resurrected Christ in the Gospel of Saint John. Rather than reading the story as one about Thomas coming to believe in Christ’s resurrection, Nancy proposes that the series of which it is a part restores sight or blindness “to those who have already seen.”105 In the case of Noli me tangere (but also relevant to the Doubting Thomas), the “revelation” of Christ’s resurrected body “is not the sudden appearance of a celestial glory. To the contrary, it consists in the departure of the body raised into glory. It is an absenting, in going absent, that there is revelation...”106 What exactly is the exegesis on the story of Doubting Thomas presented by Verrocchio in his sculpture? To explore this, let us look closely at the object itself.Verrocchio’s two figures are shallow reliefs (Figures 111 and 112).Although they appear to be sculptures in the round, they are not. Both heads are in the

Figure 111.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail of side of Christ. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo - Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico e Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

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Figure 112.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1476–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail of 1476–83 of Thomas. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico e Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

round, but the bodies are open at the back (Figures 111 and 112) and Christ’s raised arm is even open from above (Figure 46).The decision to create them in this way may have been dictated by several factors, most importantly, the size of the niche (Verrocchio was forced to fit his sculpture into a preexisting niche made for one figure) and the cost of the material (by creating his statues as reliefs, less bronze would be required). But there may have been another reason for the choice. By presenting his figures as reliefs, they are somewhere between three-­dimensional sculptures and two-­dimensional paintings or drawings; thus, they exist somewhere between the tactile and the visual.107 This play between the two senses – and dimensions – is suggested also in the iconography.Verrocchio shows Thomas stepping forward from outside the niche toward Christ (Figure  103). Propelled forward, with his hair streaming behind him, Thomas reaches in as if to touch Christ’s wound but does not.108 The juxtaposition of Thomas’ actions and Christ’s words sets up a struggle between the tactile and the visual as expressions of faith and as forms of knowledge. William Diebold has noted a similar juxtaposition in the case of an Ottonian ivory diptych (Figure  106) that represents Moses receiving the

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tablets and Christ and Saint Thomas in the two wings.109 There, the exceptionally deep carving of the ivory suggests the superiority of tactility over visuality.110 In the case of Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas, the outcome is more ambivalent. On the one hand,Thomas is shown stepping and reaching forward as if to touch Christ’s wound, which might suggest a preference for the tactile. However, notably Thomas’ hand does not reach Christ’s wound (Figure 104). Rather than regarding the tactile and the visual as antitheses, Verrocchio’s sculpture seems to suggest the possibility of a relationship between the two, where seeing is touching and knowing through touching is equivalent to knowing through sight.111 This reading of Verrocchio’s sculpture may appear radical, given the predominant attitude of the superiority of the visual over the tactile in the exegetical tradition, but there coexisted with that a belief that seeing and touching were equals, rather than opposites, as we have seen. I would like to propose that the artist went further by presenting the tactile sense as a metaphor for spiritual seeing, which Verrocchio explores through his sophisticated use of light effects on his sculpture. Paul Barolsky has emphasized how lustrous are Verrocchio’s polished bronzes, convincingly reading their surfaces as a metaphor for truth via divine illumination (an interpretation consistent with Vasari’s description of the statues: “In Saint Thomas we see incredulity and an inordinate desire for illumination of the truth”).112 And as Butterfield has eloquently addressed, the unusual position of Verrocchio’s statues in relation to their niche leads to the creation of a complex chiaroscuro that lends spiritual weight to the encounter shown. Christ’s raised hand is designed to catch the sunlight, and when it does, the top and back of Thomas’ head are likewise illuminated, which can be read as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit at this moment of blessing.113 But the play of light across the sculpture can also be interpreted as an expression of spiritual seeing, an intellectual seeing that metaphorically (but not physically) touches, thus the viewer’s encounter with the sculptures resembles the soul in its pursuit of God, as outlined by Bonaventure, for whom Thomas’ touch is a metaphor for spiritual seeing. Verrocchio encourages this reading of his sculpture through the high degree of polish for his statues and the careful positioning of them to reflect sunlight. Like Tilman Riemenschneider at Rothenburg, who considered the effects of light in the church when he carved his Altar of the Holy Blood (1499–505, St. Jakobskirche, Rothenburg), Verrocchio appears to have carefully planned his sculptural group with the changing light conditions on the exterior of Orsanmichele throughout the day in mind.114 Verrocchio’s sculpture further implicates the beholder as Thomas by showing him stepping forward into the niche using a pose that echoes that of the viewer approaching the statues along via Calzaiuoli (Figures 113 and 114), the principal street on which Orsanmichele is located. The result of these preparations is that Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas would have

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Figure 113.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo – Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

encouraged Renaissance viewers to recognize as perceptible the rays that passed from their eyes, touched the statues’ surfaces, and returned to them, according to the theory of extramission vision. Thus, Verrocchio’s sculpture can be read as suggesting an equivalence between seeing and touching, where physical touching is a metaphor for spiritual seeing. It is significant that that which Thomas reaches out to touch in Verrocchio’s sculpture is the resurrected body of Christ, which Verrocchio emphasizes with the concluding words of the inscription along Thomas’ robe:“ET SALVATOR GENTIVM” (Figure 115). As Kristen van Ausdall has pointed out, these words stress Christ as redeemer and are a departure from the concluding lines of the story of Doubting Thomas in the Gospel of John (“Christus Filius Dei”).115 Verrocchio thus presents Christ as the source of salvation. To explain this concept, commentators often turn to the metaphor of Christ as door, drawing from Christ’s own words, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.”116 Ubertino da Casale, for instance, uses the metaphor of Christ as door to describe Thomas’ revelation at the Resurrection, writing: “[Thomas] had put his hand through the doors of the incandescent furnace of Jesus’ love.”117

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Figure 114.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1467–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Alinari Archive, Florence.

Figure 115.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1476–83, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail of Thomas. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico and Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

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Figure 116.  Luca della Robbia, Tabernacle of the Eucharist, marble and enameled terracotta with bronze tondo and modern copy of lost original door, 1441–43, Santa Maria, Peretola, Florence. Alinari Archive, Florence.

Ubertino’s Arbor vitae crucifixae was well known; it was contained in the library at Santa Croce, his work was translated into the vernacular, and his words were well known in Verrocchio’s day, having been plundered by Bernardino da Siena and diffused across Europe with his sermons.118 And Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 254), whose ideas (though controversial) were well known in fifteenth-­century Florence, used Christ’s passing through closed doors after the Resurrection to explain Christ’s resurrected state as being between a body and a soul.119 The connection of Christ with a door is made explicit in a number of representations of the Doubting Thomas in which he appears either in front of or behind a door.120 For instance, in one of the eleventh-­century Salerno ivories showing Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 107), the lower half is filled with a wall that features closed doors at its center. The wall and door are positioned directly below Christ, who holds his arm up and pulls back his tunic to invite Saint Thomas to reach forward and touch his wound. The composition of the ivory thus emphasizes the idea that Christ’s wound serves as a door for Thomas.121 The resurrected Christ was also a favorite subject on doors (sportelli) of sacramental tabernacles – church furniture designed to house unconsumed Eucharistic wafers, the bread that had been transubstantiated into Christ’s body – including one commissioned from Verrocchio for a tabernacle made by Luca dell Robbia (stolen in 1919; Figures 116 and 117), further establishing the association of Christ as door.122 The metaphor of Christ

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Figure 117.  Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. Sportello with Christ the Redeemer, probably bronze, formerly Santa Maria, Peretola, Florence (missing since 1919). Alinari Archive, Florence.

as door on Host tabernacles emphasizes how the Eucharist – Christ’s suffering body – is the means to salvation.123 Christ was the threshold through which salvation was assured, the door through which the soul desires entry to mystical union with God. As several scholars have stressed, the niche within which Verrocchio’s sculpture was placed (Figure 5; built decades earlier to house Donatello’s St Louis of Toulouse [Figure 30]) was the inspiration for countless Eucharistic tabernacles, especially in its classicizing style, which marked a departure from earlier Gothic niches and was derived from antique funerary monuments.124 The site in which the Christ and Saint Thomas was positioned, therefore, would have reminded many viewers of a Host receptacle.Verrocchio took advantage of this association to stress Christ’s resurrected bodily state, a subject of interest for the members of the Mercanzia, who commissioned the sculpture, and who were patrons of Corpus Christi, the feast of the sacrament.125 But Verrocchio took this further by presenting his sculptured Christ as a door. This is suggested by the position of Christ on the step at the front of the niche (where a sportello would be on a Host receptacle) and because of the bronze medium from which the figure was made (metal was the material of choice for sportelli).126 That some viewers of Verrocchio’s sculpture understood this as his intention is supported by a

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woodcut made c. 1495 in Florence based on Verrocchio’s design (Figure 108) that shows Christ and Saint Thomas behind a wall with emphatically closed doors.127 But this allusion to Christ as door is not mere visual metaphor inVerrocchio’s sculpture. It operates on a more profound level.Verrocchio emphasizes that the wound in Christ’s side is the place where mystical union can occur. He does this by amplifying the wound, repeating its mandorla shape in the precisely rendered tear in Christ’s drapery through which the Savior directs Thomas’ hand.This highlighting of the hole in the cloth draws attention to the material existence of the wound – its bodiliness – as the means through which salvation is possible, a connection that recalls Paul’s letter to the Hebrews: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh...”128 The conflation of veil and flesh occurs also in the words of Epiphanius the Deacon at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787: “Thus, this Christ, while visible to men by means of the curtain, that is, his flesh, made the divine nature  – even though this remained concealed  – manifest through signs. Therefore, it is in this form, seen by men, that the holy Church of God depicts Christ.” Paul’s words, which formed the basis of the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council’s assertion of the salvific importance of the Eucharist, and those of Epiphanius the Deacon, contained in the proceedings from the Second Council of Nicea, were both well known during the Renaissance.129 These sources point to salvation occurring through Christ’s body and blood – in other words, through Christ’s material existence.Verrocchio highlights this in his sculpture by repeating the mandorla shape of Christ’s wound in the drapery (or veil) around it. Verrocchio’s representation, with its stress on the similarities between wound and drapery, serves to encourage the idea that the spiritual journey is enacted through the material reality of Christ’s suffering body, rather than by turning away from the bodily senses. Thus, Christ’s side wound becomes the gate through which a devotee could pass into the heart of Jesus, as Bonaventure describes it (and he presents Thomas explicitly as exemplum for this). The connection between fleshy wound and the tear in Christ’s garment also suggests an emblematic link to Christ as cloth (a comparison made, for example, by John the Scot (810-c. 877), who refers to the Incarnate Christ as “maximum velamen”). The cloth may be read likewise as an allusion to the conflation between images, allegories, and flesh as veils covering the light of God made by John the Scot in his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius.130 The metaphor of veil is employed also by Verrocchio through his decision to cast his sculptures as reliefs, rather than in the round, so that they are a kind of veil. If Verrocchio’s Christ is a door, and his wound a door to God, it should be noted that Thomas is a door too. Made from bronze, the two figures of

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Figure 118.  Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, gilt bronze, 1425–52, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Christ and Saint Thomas are like a pair of doors – Verrocchio’s equivalent to Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the nearby Baptistery (Figure 118). The space between Thomas’ finger and Christ’s wound (Figure 104) then is like a chink between two doors, inviting the viewer in, and by keeping the figures close but separate, Verrocchio amplifies the drama of this moment and the viewer’s desire by creating a narrative opening into which the viewer can participate. Indeed, if Thomas’ finger was touching Christ’s wound, the bolt would be shot, the latch lowered, and the viewer shut out (just as occurs in the image on the Salerno ivories and others).131 By maintaining the space between finger and wound, Verrocchio left open the possibility for mystical union to occur. The result of Thomas’ touch (whether physical or spiritual) is knowledge, an understanding that supersedes that available via sight (an attitude held by a number of thinkers, as we have seen). By drawing attention to Christ’s side wound, Verrocchio points to it as the font of mystical knowledge, the seat of wisdom. In framing Christ’s wound as the gate to wisdom with two relief sculptures whose material existence mimics veils, Verrocchio is also hinting at the limits of earthly perception.The bronze reliefs as veils thus represent the idea of indirect revelation described by Dante in the final Canto of Paradiso in the Divina

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Commedia in which his perfect understanding of the visage of the Trinity, which hit him like a bolt of lightning, fades from memory just as “the sun unseals an imprint in the snow.”132 Verrocchio’s sculptures convey Thomas’ comprehension of Christ’s state at the Resurrection as absent presence. He does this by placing the figures outside the niche, leaving the space behind them empty. This literal absence of the niche serves as metaphor for Christ’s absent state, reinforced further through the form of the statues as reliefs, figures with empty reverses. Even if the viewer could not actually see this detail (which was not visible when the sculptures were in place on the façade of Orsanmichele), the position of the statues in front of, and not inside, the niche would have established the sculpture’s intended message as representing Christ’s absent presence. Verrocchio’s sculpture communicates Thomas’ revelation, therefore, as one not of carnal realization of Christ’s material body, or a realization through faith alone (via sight); instead, it demonstrates how Thomas’ revelation is one of absence, a body that cannot be touched.133 3.3  THE MEANING OF BRONZE IN CHRIST AND SAINT THOMAS

Verrocchio further encourages the association between Christ and absent presence through his treatment of the medium of bronze, which offered an opportunity for viewers to contemplate theological metaphors of matter appropriate to the subject represented. The sculpture was made by taking an impression of something else (a wax model) that has become absent (like Christ’s body at the Resurrection) and by replacing one material (wax; the model) with bronze. Bronze was a material especially suitable to the subject of Christ and Saint Thomas because it was believed to be a petrified substance brought back to life by the artist. Significantly, in Benvenuto Cellini’s famous account of rescuing his Perseus, the artist compares explicitly his revivification of the bronze to Christ’s resurrection: “O Christ, how with your immense virtù you resuscitated from the dead, and climbed gloriously to Heaven.”134 Moreover, some sources describe Thomas’ encounter with the resurrected Christ in words that conjure up the heat and molten state of bronze used in casting. Ubertino da Casale, as we have seen, uses the metaphor of the door to explain Thomas’ encounter with Christ at the Resurrection, and through that door, Ubertino writes, Thomas reaches toward “the incandescent furnace of Jesus’ love.”135 And we have seen how Bonaventure describes Thomas’ experience as an entry “by the door in his [Christ’s] side . . . [so that he could] go straight up to the very Heart of Jesus. There, burning with love for Christ Crucified, be transformed into Christ.”136 Metal casting was commonly employed as a metaphor in discussions on the resurrection of the body,137 the event compared to the reforging of a statue that had been melted down (in other words, a sculpture made from metal,

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possibly bronze), though the significance of remaking was interpreted variously. Methodius of Olympus, for instance, writing in the later third century CE, compares resurrection to metal casting in a way that appears to depend upon the technique of indirect casting (because the same mold is used): If, certainly, an artist does not wish to have a statue which has been defiled when he created it with so much skill and taste, it will clearly come back to his mind that when it is melted down he can remake it as it was before. But if it does not please him to remelt it and restore and set it up again as it was, but rather to cure and improve the way it is, then it must be that the statue, purified by fire and corrected by the skill of the artist, is not preserved as it was, but changed and refined.138

Augustine uses the metaphor of a statue that was destroyed or melted down but reforged from the same material to explain the Resurrection in his Enchiridion, available at Santa Croce’s library.139 Peter Lombard, borrowing from Augustine, later argued that although the particles of the material do not return necessarily to the same part of the statue, they are all incorporated into the sculpture, and therefore the remade sculpture is the same as the original.140 Lombard’s Sentences was known in Florence; for instance, it was available at the Santa Croce library.141 Later, Thomas Aquinas argued that the earthly body was not the same as a resurrected one using the metaphor of casting: even if it was made from the same brass, a reforged statue is different because it has a second form.142 The metaphor is echoed in the account of the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, known in the vernacular in fifteenth-­century Italy, that describes how the holy man’s body, when placed on the burning pyre, resembled not burning flesh but “gold and silver being purified in a smelting-furnace.”143 As a sculpture in bronze, a medium made by replacing an area previously filled with wax, and as an object that is neither three-­dimensional sculpture nor two-­dimensional painting or drawing but something in between,Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas represents through its material facture Christ’s body between two states. In this way Verrocchio’s sculpture might be understood as a metaphor for a reading of the scriptural source that stresses Christ’s status during his encounter with Thomas as being between two states. Christ appears as a material body that converses with his disciples but passes through closed doors, just as a Tuscan Gospel Harmony and the vernacular printed Bible put it: “his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you.”144 As Origen expresses it in his Contra Celsum, “he [Christ] was moreover after his resurrection as if halfway between the solid body which he had before he suffered and the subtle one infused with a soul in which he appeared after he had previously put off that body.”145 For Origen, Christ’s state was a manifestation of the soul, which he explained as an apparition that appears to some around the

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tombs of the dead and that are “caused by the fact that the soul is subsisting in what is called the luminous body.”146 Aristotle, according to Diogenes Laertius (whose Vite e detti di filosofi featured in Florentine zibaldoni),147 compares the soul to a wax model and to a bronze statue made from wax. Just as a soul can exist potentially (in wax and bronze) or actually (in bronze after it has been cast, cleaned, and chased), so the soul can exist potentially or actually, Aristotle contends.148 In Physics, which was known in Renaissance Florence,149 Aristotle again uses the metaphor of bronze sculpture, equating actuality or existence with the modeling and casting of a bronze statue (because, like the creation of a bronze sculpture, actuality requires material, a form, a force to forge it and an intention for the object).150 In casting his statues in bronze and as reliefs, Verrocchio’s sculpture can be read, therefore, as a metaphor for Christ’s status between two states: materiality and immateriality. 3.4  MAKING THE CHRIST AND SAINT THOMAS: THE ARTIST AS THOMAS

To fully appreciate Verrocchio’s use of material and technical metaphors in his Christ and Saint Thomas, we need to examine the sculpture’s manufacture. In particular, we want to pay careful attention to how Verrocchio developed a method for making his bronzes that enabled him to create two figures in relief, which, I am arguing, he used as a metaphor of Christ’s resurrected state (between three and two dimensions). Verrocchio probably began by working out the composition with clay or wax models draped with cloth and setting them within a small wooden model of the niche. The terracotta model attributed to Luca della Robbia (Figure 102) gives us a sense of what Verrocchio’s model may have looked like.151 We know that Verrocchio used models of this sort for his small-­scale metalwork,152 and a painting on linen that relates directly to the Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 44) suggests he used both twoand three-­dimensional models for his Orsanmichele sculpture.153 The drapery study on linen is one of a group of twenty such studies to have survived and convincingly attributed to Verrocchio by Günter Passavant.154 The similarities with the sculptured figure of Christ, especially in the angular folds and the pose, support a connection. Verrocchio would have made his study on linen after a model constructed from wax or clay onto which cloth dipped in gesso was arranged.155 It was not unusual for Quattrocento artists to depend on three-­dimensional modelli for their sculptures, though typically they served as a kind of preview of the final work for the patron’s benefit, rather than serving in any creative sense.156 The relationship between Verrocchio’s drapery study and his final sculpture, however, appears to have been fundamental to the creation of the final work in bronze.157 The lights in Verrocchio’s drapery study are presented in broad washes with a more restricted tonal range than the other

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studies on linen, perhaps referring to its intended object, a bronze sculpture. The emphasis on light and shade suggests that it was these qualities that the artist sought to study and then translate into bronze, rather than creating it as a structural guide for the sculpture.158 Verrocchio’s practice suggests that in his attitude about the control of light as an important feature of sculpture, he differed from his pupil, Leonardo. One of the chief differences between a painter and a sculptor, according to Leonardo, is that the former can control and depict light, whereas sculptors, though they depend on light, treat light as an external element to their representation.159 The painting on linen alerts us to the care Verrocchio took with planning the effect of light as it fell on his sculpture, and as we have seen, light played a crucial role in the experience and intended meaning of the work. It is not known whether Verrocchio cast the Christ and Saint Thomas himself. The two figures were cast differently – runners are visible only on the reverse of Saint Thomas (Figure 31) – which might suggest that they were made by different craftsmen. On the other hand, they were cast about five years apart, which might explain the discrepancy.160 Many fifteenth-­century sculptors, such as Donatello, did not cast their own bronzes; instead, they allocated that work to another person.161 In the case of Donatello, this may have been due to his lack of knowledge about the science of making alloys, a claim made by Gauricus.162 (Gauricus’ assertion is supported by technical evidence: Bruno Bearzi has argued, based on the high tin content of the alloy of the bronze doors of the Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo, that they were cast by a founder who specialized in making bells.)163 Lorenzo Ghiberti, too, turned to others for help in casting. He depended on the expertise of Burgundian founders for his North Doors of the Baptistery.164 For the Gates of Paradise, however, Ghiberti appears to have been more closely involved, traveling to Venice either to source his copper or to make sure the alloys being made corresponded to those he requested.165 Verrocchio may well have cast his own bronzes.Vasari says explicitly that Verrocchio cast the Christ and Saint Thomas: “he [Verrocchio] made the models and the molds, and he cast them.”166 Vasari claims also that Verrocchio had intended to cast the Colleoni monument in Venice (Figure 6) and, indeed, that the artist had begun the task but that it was interrupted by the artist’s untimely death, due to Verrocchio having “caught a chill by overheating himself during the casting.”167 Even if he did not cast the Christ and Saint Thomas personally, it seems likely that Verrocchio would have supervised the casting, given the care with which he made his other works in metal (for instance, in acquiring personally the metal for his palla in Treviso and learning the technique of repoussé from craftsmen there).168 There is some controversy about how the two figures of the Christ and Saint Thomas were cast, whether via the direct or indirect lost wax casting method

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(in the direct method, the original model is destroyed, whereas in the indirect lost wax casting method, the model is preserved).169 Direct casting seems most likely, given the discrepancies between the fronts and backs of the statues (which should be the same if the work was made using the indirect method). Regardless of whether Verrocchio’s sculpture was cast directly or indirectly, bronze replaces an area filled by wax in both methods. In constructing his sculpture from bronze, Verrocchio’s encounter with the holy figures echoed that of Thomas with the resurrected Christ: the artist made a model in wax out of which the bronze sculpture was fashioned (just as Thomas met Christ physically before the Resurrection), while the casting of the bronze did not involve Verrocchio’s immediate touch (an experience that resembles Thomas’ encounter with Christ after the Resurrection).170 As Theophilus Presbyter wrote in his early twelfth-­century treatise on metalworking (De Diversis Artibus), the bronze caster cannot depend on sight or touch to know when the bronze should be poured (Theophilus was discussing bells); instead, the craftsman must turn to indirect means: Meanwhile, lie down near the mouth of the mold and, by listening, carefully determine how it is progressing within. If you hear a slight murmur, as of thunder, tell them to hold a little and then pour again. So, by at one time checking and another time pouring, the metal is made to settle evenly until the crucible is emptied.171

Furthermore, the material from which Verrocchio made his sculpture (bronze) was understood as a petrified substance that was revivified by the artist, and the process of casting mirrored the miraculous Resurrection of Christ (a connection made explicitly by Cellini, as we have seen). In his engagement with the material of bronze through the making of his sculpture, Verrocchio’s experience would have been equivalent to Thomas’ own comprehension of Christ at the moment of the Resurrection: like Thomas,Verrocchio’s “not touching” was a form of knowledge, even if it was indirect. The bronze sculpture was itself a revelation of absent presence, in that the wax model has been replaced by bronze, which the artist has not touched directly.172 By dramatizing the moment of Thomas reaching in as if to touch Christ,Verrocchio establishes the eternal truth of God’s immaterial presence at the Resurrection through material means: Christ’s body is shown to be both physically present and materially absent (it is a bronze shell that records a lost wax model). The sculpture also depicts the manifestation of the soul as something between materiality and immateriality, and it is this truth that Thomas apprehends in Verrocchio’s sculpture where he serves as a guide for the human soul. By displaying his sculptures in bronze and in relief,Verrocchio presents the viewer with a material metaphor for the resurrected body of Christ that exists

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between material solidity and immaterial infinity. This reading is in keeping with the sculpture’s role as visually declaring the chief purpose of the Mercanzia as a tribunal that was dedicated to the searching for the truth. Thomas’ revelation in Verrocchio’s sculpture is not of the carnal presence of Christ’s material body, or a realization through faith alone (via sight). Instead,Thomas’ revelation involves a distance, a realization of the departure of Christ’s material body in his resurrected state.Whereas Verrocchio’s contemporary (and possible teacher) Desiderio da Settignano used the technique of marble carving in his Tabernacle of the Sacrament (Figure 80) to construct objects that encouraged viewers to move from the material to the immaterial,173 Verrocchio’s bronze Christ and Saint Thomas represents the revelation of Christ’s state at the Resurrection as being between the material and immaterial. In other words,Verrocchio’s sculpture figures the truth it represents through its material construction, but it does this in such a way that the beholder must acknowledge the truth as figuration rather than use the sculpture as a stepping stone to a higher immaterial level of comprehension.Verrocchio’s Christ is a material approximation of his being between two states; thus, the sculpture asserts the necessity of materiality as a means for reaching higher truths even as that truth is itself immaterial.174 Verrocchio’s treatment of the subject of Doubting Thomas as a representation of spiritual seeing displayed in his bronze sculpture finds analogies with an ekphrasis on a mosaic depicting the Doubting Thomas in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople by the Byzantine Nikolaos Mesarites (d. c. 1220), composed in the late twelfth century. Mesarites argues that the visual arts were inferior to the literary arts as a means to understanding the logos, noting that although mosaics can help, they are but a springboard to a higher level of comprehension, whereas understanding via ekphrasis is more direct. For Mesarites, mosaics fail because they can represent only outwardly; ekphrasis, on the other hand, can successfully communicate with the outward and inner senses (the eyes of the soul).175 At the end of this ekphrasis (xxxiv.8), Mesarites addresses the figures of the disciples represented in the mosaic and speaks of “lifeless” art: And in the picture, these are the things that the side of the Lord suffers. But you [in the picture] who are feeling it, why are you still delaying and shrinking back, and why do you not, now as formerly, in a loud voice proclaim as Lord and God Him whom you have touched, and why do you not make manifest to us the things that have been revealed to you in mysterious fashion through the truthful touch/ But you will not give heed to us, and rightly so, for the things which we see and which are described in this discourse are not real and living things but are lifeless and painted. One would say, however, that though silent you are in agreement and that you approve what we say and assent and that, though not speaking, you express the same opinion.176

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Verrocchio’s sculpture, which posits touch as equivalent to an inner sense, addresses (and overcomes) the failure Mesarites perceives in the visual arts. Verrocchio does this by showing a narrative unfolding before our eyes and using material facture as a means for expressing spiritual metaphors. Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas represents Thomas’ revelation of Christ between two states as a metaphor for the soul’s desire for mystical union with God. Instead of serving to enable the soul’s movement from the material to the immaterial, the sculpture figures the experience through its iconography and material facture. It represents Thomas’ revelation as the absence of Christ, a realization that mirrors the technique used for making the sculpture (because in bronze casting the artist does not touch the sculpture directly), and it represents the idea of mystical union of the soul with God in Christ’s wound as a source of wisdom, a fitting emphasis for its patron, the Mercanzia, that was dedicated to searching for the truth.

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The equating of touching and seeing that Verrocchio suggested in his Christ and Saint Thomas occurs also in his drawing of an Ideal Head of a Woman (Figure 10),1 but here the comparison serves a different purpose. In his sculpture the conflation of touch and sight serves to draw the devotee through the material world to the divine. The drawing, by contrast, mimics the effect of a marble relief sculpture between life and marble – representing the act of metamorphosis as if it were occurring before the viewer’s eyes – to make the case that perception through the senses is a form of cognition (that one can perceive and come to know an object simultaneously).Verrocchio’s defense of this position is presented through the process of making. By smudging the black chalk with his fingers, he produced a rich tonal range and areas of sfumato. These actions evoke those of the poet conjuring up the beloved in matter such as clouds and rock faces. Verrocchio’s intention with this drawing, it will be argued, was to create a portrait of the beloved as carved on the lover’s heart, a portrait of Love and of the poetic imagination as if sculptured. 4.1  THE DRAWING’S ROLE

Verrocchio’s drawing shows the head of a woman in three-­quarter pose, gazing down and off to the left, her right arm apparently extended. Her hair is bound with ribbons and a veil that flutter in the breeze. Running down both shoulders are plaits of hair, which become disheveled at their ends.Verrocchio 152

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began by sketching his figure in black chalk, delineating the woman’s head and then stumping (smudging) the chalk in areas within the outlines.2 Verrocchio’s technique is extraordinary. Artists up until this point had used black chalk only to form sharp outlines, but Verrocchio recognized the potential of black chalk for tonal possibilities and stumped the chalk to create a sculptural tonal range.3 The chalk was supplemented with hatching in light brown ink, mostly applied in tiny strokes across the forehead, left eyebrow, and left cheek; above the left eye; and in the shadows of the neck and collarbone, furthering enhancing the sculptural effects of the black chalk.4 More definite areas of hatching were made below the nose and around the point of the chin.5 The drawing was pricked, presumably for transfer, at an unknown date.6 Given the pricking, and the resemblance between the woman in the drawing and those in paintings and other drawings by Verrocchio and his workshop, the Christ Church Ideal Head may have been made as a cartoon.7 Certainly it served that purpose at some point, as there remains charcoal pouncing dust in its perforated holes. But there is no surviving painting to which the drawing relates directly. Furthermore, there are significant discrepancies between the drawing and the pricking.8 Most importantly, the highly finished quality of the drawing, with the considerable attention paid to subtle surface effects (unnecessary in a preparatory study for a painting), suggests that its purpose was much more than merely preparatory and that it stood as a demonstration of the artist’s technical virtuosity.9 The final decades of the Quattrocento witnessed significant developments in the history of drawing, and it was in the graphic medium that many important attitudes to art making were forged. As Elizabeth Cropper has argued: Between the lifetimes of Vasari and Cennini, or even Ghiberti, there came into being a new kind of art made by the hand of a new kind of professional who was no longer called an artigiano, but an artista (as Michelangelo called himself). Whatever the social, political or economic circumstances of that change, there can be no doubt that drawing was its form of expression, its instrument, its justification, its trace, its nursery, and sometimes its battleground.10

In particular, it was during these final decades of the Quattrocento that the idea of disegno as a transcendental idea in the mind was formulated, explored in the technical experimentation of artists like Verrocchio and his contemporaries, as we shall see, and later theorized in writings.11 Giorgio Vasari singled out Verrocchio’s drawings of heads of women as influential, writing: “[T]here are some drawings by his hand in our book [Vasari’s drawing album, his Libro dei Disegni] made with much patience and great judgment, and among these are some heads of women, with graceful manner and hairstyles that, because of their great beauty, Leonardo always imitated.”12

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Figure 119.  Leonardo da Vinci. Head of the Virgin, black and red chalk with pen and brown ink, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1951, open access.

Vasari’s practice of collecting Verrocchio’s Ideal Heads points to the tendency among sixteenth-­century connoisseurs to treat drawings as works of art in their own right, among which those depicting beautiful women were especially prized. Although scholars have assumed that it was only in the sixteenth century that drawings came to be regarded as independent works of art, some held this attitude in the preceding centuries.13 Certainly works on paper were collected earlier, and a number of works by fifteenth-­century artists have been identified plausibly as examples of finished drawings, among them works by Leonardo (Figure 119), Francesco di Giorgio, Pisanello, Lorenzo Costa, Jacopo Bellini, and Andrea Mantegna.14 As we shall see, the poetic context in which Verrocchio’s drawing must be understood suggests that his Ideal Head would have been considered an independent object. 4.2  DRAWING AS DEFENSE OF SCULPTURED RELIEF

The intricate and varied techniques employed by Verrocchio in his drawing bring about a complex and slow viewing experience that, when combined

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with the tremendous tonal range produced through his use of materials, suggests that the represented form is undergoing a metamorphosis. Verrocchio’s technique demonstrates an interest in evoking actual sculptural materials. His representation of the effects of light on the surface of the woman’s face, especially across her cheek, creates a marmoreal luster, achieved by stumping the chalk and leaving some areas of the face untouched.15 In addition to evoking a marble surface, the parallel lines of hatching in ink blur when viewed from a distance, creating a golden tone that suggests the warmth of living flesh.16 Through his processes of making, Verrocchio creates the effect of a woman’s head as if between marble and living flesh. Verrocchio’s stumping in his Ideal Head of a Young Woman is extraordinary. It is an early – perhaps the earliest – example of sfumato, a technique associated above all with his pupil Leonardo.17 Verrocchio’s use of the technique, however, is different from Leonardo’s. Whereas Leonardo blurred the outlines of his forms (Figure 119), creating a haziness that suggests his figures are emerging from the background, as they would in nature, Verrocchio used sfumato solely within the contours of his forms and maintained an outline.18 This adherence to a boundary has been interpreted by scholars as a failure on Verrocchio’s part to represent a form in the round.19 But given Verrocchio’s demonstrated technical capabilities in his use of sfumato for the areas of flesh tones, which come close to Leonardo’s revolutionary procedures, it is worth considering the possibility that Verrocchio chose to represent his forms in this way.Verrocchio’s novel use of materials, combined with the unsmudged outlines of his forms, suggests a drawing of a head carved in low relief. Although the figure we are observing seems to shift between stone and living flesh, this metamorphosis is in fact mediated through a specific type of sculpture: Verrocchio’s refusal to represent his form in the round suggests that what we are looking at is a sculptured relief, and his drawing can be read as a defense of actual sculptured relief carving. Leonardo celebrated imitated relief at the expense of sculptural relief in his writings on the basis that imitated relief was a form of mental speculation, whereas actual relief required only physical labor (underlying Leonardo’s attitude was his belief that painting was superior to sculpture).20 While Leonardo promoted imitated relief because it was rendered in two dimensions, Verrocchio’s drawing suggests something different. His refusal to represent his form in the round implies that through his evocation of a marble sculpture, he was promoting an appreciation of sculptural relief, which he expressed through the graphic medium. Why did Verrocchio use a drawing to defend sculptural relief? His interest in re-­creating textural effects suggests the possibility that Verrocchio sought to establish an analogy between touching and seeing, and thus between drawing and sculpturing. This is supported by a technical point: some of the sfumato in the Christ Church drawing seems to have been achieved by the artist

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smudging with his finger closely spaced, parallel lines that he had drawn, and thus using his own sense of touch to achieve an effect on the viewer’s eye.21 Verrocchio’s practice reinforces quite literally a connection between seeing and touching, implying an assertion of the power of tactility as a mode of knowing. In his innovative use of stumping, and by leaving areas devoid of matter, Verrocchio created sensuous marmoreal surfaces whose effect on the eye evokes the experience of touching, thus the sfumato suggests to the viewer the sensation of touch caressing cold marble and living flesh. In other words, Verrocchio proposes that to look at the woman in his drawing is the same as to touch her, whether she is sculptured or real. This equivalence between touching and seeing in the drawing can be read as a visual argument about perception being a form of cognition, where perceiving something through the senses is the same as knowing.

4.3  TOUCHING AS SEEING, PERCEIVING AS KNOWING

The link between perception and cognition was one made in Renaissance theories of disegno. Although it has been assumed that this concept of disegno as a method of knowing the world and of representing it was a product of sixteenth-­century art theory,22 the graphic output of several fifteenth-­century artists, including Verrocchio, suggests that the notion was already being explored in the late fifteenth century. Moreover, as Carmen C. Bambach has pointed out, twice in his fourteenth-­century Libro dell’arte, Cennino Cennini’s use of disegno anticipates the Cinquecento use of the term.23 In his section on practicing drawing with a quill, Cennino writes: “Do you know what will happen to you if you practice drawing with a quill? It will make you skillful, accomplished and capable of a lot of drawing of your own invention.”24 And in his chapter on drawing on paper with charcoal, Cennino recommends a system of measurement that could be transferred from figure to figure and to buildings. If his reader did this, Cennino claims, they would be guided by their judgment, and with this they would find the truth.25 The second of Cennino’s maxims on disegno is remarkably similar to that espoused later by Vasari in which he outlines how drawing involves the simultaneous understanding and representation of an object: Because design, the father of our three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, proceeding from the intellect, derives from many things a universal judgment, like a form or idea of all things in nature – which [nature] is most consistent in its measures – it happens that not only in human bodies and those of animals, but in plants as well and building and sculptures and paintings it [design] understands the proportion that the whole has to the parts and the parts to one another and to the whole.

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And because from this there arises a certain notion and judgement which forms in the mind that which, expressed with the hands, is called design, one may conclude that this design is nothing other than a visible expression and declaration of that notion of the mind, or of that which others have imagined in their minds or given shape to in their idea.26

Leon Battista Alberti also appears to have attributed to disegno the potential to represent and know its subject.27 This is suggested, above all, by his use of the term lineamenta in his treatise on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria.28 As Caroline van Eck has convincingly argued, lineamenta is best translated as “design,” because this implies how “it can refer both to the mental activity of planning or designing and its material form, a drawn line or even a ground plan.”29 That Alberti intended “intellectual design” by the term lineamenta (something created in the mind and realized through drawing) is suggested by his use of the term in his definition of a building, where he sets it against the term materia.30 Later Leonardo espoused the view that drawing was an instrument both of knowing and investigating reality: “this disegno is of such excellence that it not only investigates the works of nature, but infinitely more than those that nature produces. This demands of the sculptor that he finish his images with knowledge.”31 In their attitude toward disegno, then, artists and theorists from the fourteenth century onwards indicated the potential for a close relationship between the idea in the artist’s mind and that which they represented in drawing, an opinion Verrocchio appears to have shared and attempted to prove through his practice. The relationship between representation and thing suggested in Verrocchio’s drawing – how to describe something (perception) and know it (cognition), and whether those two were the same or different – was the subject of dramatic transformation during the Renaissance, and it appears likely that Verrocchio would have been familiar with it.32 It is central, for instance, to the story of Geta and Birria, contained in three commonplace books made in Verrocchio’s workshop. As we have seen, in the vernacular version known to Verrocchio and his contemporaries, this comedy of mistaken identity centers around the character of Geta, a foolish servant recently returned home from Athens, who is tricked into believing he is no longer himself. As Geta contemplates his situation, he concludes that word (his name) and thing (his essence) have become separated: ‘Who can speak with the voice of Geta if he is not Geta? Well, how could this happen? I know very well that logic does not prevent two people from speaking with similar voices. And it is also very common for the same name to be given to two people’ . . . [Geta ponders his situation]: ‘The voice and the evidence clearly suggest that this is Geta . . .Thus have we become two that formerly were one? This I cannot understand’ . . .

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[After more thought, he concludes]: ‘Undoubtedly, I have found out that I have become two.’33

The target of satire in Geta and Birria, like its medieval source, is Scholastic thought,34 in particular, the concept of universals. Geta’s concern about his name is closely tied to Peter Abélard’s discussion of universals and the issue of names.35 In a nutshell, the problem of universals (the common designation for individual objects of the same kind) concerns the question of whether things “have any independent reality or exist as mere notions and if that is the case if they are corporeal or incorporeal, if they are independent of the sense or require them, or if they are merely the products of thought.”36 Such issues are central to the story of Geta and Birria for, as Birria, a wise fool and the other servant in the story, remarks: “Geta is crazy . . . [thanks to] his great knowledge [(logic)].”37 In the course of the story Geta is philosophically and metaphorically destroyed.38 The relationship between object and representation, which I am arguing is central to understanding Verrocchio’s drawing of an Ideal Head of a Young Woman, then, was a topic in Renaissance vernacular culture and one with which Verrocchio would have been familiar. 4.4  PERCEIVING AND KNOWING THROUGH ARTISTIC PRACTICE

In addition to Verrocchio’s awareness about the relationship between perception and knowledge from vernacular tales like Geta and Birria, the artist would have encountered it every day through his experience of working with matter. At the heart of Verrocchio’s practice was his use of the senses as the gateway to knowledge and understanding of his materials. Over many years Verrocchio would have refined his skills in working with materials to understand how they should be treated. For objects in bronze, for instance, Verrocchio would have used the senses of sight, hearing, and touch to locate the best materials with which to begin preparing his alloy.To recognize pure tin, he would have looked for the whitest and hardest tin he could find, listening for it to “crackle” (like the sound of breaking ice), bending it with his hands, or holding it tightly in his teeth, as the sixteenth-­century metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio explained it was done.39 Different types of objects were made from alloys of various proportions, and Verrocchio would have depended on his sense of touch to decide how much to use, by feeling the weight of the alloy.40 To determine how much tin to use for making the alloy for his bronzes, Verrocchio would have used sight: copper changes from red to white with the addition of tin, and from a malleable consistency to one that is hard and brittle.41 Verrocchio’s skills in alloying bronze appear to have been recognized by his contemporaries: in 1473 Verrocchio was paid for alloying metal for a bell for the Opera del Duomo.42 Verrocchio would have used his senses also to recognize a good clay with

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which to make the core for his bronzes. Sight could not help in this, according to Biringuccio, for there was no visible way to distinguish between clays, despite their varied colors. Instead, the modeler would have used touch to find a clay that was suitably fine, lean (but not too lean or it would be too powdery and would not hold together), held its shape well when dried and, above all, resisted fire.43 A document records that on one occasion Verrocchio sought a very specific type of clay for a work of his in bronze (never completed): clay from a glassmaker’s oven.44 Finally, casting itself required great skill and knowledge, and there was much room for error. Many little things could go wrong, from a badly fitted joint or leaking of the mold through a crack, to a piece of earth or charcoal blocking the gate or filling a hole.45 Verrocchio would have watched the metal until it turned red or white and began to melt, and he had to be on guard so that the fire did not “form a kind of skin on top.” After the addition of tin, he would have recognized when the bronze was ready by sight because it would flash “like the sun,” and he would see flames that were “almost white and without smoke,” as Biringuccio explains.46 As a sculptor in marble,Verrocchio would have developed skills in identifying different types of marbles through sight and touch.47 Using a variety of mallets, hammers, axes, punches, chisels, drills, saws, files, and rasps,Verrocchio created virtuosic effects in his marble sculptures.48 To suggest the transparent veil that covers the chest of his female subject in the Woman with a Posy (Figure 120), he used a gouge for the tiny folds in the dress, a punch for the delicate border of her partlet, and a pumice stone, and perhaps earth and straw in bunches, for the polished surface.49 For the curls and nostrils of the same sitter and the space between the petals of the flowers that she holds, he used a drill.50 The pitting across the face of Francesco Sassetti (Figure 121), which suggests the sitter’s stubble, was produced with a sharp-­pointed percussive instrument. Verrocchio’s understanding of his materials and techniques was acquired through practice, based on years of experience using his senses. Only through countless experiments of working with nature could he acquire the appropriate judgment necessary for making his objects and in an impressive variety of materials.Through this training, the artist developed such sophisticated skills and understanding of matter that an idea could be formed in his mind and represented effortlessly with his hand. The belief that judgment could be trained through experience was one shared by many Renaissance artists, among them Donatello, about whom Pomponius Gauricus (writing in 1504) told the following anecdote: When Marco Barbo, bishop of Vicenza and nephew of Paul II, asked Donatello to let him see his abacus, Donatello invited him to come and see it the next day. When Barbo arrived, however, Donatello had nothing to show him, claiming that he was himself his abacus, which he always consulted and carried with him everywhere without effort.According to Gauricus, Donatello then asserted that if his visitor wanted to see something he should bring him paper

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Figure 120.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Woman with a Posy, marble, c. 1475, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 121.  Andrea del Verrocchio, attributed to Bust of Francesco Sassetti, marble, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Finsiel/Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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and a stylus, then he might admire the result drawn from his abacus.51 David Summers interpreted Gauricus’ story as proof of a belief in an artist’s innate sense of judgment with no need for practical training.52 However, Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey have rightly pointed out how the story of Donatello’s abacus points to the necessary coexistence of training and judgment in the practice of art, where training was the precondition for judgment (that was why Donatello could throw away his abacus).53 As Pamela H. Smith has emphasized, the development of an artist’s judgment required careful and laborious practical experience, a form of knowledge that she has aptly termed “artisanal literacy.” Renaissance artists learned through practice and the errors of others to develop sophisticated skills in working with their materials, the “giudizio dell’occhio” (judgment of the eye) of Donatello expressed in Gauricus’ tale.54 Verrocchio not only acquired this “artisanal literacy” through his practice; he highlighted it as a theme in his work. Verrocchio’s emphasis on sculptural effects rendered graphically in his Ideal Head of a Young Woman (Figure  10) suggests that he was demonstrating the notion of drawing as both perception and knowledge. In his Ideal Head of a Young Woman, the artist pursued the close relationship between sculpture and drawing to suggest that what we are observing is a woman between life and marble. In so doing, Verrocchio appears to be claiming through his graphic practice the potential for drawing to state visually how one could both know and perceive something at the same time. His drawing is a demonstration of a hands-­on understanding of the world, acquired through the senses and refined through training, that was a way of knowing, not just describing, the world. 4.5  REPRESENTING METAMORPHOSIS

In his evocation of metamorphosis in the drawing of a living woman turning into a marble sculpture or vice versa,Verrocchio was demonstrating the widely held belief that matter was not fixed, but always mutable. Since Aristotle and Theophrastus, marble had been regarded as living, earthly matter suspended in water that responded to the humors.55 Thus, a rabbi visiting Rome in the first century could explain why the marble columns in Roman churches were covered in tapestries (“so that they might not crack during the heat and not congeal during the cold”).56 And in medieval Latin editions of Aristotle’s Meteorology, marble was said to be created from water transformed into stone.57 The belief was widespread. Dante referred to it in “Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna” from his Rime petrose:“Lord, you know that in the freezing cold/water becomes crystalline stone.”58 Artists were certainly familiar with the theory that marble was made from water. Filarete, for instance, disproved it by cooking a piece of marble from a column from the Roman church of the Aracoeli.59 The motif of a lady transformed into matter occurs frequently in vernacular love poetry, where she stands for the poet’s imagination. Giacomo da

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Lentini (c. 1210–60?) – the Sicilian poet whose works were widely available in Tuscan and to whom Lorenzo de’ Medici,Verrocchio’s patron, devoted the most attention in his Raccolta Aragona (the collection of vernacular lyric poetry Lorenzo assembled and sent to Federico d’Aragona in 1477) – wrote in one of his sonnets: “I bear your image in my heart. It seems I bear you [my lady] in my heart, painted as you look . . . Feeling great desire I painted an image, my fair, your likeness.”60 For Dante in his Rime petrose, the Lady – who represents Poetry – is a stony one: over and over she is compared to stones.61 Dante describes his beloved in “Io son venuto al punto de la rota,” as an “image of stone” that he held in his imagination, and in “Amor, tu vedi ben” as “a lady carved from some lovely precious stone by the hand of some master carver of stone.”62 Petrarch – whose sonnets were a favorite in Florentine commonplace books63 – famously refers in two poems (77 and 78) to a portrait of Laura by the painter Simone Martini, executed on paper and presumably in metalpoint.64 And in another sonnet, Petrarch sees Laura transformed materially from flesh into wood, specifically into a laurel tree.65 Of course, the topos of the beloved turned into a tree derives from Ovid’s telling of Apollo and Daphne, which was well known during the Renaissance. Lorenzo il Magnifico, in his commentary on one of his sonnets (XV), describes how the beloved’s image could be preserved in his heart so that it “might endure in the fashion of the hardness of a diamond.”66 And in Lorenzo’s Ambra, a nymph pledged to the goddess Diana is transformed into stone after Ombrone attempts to rape her.67 The close connection between seeing and touching that Verrocchio suggests in his drawing also occurs in love poetry. According to the Renaissance theory of falling in love, little spirits (spiritelli d’amore) pass from the eye of the beloved into those of the lover, impressing the image of the beloved on the lover’s heart. Sometimes the spirits are sent via little arrows that would strike wounds in the lover’s heart (“the shot from your eyes pass[ed] straight into my inward parts,” as Petrarch describes).68 The idea of arrows delivering love’s wounds occurs also in devotional literature and in descriptions of divine love. The twelfth-­century Cistercian, Gilbert of Hoyland, whose sermons were popular in Renaissance Florence, writes how Love pierces the heart through the eyes: “Would that he [Christ] might multiply such wounds in me, from the sole of my foot to the crown of my head, that there might be no health in me! For health is evil without the wounds that Christ’s gracious gaze inflicts.”69 And in his Confessions, Augustine writes that God “pierced my heart with the arrow of your [his] love, and we carried your words transfixing my innermost being.”70 This sentence reached a wide vernacular readership, thanks to a paraphrasing of it by Jacopo de Voragine in his Legenda Aurea.71 Falling in love was often described in terms that mimic the actions of a sculptor, using metaphors of carving, incising, and forming with the hands. For instance, Giacomo da Lentini writes how he “was greatly delighted, my lady, that day when

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I formed in wax your beautiful image.”72 In his Amorosa visione, Boccaccio (whose Decameron Verrocchio owned)73 describes how his lady-­love inscribed her name upon her lover’s heart.74 And in one of his sonnets (XIII), Lorenzo il Magnifico praises the beautiful hand of his beloved, with which she drew out his heart, tying it in a thousand knots and remaking it so that he would be inclined to love her: O pure white, delicate and lovely hand,/ Where love and nature placed those graceful sweets,/ so noble and so lovely that it seems/ That all their other works are made in vain,/ You gently drew my heart forth from my breast,/ Out through the wound the lovely stars had made/ When Love made them so pious and so sweet;/ You entered in behind them, bit by bit,/ And with a thousand knots you bound my heart./ You formed it new; and when you afterward/ Had made it noble, it won’t do/ To longer seek to bind it with new knots,/ Or ever think it pleased by something else.75

The unknown artist responsible for the so-­called “Otto prints” represented the idea in an engraving (Figure 122), showing the beloved holding her lover’s heart, which she has taken from his body as he stands, tied to a tree, before her.76 (The ability of the beloved to reach the lover’s heart with her hand was the result of a vein that was believed to run directly from the heart to the ring finger of her left hand and thus serve as “a messenger of the heart’s intention,” as Lorenzo explained in his Comento sopra alcuni de’ suoi sonetti.)77 The connection between touch and falling in love was made in countless love poems, many in the vernacular,78 with which Verrocchio would have been familiar. Further proof of Verrocchio’s awareness of the role of touch in falling in love can be found in the standard he painted for a joust in Florence in 1475, as recorded by the artist’s brother in an inventory drawn up to claim money owed by the Medici after their expulsion in 1494. It depicted a spiritello d’amore, the agent that impressed the lady’s image on the lover’s heart.79 4.6  A PORTRAIT OF THE IMAGINATION: THE BELOVED IMPRESSED UPON THE LOVER’S HEART

One might conclude, then, that in his drawing, which shows a woman metamorphosing into marble or vice versa, Verrocchio has depicted the beloved, but the connection with poetry can be taken further, and Verrocchio’s drawing procedures encourage us to do this. The artist’s technique involved smudging black chalk with his fingers, which recalls the poet’s imaginative process. As Petrarch writes: “Where a high pine casts a shadow, or a hill,/ Sometimes I stop; and even in sheer rock/ I draw with my mind her beautiful face.”80 Petrarch’s words find parallel with those of Pliny the Elder in his accounts of the discovery of painting and sculpture, who writes how these arts were invented by Butades, a potter from Corinth, who made a drawing around

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Figure 122.  Anonymous (Florentine). The Cruelty of Love, engraving, c. 1470, The British Museum, London. Copyright. The Trustees of the British Museum.

a cast shadow of a young man with whom Butades’ daughter had fallen in love (Butades also made a clay relief after the cast shadow).81 They also echo Alberti, who, in his explanation of sculpture’s very origins, writes that the art of sculpture began when “a tree trunk or clod of clay or some other inanimate object” suggested a form to be completed by the sculptor (this process recalls Petrarch’s in conjuring up the beloved from forms suggested in nature).82 The cast shadows are the source from which Petrarch composed his sonnet, using them to conjure up the face of his beloved, just as she had impressed her portrait on his heart. Alberti’s origin story of sculpture and the role of shadows in Petrarch’s sonnet give meaning to the shading of Verrocchio’s drawing, made by the gentle rubbing of the black chalk with the artist’s finger to create sfumato, suggesting how the artist’s stumping, through which he conjures up his figure of a woman, is equivalent to the poet’s process of imagination. The manual manipulation exercised by Verrocchio with his chalk parallels the actions of the beloved with her lover’s heart, but it should also be understood as referring to the refining of an idea in the imagination, the transformation of the idea into something noble (the Idea). In Lorenzo’s commentary

The Sculptured Imagination

on his sonnet XIII, he explains how it was through touch that his heart (and the idea contained within it) was made noble: And for this it was made noble, that is, to understand, to contemplate and to enjoy that beauty only by means of the eyes. But after the whitest of hands entered into my breast and drew the heart from it, it seemed that it would be elevated to a very worthy office, because this demonstrates the jurisdiction that my lady exercised over my heart, and it expressly clarifies that she already considered it hers.83

Furthermore, Lorenzo points out, it is only through touch that this process of refinement can occur: “It was then necessary . . . to make my heart noble again and to shape it for this new object, and for this function nothing seemed better suited than the hand of my lady.”84 Elsewhere Lorenzo, like other poets, uses the metaphor of sculpture to describe the process of falling in love and its connection with the imagination. For instance, in his commentary on sonnet XXXV he writes: “[M]y thoughts, confined to the heart, were contemplating my lady, sculpted in my heart by Love.”85 For Renaissance poets, there was a conflation between the Lady, Love, and Poetry, all of which were born in the immaginativa (imagination).86 As Giorgio Agamben has noted, the concept of love for the Dolce stil nuovo poets  – to whom poets in the succeeding centuries, including Lorenzo, were indebted – was an imaginative process. When the spirit from the beloved’s eyes (spirito visivo) passed through into the lover’s eyes to initiate the process of falling in love, it entered the brain and impressed on it the image of the lady.87 From this impression, a true spirit of love (spirito d’amore) arose that ennobled all other spiritelli there (as Guido Cavalcanti wrote in a sonnet, echoing Dante’s description of seeing Beatrice for the first time in the Vita nuova: “Through the eyes strikes a delicate spirit/ that awakens a spirit in the mind, from which stirs the spirit of loving/ that ennobles every other little spirit.”)88 Charles Dempsey and Agamben have recognized that the process of falling in love described here is the same as the process of the imagination: for the latter, ideas are born inside the second ventricle when a battle between spirits in the lover’s brain concludes. At this moment a true idea has been chosen, at which point all other spirits are either cast out or transformed into noble spirits.89 Indeed, in the Vita nuova Dante makes explicit the connection between the imagination and love, identifying a spirit of love (“uno spiritel novo d’amore”) that dwells within him as the same as a random thought, a “gentil pensiero.”90 Verrocchio was probably acquainted with Lorenzo’s poetry, having designed the banner under which the young leader of Florence appeared in a joust in 1469, the design of which was based on his patron’s poetry. The standard depicted an allegorical image of Lorenzo’s lady-­love, Lucrezia Donati, seated beneath a laurel tree with the sun and a rainbow above, accompanied by the motto les tems revient (best translated as “the Golden Age returns”).91 Some

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Figure 123.  Niccolò Fiorentino, Florentia Under a Laurel Tree, reverse of bronze medal, c. 1485– 92, Gift of The Circle of the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., open access.

sense of the appearance of Verrocchio’s banner may be on the reverse of a medal by Niccolò Fiorentino of c. 1485–92 (Figure 123). The recto shows a portrait of Lorenzo, while the verso shows a lady, identified in an inscription as Florentia, seated beneath a tree, holding out lilies. As Dempsey has explored at length, Lucrezia appears in Lorenzo’s poetry not as a personality in her own right, but as a portrait of Love,92 and the lady in Verrocchio’s Ideal Head of a Young Woman performs the same function. In the drawing the woman figures the image of the beloved impressed upon the lover’s heart (Love), made through a process that mimicked the creation of a work of art. By suggesting the form of a woman between life and stone, Verrocchio was representing the idea of Love itself formed upon the lover’s heart and shaped by his imagination. In sonnet XV Lorenzo writes how the beloved presses his heart with her hands, forming an impression of her and how he wishes that this process could be made permanent: O how I envy you, my blessed heart, Because that the charming hand now presses, now Caresses you, expunging every hardness low, And you are thereby made so noble that

The Sculptured Imagination

The name to which Love consecrated you, That finger white portrays in you, and now Imprints her face angelic, represents Its joyful now, now troubled tenderly. Now one by one her amorous, winsome thoughts The lovely hand sets down, now it records Her blessed and sagacious words so sweet. O my fine heart, what more then can you hope? Only that those divine lights have the power To change you to unyielding diamond.93

Furthermore, as Lorenzo explains in his commentary on this sonnet, the process of refinement (of elevating random thought to Idea) is equivalent to an artist transforming matter into form: As soon as my heart became noble matter, as long as the matter could be without noble form, the longer the matter could be without form. And because Love joins matter and form together, that is a natural desire that the one has for the other, so Love, who moved that hand to ennoble my heart, also moved it again to give my heart a very noble impression.94

Verrocchio realizes the desire expressed by Lorenzo by making the beloved permanent through the medium of drawing.Yet the beloved immortalized in Verrocchio’s drawing is a woman eternally transforming and not fixed. The woman appears to be metamorphosing from marble into flesh before our eyes, but she is forever prevented from completing this transformation. The outline around her makes it ambiguous whether the metamorphosis is marble into flesh or vice versa. By refusing to blend the outlines of his form, Verrocchio emphasized the flat surface of the sheet, and therefore the head is forever connected to the background as a sculpture in low relief, rather than a living figure viewed as if in the round. This is consistent with the role of desire in Renaissance love poetry. Unlike Pygmalion, who was rewarded with the metamorphosis of his beloved statue into living flesh, the desire of Renaissance poets remains forever out of reach and always postponed. For Lorenzo, by turning to stone, the beloved’s image (her beauty and his thoughts) could be preserved in his heart so that it “might endure in the fashion of the hardness of a diamond, and that new and troubled thoughts would not succeed them and drive away those that were sweet, as many times occurs with lovers, who ordinarily are preserved in the same condition but for a brief time.”95 Just as Lorenzo wrote in his Comento on sonnet XV that he hoped that his lady’s eyes might transform his heart from painted and beautiful “into a hard diamond” and thus be made eternal,96 Verrocchio created a drawing that figured that transformation and found a way to make that metamorphosis permanent.

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In one of his well-­known vernacular tales from the Trecentonovelle, Franco Sacchetti tells the story of Mino, a Sienese artist who specializes in carved and painted crucifixes. One day Mino hears a rumor that his wife is cavorting at home with another man, so Mino rushes to his house to confront them.When he knocks at the door, the wife comes up with the ingenious plan of disguising her lover as a sculpture of Christ in her husband’s workshop. She instructs her lover to undress, put on a loincloth, and lie down on one of her husband’s crosses. After searching for his wife’s lover to no avail, Mino locks up his workshop, inadvertently trapping the man inside. The next day, when Mino enters his bottega, he sees the lover’s toes and rushes for an axe with which to castrate him. But before he has a chance to do it, “Christ” leaps up and escapes out the door. Furious, Mino accosts his wife and begins beating her, but she is stronger than him, and soon Mino is the one fighting off the punches. To save himself from further harm, Mino recants his accusations and explains Christ’s miraculous exit from his workshop in practical terms: Christ must have escaped because he was not properly nailed to the cross.1 Implicit in Mino’s explanation is the sculptor’s success in creating a Christ that is so naturalistic it can come to life. In Sacchetti’s story a man becomes a sculpture that comes to life, a transformation that depends upon the notion of cristo vivo (a Christ who appears to be alive).Through Sacchetti’s wit cristo vivo becomes an opportunity for escape from punishment first for the lover, then the wife, and finally for Mino. The story suggests how theological ideas were utilized by the popolani 168

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

Figure 124.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Resurrection, polychrome terracotta, c. 1470, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Detail of head of Christ. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

during the Renaissance – in this case, how the idea of the incarnation was used to explain the transformation of wood into flesh in an artist’s workshop. The story suggests also that there was a belief among some (even if it is mocked in the tale) that Christ could be incarnated from matter treated by a sculptor and without the intervention of a priest enacting the transubstantiation. Verrocchio, like Mino, produced sculptured and painted crucifixes. His only surviving example (Figure 11) was discovered in a storeroom in Florence in the 1990s. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi convincingly attributed the sculpture to Verrocchio – who, Vasari tells us, made “crucifixes of wood”2 – on the basis of similarities between the physiognomy of Christ (Figure 132) and other works by Verrocchio dating from the 1470s, especially his terracotta Resurrection (Figure 124), Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 125), the Forteguerri cenotaph (Figure 126), and a clay modello of the Pietà, formerly in Berlin (Figure 127). In all of these, the head of Christ features similar high cheekbones, deep-­set eyes with heavy lids, a bifurcated beard with a round chin between, and regular strands of hair parted in the center and falling down either side of the face.3 Given its similarities with these works, most of which date from the 1470s, the Bargello Crucifix probably dates from that decade also. Verrocchio’s Crucifix is remarkable for the degree to which it mixes techniques of different media and the specific methods used, some of which are unique in Renaissance art, as far as I can tell. In this work,Verrocchio employed

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Figure 125.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, c. 1470–80, Orsanmichele, Florence. Detail of head of Christ. Alinari Archive, Florence.

his skills as a wood carver, but also transferred his knowledge of working as a wax and stucco modeler, a painter, a bronze caster, and an armorer.Verrocchio began by blocking out the torso in limewood.The body was hollowed out to a depth of 12 mm, thus making it like a sculpture cast in bronze where a uniform thickness was optimal. The two halves of the limewood trunk making up the body were tied together with three narrow ropes that encircle the torso.4 The head and the back between the shoulders, made from cork, were grafted to the body with flat nails (visible in the x-­radiograph; Figures 128 and 139), a technique used by armorers for attaching pauldrons to the body of armor.5 The details of the figure were achieved by modeling up with stucco instead of carving into the wood.6 The loincloth, made from linen dipped in gesso, resembles a three-­dimensional model from which Verrocchio would have made his drapery studies on linen. And the entire figure was painted in tempera over a layer of charcoal like a panel painting.7 This example of mixed-­media production is not unique in Quattrocento sculpture. A number of ostensibly wooden crucifixes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries incorporated different materials, probably to heighten their verisimilitude.8 Many wooden sculptures

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

Figure 126.  Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop. Forteguerri cenotaph, marble, 1481–88, San Zeno, Pistoia. Detail of head of Christ. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo - Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

Figure 127.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Entombment, terracotta, 1480s, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Inv. Nr. 3C-­12, transferred after WWII. Until 1945: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung, Inv. Nr. 117. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-­Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

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Figure 128.  Andrea del Verrocchio, Crucifix, early-to-mid-1470s, x-radiograph Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le attività Culturali e del Turismo - Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico.

(not only crucifixes) went further by featuring movable limbs, including arms, heads, and even tongues and eyes (Figures 129 and 130); provisions for blood to flow from Christ’s side; and additions such as wigs made from human hair or other materials; and flesh made from leather. All of these would have made the sculptures appear remarkably naturalistic to their original audiences.9 However, while other artists mixed media in order to create naturalistic sculptures, the extent of, and meaning conveyed by,Verrocchio’s use of mixed media in his Crucifix make it noteworthy. His precise hollowing out of the body’s interior to 12 mm, the use of rope to attach the two halves of the body together, the use of cork for the head and shoulders, and the method used for attaching this section to the body using nails are unique, as far as I have been able to determine.10 (By comparison, Brunelleschi’s Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella [Figure 54] and Donatello’s Crucifix in Santa Croce [Figure 56] were made with unhollowed-­out trunks of pear wood onto which a thin layer of stucco and polychromy were applied; Brunelleschi also added a linen loincloth, as we have seen.)11 Verrocchio modeled the flesh of his figure in stucco, but treated the material as if it were wax by adding fine layers one on top of

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

Figure 129.  Stefano Accolti and Agostino di Giovanni, The Virgin Annunciate, polychromed wood, 1321, Museo di San Matteo, Pisa. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut.

Figure 130.  Unknown German sculptor (Giovanni Teutonico or Paolo Alemanno?), Crucifix, polychromed wood, last third of the fifteenth century, Museo della Città, Rimini. Detail of head, which featured a movable tongue. Storico-artistico AUSL della Romagna. Photo: Gilberto Urbinati.

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Figure 131.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Crucifix, early-to-mid-1470s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Detail of gessoed linen loincloth. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico and Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

another and burnishing the surface with an agate-­tipped tool. Over this he added thin and transparent egg-­based tempera, creating subtle variations in skin tone across the body. The skin across Christ’s chest was rendered in ivory and rose, the loincloth was striped with violet and mauve (Figure 131), Christ’s hair was painted brown, rose added to the cheeks, and splotches of red applied across the forehead to suggest blood, the tip of the nose and across the eyelids highlighted in red, and the teeth, just visible through the open mouth, were painted white (Figure 132).The effect of these surface techniques is a virtuosic spectrum of expressions across the body, especially Christ’s face, that change depending on the spectator’s position, resulting in a remarkably convincing and charismatic cristo vivo.12 In its layered manufacture, Verrocchio’s Crucifix is best understood within the context of vernacular literary culture, with which we have seen the artist was familiar. In addition, we know that the artist spent his earliest years embedded in the heart of Florentine literary culture. He received his training

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

Figure 132.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Crucifix, polychromed cork and stucco, early-to-mid1470s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Detail of face of Christ. Su concessione del Ministero dei beni e le attività culturali e del turismo – Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, Archivio dei Restauri e Fotografico and Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

as a goldsmith in the late 1440s and early 1450s in the bottega of Antonio Dei and probably Francesco di Luca Verrocchio, both of whom had workshops on or very near via Calimala.13 It was here that Burchiello had his famous barbershop, where he composed his satirical verses for an audience that included humanists like Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo Dati, and Cristoforo Landino.14 Although Burchiello was dead by the time Verrocchio was training, his poetry remained popular throughout the fifteenth century. Verrocchio’s links with vernacular Florentine literary culture are further supported by lines of poetry inscribed in the artist’s hand on sheets of drawings by him and by artists associated with him.15 For example, on the verso of a sheet (Figure 22) containing sketches relating to the artist’s Madonna di Piazza (Pistoia altarpiece) for San Zeno, Pistoia, which dates from the 1470s and 1480s, there are some lines of verse in a script that match Verrocchio’s autograph catasto declaration of 1470, as we have seen. They read: “A more beautiful thing has not been conjured in this world, a more beautiful thing has not been conjured in this world.”16

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Verrocchio’s Crucifix can be most usefully considered alongside the poetry of Burchiello, whose relevance to Verrocchio is supported by the fact that one of the largest corpuses of Burchiello’s sonnets is a commonplace book made in the artist’s bottega (ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87). The patchwork approach to construction in Verrocchio’s Crucifix – with the artist adopting techniques from different media – can be considered analogous to the apparently random association of words in Burchiello’s poetry. Burchiello often juxtaposed words in unusual (often apparently nonsensical) groupings in his sonnets, transforming them to convey new meaning. Domenico De Robertis has compared these juxtapositions to notes recording the input and output of objects in a merchant’s account book.17 Often sonnets read like inventories of stuffs for sale in a shop, for instance: “Parsley, truffles, and gladioli of Constantinople/ and eels from Legnaia and from San Salvi,/ German lasagna, bald men,/ and turnips and parsnips and spindle whirls.”18 There is an insistent materiality to the words in Burchiello’s poetry, but also, the meaning of his words is transformed, with objects named but their meanings altered.19 De Robertis has likened this technique to an object being purchased at a market and then being made into something new in an artisan’s workshop.Verrocchio’s treatment of his materials, which breaks from convention and places them in startling juxtapositions, resembles Burchiello’s use of words in his sonnets. 5.1  MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S CRUCIFIX

The original location of Verrocchio’s Crucifix is not known, but it has been suggested that it may have been commissioned by the confraternity of Santa Maria della Pietà, colloquially known as the Buca di San Girolamo. When the Crucifix was rediscovered, it was in a storeroom of the confraternity of San Francesco Poverino in Piazza SantissimaAnnunziata,where many of the Buca’s possessions were moved in the late eighteenth century.20 From this, Paolozzi Strozzi has convincingly proposed that Verrocchio’s Crucifix may have belonged to the Buca. Founded in Florence by a group of merchants, the Buca counted among its members a number of illustrious Florentines. Saint Antoninus chose the first twelve members of the Buca from the Buonomini of San Martino,21 and later the Buca’s membership included humanists such as Feo Belcari; statesmen such as Cardinal Cesarini and Cardinal Barbo (the future Pope Paul II); and artists and craftsmen like Paolo Uccello, Antonio Rossellino, and Luca della Robbia.22 The Buca are known to have had in their possession crucifixes like Verrocchio’s, one of which was housed on a small altar in the confraternity’s dormitory.23 This very crucifix may have been that by Verrocchio.24 Alternatively,Verrocchio’s Crucifix may have been one of two carried in processions by the Buca and kept at their oratories at Fiesole and in Florence.25

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

The Buca was renowned for its harsh rule, which exhorted its members to follow a life of poverty, charity, and penitence, and like their namesake, Saint Jerome, the Buca was devoted to the crucifixion. Every alternate Saturday, the members of the confraternity spent the entire night in prayer, listening to orations and engaging in flagellation.26 During Holy Week members of the Buca, like other penitent confraternities, meditated on Christ’s bodily suffering on the cross, and Verrocchio’s naturalistic Crucifix would have been a particularly effective focus for their contemplation.27 The figure’s pained expression, conveyed by the slightly tilted head, swollen lower eyelids, bloody forehead and side, and opened mouth, inside which the artist carved tiny white teeth from cork (Figure 132), would have been a powerful focal point for beholders in their spiritual devotion. Verrocchio’s Crucifix may have originally featured movable arms – this might explain the deep cavities below each shoulder (a requirement only if the arms were mobile) and the introduction of modern arms (necessary if the originals were overused because of changes in position).28 Movable arms would make the figure of Christ suitable for taking down from the cross for sacre rappresentazioni (sacred performances) and/or for processions. A number of Tuscan crucifixes feature movable arms, suggesting their use in sacred performances.29 Donatello’s Crucifix in Santa Croce (Figure 56), for instance, features hinged shoulders, indicating that it could be removed from the cross and taken in processions.30 A fifteenth-­century Florentine liturgical drama mentions how a sculptured Christ was taken from the cross and carried in procession along with a consecrated host to a place of burial.31 A record from 1490 mentions a wooden crucifix with movable arms by Andrea della Robbia to be used in Good Friday ceremonies in Santa Maria del Fiori.32 And Luca Dominici describes how a crucifix from Santa Croce in Florence was taken in procession to the altar of the church in Passignano, where “it miraculously poured out living blood in great quantities from many parts of the body.”33 The height of Verrocchio’s sculpture – 87 cm – also supports this context, as the size resembles that of other crucifixes used in this way.34 Many records point to the use of wooden crucifixes in these rituals, including in Florence.35 Often the only nonliving actor in these sacred dramas was the figure of Christ, who was sculptured; the other participants tended to be monks or lay people, including children.36 In one sacred performance that took place at Easter in 1448 in Perugia, a living actor playing Christ was replaced with a sculpture at the moment when Christ was attached to the cross.37 A 1425 inventory of a confraternity in Foligno records a crucifix that opened and closed its eyes and had nails that could be removed, this last feature designed for performances of the ritual “schiavellatione,” when Nicodemus would remove the nails from Christ’s bleeding limbs.38 The effect of Verrocchio’s techniques, especially the virtuosic polychromy, which produces subtle changes in Christ’s expression, would have

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been particularly effective in this ritual context, suggesting that Christ was in a state between life and death before the viewer’s eyes. (This change in expression is especially apparent in Christ’s face [Figure 132] where the artist modeled each side of the mouth differently so that one side is up and the other down.)39 Whether or not Verrocchio’s Crucifix was made for the Buca or another confraternity and/or used in sacred performances or processions, it was probably also the focus of spiritual devotion in a church. Baccio da Montelupo is known to have made a crucifix (which served as a processional cross but at other times stood on an altar) for the Compagnia di Gesù, a confraternity that met in an oratory of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.40 Donatello’s Crucifix for Santa Croce (Figure 56), which appears to have been used in a Deposition play, was on regular view in the church, set against the rood screen at eye level.41 Positioned like this, Baccio’s and Donatello’s crucifixes could be the focus of devotion at any time. Contemplation of a crucifix was deeply moving for the laity, for whom prayers, hymns, and sacred plays played a central role and amplified their spiritual experience. In performances directed at congregations, such as the Planctus Mariae et aliorum (The Lament of Mary and Others), actors playing the roles of Mary and John the Evangelist adopted dramatic poses before sculptured crucifixes (according to written instructions, Mary and John would turn to the people with “raised” or “outstretched arms”), gestures that mimicked those found in their sculptured counterparts.42 In addition, the laity would have participated in theological and mystical devotion through sermons, among which the sermon on the cross was pre-­eminent. During these, the congregation might recite lauds whose expressive content had them envision themselves as the Virgin Mary contemplating her dead son.43 Whether Verrocchio’s Crucifix was kept in a church, marched in processions, and/or used in sacre rappresentazioni, it offered beholders a moving representation of the suffering body of Christ, with whose corpus they communed at the Mass. From the late Middle Ages, the laity chiefly experienced this communion not through taste but through sight.44 This was the case in Florence in the fifteenth century when, as Arlotto de’ Mainardi, the writer and country priest, records in one of his popular vernacular stories, people regularly converged on churches to catch sight of the host. According to the tale, one day while the priest was conducting Mass at the church of San Romolo (no longer extant) near Piazza della Signoria, he observed workers running from their shops, carrying the tools of their trade in their hands, to witness the moment of elevation.45 Verrocchio’s unusual mode of manufacture also suggests links with a specific form of meditation, in which graduated levels of contemplation of Christ were presented as analogous to different materials and to different forms of representation. It is found, for instance, in the writings of Ugo Panziera da

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

Prato (Hugo Panciera), a Franciscan, who died c. 1330 and whose works were known in the late fifteenth century. His Trattati were copied in a number of fifteenth-­century Florentine manuscripts,46 and they were published in Florence in 1492, pointing to their popularity.47 Panziera’s works were also mined by preachers, such as San Bernardino da Siena, who owned a personal copy of the Trattati and used it as source material for some of his sermons.48 In Panziera’s treatise on perfection, he describes his method of meditation: Mental action is known to many as meditation and contemplation  . . . When the mind, after much time has passed, has exercised itself in Christ, communicating Christ to the imagination, Christ will not leave bare the active and corporeal virtue of the mind. In the first phase, in which the mind begins to consider the circumstances of thinking about Christ, Christ seems to be written into the mind and imagination [nella imaginativa scritto]. In the second he appears to be outlined [disegnato]. In the third he appears to be outlined and shaded [disegnato e ombrato]. In the fourth he appears to be colored and alive [colorato e incarnato]. In the fifth he seems to be sculptured in relief and alive [rilevato e incarnato].49

Panziera’s use of the term “rilevato” (sculptured in relief) plays on the idea of the resurrected Christ (as Lars R. Jones has pointed out, “levato” means raised up), and by pairing “incarnato” with “rilevato” Panziera suggests that the devout can make the divine manifest out of interior and material images.50 Verrocchio’s Christ, made using techniques generally not applied to wooden sculpture (carving the wood to precisely 12 mm, making the head and shoulders separately from cork and attaching them like an armorer, tying the two halves of the hollowed-­out trunk for the body with rope), invites a comparison with Panziera’s emphasis on different representational modes marking different meditative levels. Panziera’s meditative scheme belongs to a long tradition in spirituality (known in the vernacular both orally and textually), which Verrocchio and his audience would have known.51 In this, words were used to aid the reader in constructing mental images, and metaphors of art making were often employed. In his Esposizione del simbolo degli Apostoli (written after 1333, for a vernacular audience), for instance, Domenico Cavalca compares the mind of an angel, who had the capacity to understand the whole universe, to a wooden panel painted in noble colors. The panel becomes one onto which Cavalca’s reader is instructed to write and paint for their whole life, but this task cannot be completed because the panel is so large (and thus unfathomable).52 Cavalca’s Trattato della pazienza, written in the vernacular and copied in a number of Florentine zibaldoni, includes instructions to his reader to figure the cross in the mind, draw the image of Our Lady, and paint all the saints.53 And later, in the same treatise, Cavalca compares Christ to the material makeup of a book,

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its black letters read as the marks on Christ’s body from the flagellation, and the red letters as Christ’s bloody wounds. Verrocchio and the viewers of his Crucifix would have been familiar with such strategies, which were a feature of sermons, as well as texts, many in the vernacular.54 Furthermore, evidence suggests that mystical encounters with the divine were often material and rooted in objects,55 the appearances of which themselves were shaped by accounts of visionary experiences.56 The Blessed Andrea Gallerani, a Dominican tertiary from Siena, was spiritually transported while praying ceaselessly before a crucifix (he kept his head in a noose, which would hang him if he yielded to the temptation to fall asleep).57 And Saints Peter Martyr, Brigid of Sweden, and Antoninus apparently experienced visions in which Christ spoke to them, while they prayed before carved wooden crucifixes.58 Agnes of Montepulciano had a vision during which she was elevated and embraced a sculptured Christ crucified.59 After contemplating a sculptured crucifix,60 Margherita of Cortona, a Franciscan tertiary, acted out the Passion of Christ over twelve hours in the church of San Francesco, in which she experienced Christ’s suffering on and through her own body.61 And Saint Catherine of Siena received the stigmata while gazing at a crucifix in Pisa.62 It is significant that many mystics’ visions (such as those of Saints Agnes, Catherine, and Margarita) were not only prompted by sculptured crucifixes, but their experiences remained at a bodily (and thus material) level. Catherine of Siena regarded Christ’s physical body as a staircase to heaven.63 Jacopone da Todi describes Saint Francis’s reception of the stigmata in material terms: “Francis’ deep desire was such that he was incorporated into him [Christ], his heart was softened like wax for a seal, impressing on it that [Christ] into whom he was transformed.”64 Thomas of Celano’s account of the same event is similarly material in emphasis but goes further by suggesting that the experience was a sculptured one because the stigmata were three-­dimensional swellings.65 The body of Clare of Montefalco, who had vivid visions during her life,66 was found to have physical signs of her mystical experiences after her death. Upon her heart the sisters from her convent found “the symbols of Christ’s Passion: the crucifix, the whip, the pillar, the crown of thorns, the three nails, the lance, and the rod with the sponge. In her gall bladder they found three globes of equal size, weight, and color, arranged in a triangle as the symbol of the Trinity.”67 And the Franciscan Blessed Conrad of Offida had a vision in which he touched the Christ Child, embracing and kissing him, and held him to his chest and through this, he “was wholly melted and dissolved in divine and indescribable love.”68 Conrad’s experience, though extraordinary, was part of an imaginative interaction with objects that was typical of the devotional practices of the laity.69 (In fact, Conrad’s encounter was itself recorded in a vernacular compilation, Fioretti or The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, which was owned by at least one

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artist – Giuliano da Maiano – and a favorite in Florentine zibaldoni.)70 During these rituals, devotees touched three-­dimensional objects, such as Christ Child mannequins, rosary beads, paternoster cords, paxes, paintings, and crucifixes, using them to partake in spiritual nourishment in churches, confraternal meeting places, and the home.71 Readers of the bestseller The Meditations on the Life of Christ – a work that was commonly included in Florentine zibaldoni and recorded in the possession of at least one artist72 – were invited to kiss, pick up, and touch the Christ Child.73 And devotees were encouraged to meditate on the physical materiality of Christ’s pain. In his enormously popular Opera a ben vivere written by Saint Antoninus – archbishop of Florence and founder of the Buca confraternity for which Verrocchio’s crucifix may have been made – the reader is instructed to meditate . . . on the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . kneel down before a Crucifix and with the eyes of the mind, more than with those of the body, consider his face. Beginning first with the crown of thorns, pressed into his head, down to his skull; next the eyes, full of tears and of blood; the mouth, frothing and full of bile and of blood; the beard, similarly full of spit and of blood and bile . . . And in reverence of all these things, you should recite the Lord’s prayer with a Hail Mary.

Although Antoninus tells his reader to use the eyes of their mind, rather than of the body, the creation of works of art that seem to respond to Antoninus’ meditation indicates that objects played a role in actual practice.74 That devotees approached objects in the ways encouraged by Antoninus (among others) is confirmed in sources. The Ricordi of merchant Giovanni Morelli provides a lengthy account of his devotional practices after the death of his beloved son, Alberto. Morelli records how he reached out and touched the sacred figures depicted in the paintings he prayed before, kissing them with his lips.75 In the founding legend of the Bianchi – a group of lay pilgrims who processed through cities and the countryside behind a crucifix  – a peasant was physically marked with the outline of the Virgin Mary’s hand, which she laid there during a vision he had of her (and of Christ). The story was well known and discussed in a number of accounts accessible to lay audiences.76 The chronicler Luca Dominici records occasions when ordinary people were healed through physical contact with a crucifix. He tells, for instance, of a man with a withered and useless arm [who] crossed the Arno and went up there to San Miniato and there devoutly presented himself to the Crucifix; and when he had touched the Crucifix with his arm and kissed it, at once he was freed and healed in the presence of many people, and he fainted. And when he revived, he said that he felt the entire arm tingle, which was the blood returning to the veins, and he extended it and used it just like the other.77

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On another occasion, a woman possessed by the devil was brought before a company of the Bianchi from Pistoia who were at San Miniato al Monte. The woman was forced to kiss a crucifix, whereupon she was cured.78 The material tack of these devotional practices derived from the mystical theology of the late Middle Ages, in particular, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s enormously influential sermons, which were well known in the vernacular.79 In his sermons on The Song of Songs, Bernard established that mystical union with God was a corporeal experience, one based on the belief that the body “provided human beings a way to know, love, and become one with him.”80 (“He [God] took on flesh for those who are wise in the flesh, that they might learn to be wise in the spirit as well,” Bernard writes)81 Lay Florentine preachers stressed this corporeal aspect of worship in their encouragement of flagellation in sermons to confraternity members, drawing from popular confraternal practice.82 Chancellor of Florence, Bartolomeo Scala (1430–97), for instance, in a sermon called on himself and his listeners to “give our body conquered by sensuality a beating so that castigated, it is converted to the way of salvation, reconciled with its Creator. Chase away the appetites, exterminate sensuality, and place yourself under the sway of true reason.”83 In another homily, delivered by the budding humanist Giovanni Nesi (1456–1506), the lay audience was encouraged to feel Christ’s corporeal suffering on their own bodies, which they did through flagellation during the ceremony: [consider] that he suffered in every part [of his] body from his head to his feet. In as much as his most holy head was [wounded by] sharp thorns, the brightest eyes by a blindfold, the mellifluous mouth by the bitterest bile, the resplendent face by bloody sweat, the weak shoulders by the heaviest weight of the cross, the most sacred breast with a sharp lance, and the innocent hands and the immaculate feet with pointed nails, and finally his precious body with the sharpest of beatings.84

We get a sense of the flagellant’s experience through a poem by the fifteenth-­ century Florentine patrician Giovanni Ciai, who writes: I repent with all my heart that I am filled with carnal sin. And so, with a whip I often scourge my flanks, whence my blood, spilling forth, pools around me as I kneel on the ground, and mixes with my many tears. I, who am such a vile worm, have unleashed pride against God and my neighbor, for which I deserve death.85

Objects that were the focus of devotion were not mere receptacles; they were understood to be analogous (and in some cases equal) to living bodies.

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Figure 133.  Cosimo Mogalli, Madonna of Impruneta Carried in Procession to Florence, 1714, engraving from Giovanni Battista Casotti’s Memorie istoriche della miracolosa immagine di Maria Vergine dell’Impruneta (Florence: G. Manni, 1714). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-B21551).

The miraculous painting, Our Lady of Impruneta, which was brought from Impruneta to Florence in times of trouble, was treated is if it were the Virgin Mary (Figure 133).“Nostra Donna” was dressed in vestments, and in 1466 a law was introduced in Florence imposing double penalties on those committing murders while she was being processed through the city streets, implying that the statue had sensory awareness and thus could be offended.86 Some objects transmitted blood, sweat, and tears; moved body parts; spoke; and displayed agency.87 The power of these objects did not lie beyond them (in the sacred being represented, as official doctrine repeatedly explained was the correct use of images), but rather in and through their physical materiality. Moreover, spiritual devotion  – like that which beholders in front of Verrocchio’s Crucifix would have practiced – was affective and rooted in an experience whereby the devotee sought mystical union with God at the boundary point between the material and the immaterial. As Jill Bennett has persuasively argued, drawing from Daniel Arasse, devotional images were designed to heighten the viewer’s emotional engagement with the sacred subject in their memory, an experience that was itself understood physically and materially as an impression on the senses, a “mnemonic of pain” to adopt Bennett’s phrase.88 For mystics  – who successfully united with God during

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Figure 134.  Andrea del Verrocchio. Madonna and Child, terracotta, c. 1470, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

their devotions – this experience was marked on their body not only as a sign but also as source material in their memory.89 Works of art performed a powerful role in encouraging mystical experiences and in lay devotion more generally. But a three-­dimensional object like Verrocchio’s Crucifix posed a particular challenge that was irrelevant in two-­ dimensions: sculptures in the round could resemble too closely the holy figures they were meant merely to represent. Paintings of sacred personages got around this by suggesting how they were “between concrete sensual experience and the trans-­material imaginary” (to quote Klaus Krüger).90 This was achieved through pictorial devices that suggest the holy figures had the potential to break out of their frames and yet they remain forever frozen in an in-­between state. In paintings of the Madonna and Child, for instance, this is achieved by pictorial devices such as figures who seem to break beyond the confines of their frames, as Verrocchio’s did in some of his paintings and relief sculptures  – for instance, his terracotta Madonna and Child (Figure  134) and the stucco Madonna and Child (Figure  135) and painted Madonna and Child (Figure 136), both attributed to his circle. In the stucco example in Oberlin,

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Figure 135.  Andrea del Verrocchio, workshop of, Madonna and Child, stucco, c. 1470. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin.

Figure 136.  Andrea del Verrocchio, workshop of, Madonna and Child, tempera on panel, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: Christoph Schmidt.

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the Madonna’s mantle spills out of the frame into the beholder’s physical space, thus connecting the viewer with the holy figures, but the sacred personages remain forever connected to their backgrounds to emphasize their status as images. In other words, a painting or relief can suggest that it is a representation of a sacred figure, while also aiding in the process of the devotee forming an image in their mind’s eye (and therefore overcoming the charge of idolatry). A sculpture in the round, however, presented a problem: how to suggest this in-between-ness.91 Whereas Panziera and his contemporaries used material and representational metaphors for moving closer to God (with the ideal state residing in the immaterial),92 Verrocchio’s material metaphors suggest the incarnation of Christ, which is about word becoming thing. Verrocchio does this by transforming materials into metaphors, metaphors that do not work except when the material is transformed. For instance, wood becomes like bronze, stucco like wax, cork like armored steel. His crucifix thus perpetually represents the metamorphosis of Christ as permanent in-between-ness (wood that is becoming bronze, stucco that is becoming wax, cork that is becoming steel) to convey this idea of becoming. Yet this in-between-ness is not apparent to the naked eye. By using metaphors about transformation to make his object,Verrocchio was thinking about animation, how to make something that resembled a living thing in its lifelikeness, but whose animating force was concealed from view. That Verrocchio would have been aware of theories of animation is supported by contemporary vernacular accounts of miraculous objects that came to life. In one, for instance, a sculptured Christ crucified became animated when it was touched, a metamorphosis that was otherwise indiscernible to the eye.93 Furthermore, the interest in representing lifelikeness apparent in Verrocchio’s Crucifix was shared by a number of Renaissance artists, writers, and theorists, whose ideas were accessible to all readers in the vernacular. Dante, for instance, writes in his Purgatorio: “What master was he of brush or of pencil who drew the forms and lineaments which there would make every subtle genius wonder? Dead the dead, and the living seemed alive.”94 In his Della Pittura, Leon Battista Alberti, drawing from Dante, advises painters “wishing to express life in things . . . to make every part [of the body] in motion.”95 He goes on to recommend that painters begin creating a human figure by imagining a skeleton onto which they should add muscles, skin, and clothing.96 While anatomical accuracy underpins Alberti’s advice, there is also present an awareness of that which makes things appear lifelike: something that was invisible to the naked eye but discernable in the workings of the body, including its anatomy. This was the soul, defined according to the Aristotelian tradition – and widely known during the Renaissance  – as the life principle, that which distinguished the living from the nonliving.97 This is evident in Leonardo’s writings in which he

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developed the idea that animation was controlled by a body’s inner (invisible) workings: the muscles of the body move in accordance with the soul.98 We see evidence of Verrocchio’s interest in anatomy defining liveliness in his restoration of an antique statue of Marsyas (now lost), which, according to Vasari, included meticulously rendered veins and other anatomical details made from porphyry (a material which we have seen was equated with blood)99: Cosimo de’ Medici . . . had had put in place a very beautiful Marsyas of white marble, bound to a tree trunk to be flayed. Because his grandson Lorenzo, into whose hands had come a torso with the head of another Marsyas, very ancient, much more beautiful than the first, and made of red stone [porphyry], wanting it to be set beside the other, could not, because it was so imperfect. So he gave it to Andrea [Verrocchio] to restore and complete it, and he made the legs, thighs, and arms that were missing from this figure, from pieces of red marble, which he did so well that Lorenzo was well satisfied and placed it opposite the other, on the other side of the door. This ancient torso, made to show a flayed Marsyas, was done with such care and judgment that some of the subtle white veins, that were in the red stone, were carved by the craftsman in the right place to suggest little nerves, as one sees in real bodies when they are flayed. It [this technical feature] must have given to that work, when it had its original surface, an appearance of lifelikeness.100

Verrocchio’s interest in animation can be established also from a group of death masks and wax votives he made that no longer survive but the existence of which are supported by numerous reports. According to Vasari, Verrocchio invented death masks, a genre that became so ubiquitous that they could be seen “in every house in Florence, above the fireplaces, doors, windows, and cornices, infinite numbers of these portraits, so well made and natural that they appear alive.”101 In fact the practice was an ancient one, and one known to Cennino Cennini, writing in the fourteenth century.102 Although Verrocchio did not invent the practice, he did make death masks, which are recorded as “venti maschere ritratte al naturale” in an inventory submitted by Verrocchio’s brother, Tommaso, for payments still outstanding by the Medici in 1495/96.103 According to Vasari,Verrocchio also made wax votives in collaboration with a certain Orsino, a wax maker (undoubtedly Orsino Benintendi),104 including three life-­size figures of Lorenzo de’ Medici, made after the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478: On the occasion of the death of Giuliano de’ Medici and the danger to his brother Lorenzo, wounded in Santa Maria del Fiore, it was ordered by friends and relatives of Lorenzo that images of him be set up in many places in thanks to God for his preservation. Therefore Orsino [Bentintendi], among others, with the help and instruction of Andrea [del Verrocchio], executed three life-­size ones in wax, making an internal armature of wood as recounted elsewhere, interwoven with split reeds,

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then covered with cloth soaked in wax, with beautiful folds and such arrangement that nothing better or closer to nature could be seen. Then he made the heads, hands and feet of thicker wax, but hollow inside, and taken from life [ritratte dal vivo] and painted in oils with all necessary ornaments of hair and other things, natural and so well done that they appear not as men of wax, but truly alive . . . one of these is in the church of the nuns of Chiarito, in via di San Gallo, in front of the miracle-­ working Crucifix. And this figure is in the very clothes that Lorenzo had on when, wounded in the throat and bandaged up, he showed himself at the window of his house to the people who had run there to see if he was still alive . . . the second figure of the same wears a lucco, a typically Florentine citizen’s garment, and this is in the Servite church of the Annuziata, above the subsidiary door, next to the table where candles are sold; the third was sent to Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi.105

As Karla Langedijk has argued, in commissioning these works, the Medici may have intended to evoke the wax effigy of the murdered Julius Caesar. A Latin text, recently printed in Venice (in 1472 and 1477), recounted how Caesar’s effigy moved mechanically to display its wounds and that his party used it to appeal for support from the people.106 Hugo van der Velden has convincingly shown that Lorenzo’s boti were stand-­ins for his person, and the miracle-­ working images before which the effigies were placed provided Lorenzo with perpetual protection.107 Whereas Georges Didi-­Huberman reads the practice of death masks and votives – like those made by Verrocchio – as a pledge of death in order to have the sitter resemble God, in whose image all Christians were made (and for whom God had been forced to die as Christ on the cross), the processes of making these objects suggest instead that they were designed as equivalents to the bodies they represented and that they promise through their materiality eternal life possible after death. Vasari tells us that Verrocchio made the effigies of Lorenzo il Magnifico around a skeleton of wood interwoven with split reeds, covered with waxed cloths that were folded and arranged, and with heads, hands, and feet made from hollow wax. After such figures were constructed, they were painted, often with vermilion or with a wide range of pigments, to suggest lifelikeness.108 It may be no coincidence that vermilion was used often for wax effigies: Cennino reserves the application of vermilion for flesh tones on living bodies (never for the dead) and to render blood, and he calls the pigment – mixed with lead white to make flesh tones – “incarnatione,” thus making a clear link between vermilion and its role as animating force.109 Verrocchio would have been familiar with theories of animation also from literature in the vernacular. For instance, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Deucalion (charged, along with Pyrrha, with repopulating the earth after the great flood), said of his father, Prometheus: “Oh, would that by my father’s arts I might restore the nations, and breathe, as he [Prometheus] did, the breath of life in the molded clay.”110 Ovid’s Metamorphoses was widely known in the fifteenth

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century and was included in a number of Florentine commonplace books.111 Animation was also a topic in medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy, which explains how the body’s functions are transmitted by little internal spirits (spiritelli), a belief with which Verrocchio would have been familiar, as we have seen.112 That artists, including Verrocchio, were aware of these spirits has been well established by Charles Dempsey, who demonstrated how the popular figure of the spiritello – the child-­like sprite, a feature of so much Renaissance art – was a material and physical embodiment of this idea. The figure of the spiritello embodied “the breath of life animating the human organism.”113 According to Dempsey, in its earlier manifestation the spiritello is more ornamental (epitomized by the examples adorning Jacopo della Quercia’s early fifteenth-­century tomb of Ilaria del Carretto in San Martino, Lucca), but this is replaced by a more active version, invented by Donatello, that embodies the physical spirits that inhabited the other figures represented (exemplified in Donatello’s Cavalcanti altarpiece [Figure 137], where the teetering spiritelli at the

Figure 137.  Donatello, Cavalcanti altarpiece, pietra serena and polychromed terracotta, c. 1430s, Santa Croce, Florence. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

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top personify the pneumatic spirits of fear that grip the Virgin at the moment of the Annunciation depicted below).114 Spiritelli often decorate tombs, including that of Carlo Marsuppini (Figure 138) by Desiderio da Settignano, which a young Verrocchio may have had a hand in carving.115 (Charles Seymour has tentatively proposed that Verrocchio may have made the left shield-­bearing putto.)116 Although Dempsey prefers to read Desiderio’s spiritelli as decorative and ornamental (because they are relatively static), as opposed to the active personifications of Donatello, their role is nonetheless to convey the idea of the spirit of life of the deceased passing over into eternal life. In this way, spiritelli can be read as representing not the passing of the animating spirit,117 but the transformation of that spirit into the eternal after death. The idea of the Renaissance artist spiriting life into their objects is associated especially with the sixteenth century when it becomes a topic in art historical literature.118 Benvenuto Cellini, for instance, refers to clay molds as having an anima and to cast bronze possessing a spirit, language that derives from Aristotle.119 But it was already known in the preceding centuries. In the fourteenth century, the Sienese sculptor Lando di Pietro buried two notes

Figure 138.  Desiderio da Settignano and workshop (Andrea del Verrocchio), Detail of spiritello from the, tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, polychromed marble and fresco, c. 1453–60, Santa Croce, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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within his carved wooden crucifix, one inside Christ’s nostril, the other inside a knee joint. One identifies the artist by name and requests that with his sculpture, Lando be presented to God, with his work an expression of his piety.120 The placement of the first note inside Christ’s nostril is significant, as it recalls God’s creation of Adam in Genesis when “God breathed into his face the breath of life and man became a living soul.”121 The power of the artist as potential animator was not lost on Lando (and was probably a belief shared by other artists as well), whose other note states that it is God, rather than the wooden statue, that should be adored. Lando buried this second inscription in the statue’s knee joint, with which the devotee (i.e., the artist) would use to show his humility through genuflection.122 Even if Verrocchio was aware of the belief that the artist could animate his objects, much of Verrocchio’s own techniques for his Crucifix are invisible to the naked eye. However, this does not imply that they were not meaningful. The power of what was not seen is a topic in devotional literature, which encouraged its readers to move beyond the visible to imagine the contents of bodily interiors. In his Opera a ben vivere, for instance, Antoninus implores his reader to use the eyes of their mind to attend to Christ’s face; to consider how the crown of thorns was pressed onto his head, “down into his cranium”; how the nose was full of “snot, tears, and blood”; how the mouth was “full of gall, slime, and blood.”123 Artists responded to meditational exercises like Antoninus’ by providing some visual details for the beholder to ponder, such as the symbols of his Passion presented by Christ, which the viewer could use to bring about the required empathetic response.124 But even if Antoninus’ reader were meditating on an image as they contemplated his words, not all of the details he describes would be visible to them (for instance, the interior of Christ’s cranium, nose, and mouth). For Verrocchio himself, members of his workshop, and perhaps those for whom he made his sculpture (with whom he could have conversed about the Crucifix’s manufacture), the metaphors of making that he employed would have been meaningful, even if they were not discernable to the eye, just as content conjured up in the mind’s eye was for readers of devotional tracts. That meaning was to imbue his sculpture powerfully with the potential for animation. Verrocchio’s methods of manufacture can be read also as a kind of personal spiritual devotion, like that attributed by Vasari to Fra Angelico, who apparently never painted a crucifix without tears streaming down his face.125 Technical studies of Fra Angelico’s paintings support Vasari’s account of the importance of devotion in making, showing how the painter created his figures of Christ not by applying pigments directly onto the figure with a paintbrush, but rather by throwing a sponge, an action that stemmed from his refusal to touch the body of Christ.126 Verrocchio, by contrast, constructed his sculpture of Christ crucified by touching the body of his Christ, beginning with the trunk of a lime

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SUGHERO CHE FODERA IL RETRO DELLE SPALLE SUGHERO PRESENTE SULLA CALOTTA CRANICA SUGHERO PRESENTE SUL PETTO CORDA TELA MODELLATA, AMMANITA E DIPINTA

Figure 139.  Andrea del Verrocchio, Crucifix, early-to-mid-1470s, diagram. Drawing by Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini.

tree, which he tied together with rope (visible in x-­radiographs; Figures  128 and 139) – mimicking the mocking of Christ when he was bound with rope.127 He added to that layers of stucco built up directly with his hands and wound a linen loincloth stiffened with glue around the figure.The cork head and shoulders were attached indirectly, and the whole surface was painted with a brush. Verrocchio’s making of his sculpture thus involved the interaction of an artist with the dying body of Christ that mimicked that of the devotee in Panziera’s meditative scheme, but in reverse. Verrocchio began with a living, three-­ dimensional “body.” This corpus would have been understood as equivalent to a human body, thanks to its material – wood, considered analogous to a living body (because wood was recognized to have blood in the form of sap, humors, and a complexion).128 After carving out the “body,” Verrocchio moved away from this direct encounter to a more abstract (i.e., indirect) mode of contemplation. The materiality of Verrocchio’s crucifix – with its emphasis on suspending eternally the transformation of materials  – would have been understood by the artist as contributing to its efficacy as cristo vivo, its inner in-between-ness mimicking that which described living things, according to Renaissance belief.

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Moreover,Verrocchio’s refusal to work with his materials in a way that conformed to convention (treating wood as if it were bronze, stucco as if it were wax, etc.) rendered those materials problematic and opaque through his practice. This treatment can be read as analogous to a confraternity member’s flagellation of his or her own body to create pain (or the imagined pain suffered by Christ through all five senses encouraged in devotional literature)129 and, through that, come to an understanding of the divine. Indeed, the connection between making and suffering is made explicit in texts attributed to the Catalonian physician Arnald of Villanova (d. 1311), such as the Tractatus parabolicus, which instructs the alchemist to treat mercury like Christ at the crucifixion: just as Christ was beaten until he bled, made to wear a crown of thorns, nailed to the cross, and his body anointed with gall and vinegar, so mercury is to be tortured in four stages.130 This was not the only text to make the connection between alchemy and Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, and it and other texts concerning the topic circulated among humanists in Florence.131 The Tractatus parabolicus concerns alchemy, not the so-­called “mechanical arts.” Nevertheless, the boundaries between alchemy and art were fluid enough that many recipes on art making reveal a close connection to alchemy, and Verrocchio’s pupil Leonardo demonstrates a considerable knowledge of alchemical recipes in his manuscripts (despite expressions of disdain for alchemy in his writings).132 5.2  HOW TO REPRESENT GOD IN LIVING MATTER

The emphasis on the transformation of materials in Verrocchio’s Crucifix can be read in the light of beliefs about the nature of change in the Eucharist, understood to be Christ’s suffering body at the crucifixion.133 As Caroline Walker Bynum has recognized in the case of the Middle Ages, “transubstantiation as a technical notion was not depictable; however change was understood, what changed was what was not seen.”134 Yet as Aden Kumler has persuasively demonstrated, “the invisible and unseen substance of the Mass” was precisely the problem with which one artist engaged in a fourteenth-­century English compendium of spiritual instruction in the vernacular, made for a lay patron, and which beholders encountered every time they gazed upon the Eucharistic wafer during the Mass.135 Renaissance artists played with this idea of representing the paradox of the Eucharist as visible and invisible presence in sacramental tabernacles. Matteo Civitali gestures to this idea in his Ciborium for the Host (Figure 140) by carving a marble lattice that is not pierced. In other words, it ironically and teasingly suggests the possibility of seeing through while making that impossible.136 Regardless of whether Verrocchio’s Crucifix was used in a confraternal context, displayed above an altar, and/or used in processions or sacre rappresentazioni, its methods of manufacture would have gained significance through the ocular (and possibly phenomenological, in the case of performances) engagement

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Figure 140.  Matteo Civitali, Ciborium for the Host, marble, early-to-mid-1470s,Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copyright.Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

of its beholders. As they listened to sermons by Bernardo d’Alamanno de’ Medici and Messer Giorgio Antonio Vespucci on the crucifixion, for instance, the brothers of the Compagnia dei Magi contemplated a crucifix, and at the conclusion of Vespucci’s sermon, they kissed it.137 Confraternities mimicked the experiences their members had in church (by hearing Mass or listening to sermons), but, as Daniel Bornstein has noted, this was “on their own terms and often with the participation of lay preachers.”138 Humanist members of ­confraternities – including Donato Acciaiuoli, Cristoforo Landino, Alamanno Rinuccini, Pier Filippo Pandolfini, Giovanni Nesi, and Marsilio Ficino – were invited to give sermons at confraternity meetings.139 Many confraternities emerged as independent from clerical institutions, practicing a form of spirituality that was not guided directly by the Church or its representatives,140 and this included members taking the Eucharist in the confraternity meeting hall.141 Often confraternities had substantial libraries, their holdings including psalters, hymnals, and liturgical texts, which their members borrowed and read.142 And sermons by humanist lay preachers touched on several topics relevant to Verrocchio’s Crucifix, including Eucharistic themes, the poignancy of Christ’s death,143 and even matters of Eucharistic doctrine.144

MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX

The transformation that lies at the heart of the incarnation of Christ, and to which, I am arguing, Verrocchio was alluding through material metaphors of metamorphosis, served as proof of Christ’s incorruptibility. In the lives of saints, holy bodies were compared to minerals because minerals were regarded as alive and resistant to decay.145 And belief in the mutability of materials lay, for instance, at the heart of much vernacular literature written in imitation of Ovid’s enormously influential Metamorphoses.146 (As we have seen,Verrocchio possessed copies of Ovid’s Heroides and Boccaccio’s Decameron.147 The latter was influenced by the Metamorphoses and rehearses the theme of transformation in many of its tales.) But Verrocchio’s metaphors of making also serve to address the very nature of God as represented as Christ at the crucifixion. His sculpture seems to answer the question of how one can represent God in living matter  – that is, in materials that are believed to be alive and changing, as Jane Bennett has explored.148 The base material of Verrocchio’s crucifix was wood, which, as we have seen, was understood to correspond to a living body.149 In other words, at its heart, Verrocchio’s Crucifix was made from something that his contemporaries would have regarded as living and constantly in flux. What are the ramifications of this for understanding God in Christ at the crucifixion? Christ’s body at the moment of his death was understood by a number of theologians and natural philosophers to behave as if it was alive, providing an explanation, for instance, for how blood could flow from Christ’s dead body.150 Thus, Verrocchio has created a Christ whose in-between-ness expressed a theological idea: that Christ was between life and death at the crucifixion. But how could an artist, not a theologian, come up with such a concept? We need only return to the story by Sacchetti told at the beginning of this chapter for proof of complex theological ideas being taken up by the popolani. Indeed, the topic of cristo vivo was a favorite in vernacular literature. Poggio Bracciolino, for instance, tells the story of a group of peasants who come to Arezzo to commission a wooden crucifix. When they approach an artist to make one, the artist asks them if they would prefer theirs to be dead or alive. After consulting one another, the peasants decide they want a living one.151 Just as Sacchetti’s carved “Christ” could leap from the cross (because it was animated by the artist – by Mino, the sculptor who was being cuckolded – through fear of his life),Verrocchio’s intermedia mode of creation in his Crucifix resulted in a figure of Christ whose interior makeup expressed its potential for animation as a perpetual metaphor for the state of Christ at the crucifixion, when he was eternally alive, even in death.Verrocchio’s crucifix, which appears so naturalistic, in fact, that one could imagine his Christ leaping from the cross just like the one in Sacchetti’s tale, is a meditation on the nature of Christ at the crucifixion (as between word and thing, and thus eternally alive), powerfully animated by an artist-­creator – like Sacchetti’s Mino, who implies that the skills of a sculptor include the capacity to bring Christ crucified to life by explaining that “Christ” has escaped from his workshop.

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What are we to make of Verrocchio’s processes of making in which he transferred tools and techniques from one medium to another and made certain claims about the subjects he represented? I have suggested that the unusual situation of the artist’s bottega, in which he worked in a variety of different media, was the precondition of Verrocchio’s practice. I have also suggested how the materials with which the artist worked exercised a certain agency over the final product. Yet the conclusions reached here do not assume that Verrocchio was an unthinking practitioner, led simply by his materials. Instead, I have explored the numerous levels on which Verrocchio’s engagement with his materials is manifested in and meaningful for comprehending his objects, concluding that to understand his practices, we must acknowledge the artist’s relationships with matter. Chapter 2 argued that Verrocchio used the materials on Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici’s tomb to comment on the character of the interred and Lorenzo de’ Medici (the monument’s chief patron). Part of this commentary occurs through allusions to the collection at the nearby Palazzo Medici. This interpretation is based on a reading of the tomb in terms of its material iconology (the “language of materials”). I also propose that the monument’s allusions to reliquaries, through the tomb’s resemblance to a jeweled casket and the inclusion of bronze netting – a frequent feature demarcating sacred spaces – serve to suggest that it contains sacred remains (a claim that is in keeping with Medici ambitions to be considered sacred). But the reading of the Medici tomb goes further than just one about material iconology, proposing that Verrocchio used visual puns in the tomb that relate to techniques – specifically, allusions to working porphyry with acanthus – and references to beliefs about the mutability of matter – the metamorphosis implied by the cornucopia on top of the tomb and the enlivenment of bronze in the netting below the sarcophagus that moves as if in the wind. These witty references serve political and spiritual purposes: they suggest how Medici wealth could be transformed into something positive. This occurs by the attention paid to the nature of things on the tomb – the suggestion that the matter represented on the tomb is transforming – and to material links to objects in the Medici palace. In this way, Verrocchio cleverly challenges the 196

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prevailing view that usury was unnatural, showing instead how wealth could become positive through correct use, in other words, through his labor. Thus, the transformation of Medici wealth occurs thanks to Verrocchio’s artistry. It is through his engagement with materials that Verrocchio realizes the tomb’s message, and it is only in the foregrounding of the artist’s practices that the Medici can fulfill their aim of transforming their wealth into spiritual benefits. Chapter 3, on Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas, proposes that the artist presents Christ as between two states at the Resurrection, just as he was understood in certain branches of theological exegesis.This is expressed through the presentation of Christ in bronze  – a medium that depends on absent presence (the artist’s hands engage directly with a wax model that disappears and is replaced by bronze) – and as a relief sculpture, something between two and three dimensions. It argues that viewers must move through the material level – not beyond it – to reach an understanding of the subject matter, a material metaphor for Thomas’ revelation of Christ. The viewer’s engagement with the sculpture thus mirrors Thomas’ encounter with the resurrected Christ, a fitting experience given the emphasis on Thomas as an example for the devotee. Finally, the sculpture is interpreted as a promotion of the tactile over other senses as a means of comprehension. The topic of tactility is explored also in Chapter  4, which considers the implications of Verrocchio’s early use of sfumato in a drawing of a woman. I argue that the technique is used to present the viewer with an object that appeals to the sense of touch and suggests visually that they are caressing both cold marble and living flesh. Through these allusions to tactility, the drawing suggests how looking at the woman is the same as touching her and therefore that perception is equivalent to knowing. The final chapter focuses on a wooden crucifix that I argue presents its materiality as a response to the needs of its devotees. This object provided beholders with the means to engage more directly with the divine and in response to written instructions on how to move beyond the material world. Verrocchio uses materials as metaphors in the crucifix (each material is treated “like” another: wood like bronze, cork like armored steel, stucco like wax) so that his materials are permanently suspended in the moment of becoming. He does this, it is argued, as a means of solving the challenge of how to represent God (as Christ) as mutable matter. What Verrocchio’s objects present to us are demonstrations of a Renaissance artist’s deep understanding of his materials as meaningful and mutable. But they also make clear how matter could be engaged with to make certain claims, claims that could not be expressed in any other medium (political oratory, for instance, in the case of the tomb; or poetry, in the case of the drawing – by rendering metamorphosis permanent).

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Transformation is a recurring theme among all the objects I consider. In Chapter  2 Verrocchio transforms gold (Medici wealth  – brute matter) into something spiritually beneficial. In Chapter 3 he presents a moment unfolding in time (time is not fixed) and demonstrates how the nature of Thomas’ revelation is that Christ is between life and death. Chapter 4 argues that the drawing actually depicts metamorphosis (woman turning to stone that comes to life or vice versa). And Chapter 5 – on a wooden crucifix – proposes how the artist’s engagement with his materials presents them as a meditation on the nature of God as mutable. By attending to the materiality of Verrocchio’s objects, we gain not only a better appreciation of this underappreciated artist, we also come to understand how processes of making served as a form of communication during the Renaissance, providing us with the means to begin to comprehend attitudes toward art and art making for an artist who left no written records about the meaning of his art.

A NOTE ON ARCHIVAL SOURCES

I have cited the relevant archival documents in the notes (all of which I consulted myself), followed by references to Dario Covi’s monograph on Verrocchio, Andrea del Verrocchio. Life and Work (Florence, 2005) who very usefully transcribed almost all the documents. For the publication record for each archival source, I direct the reader to Covi’s book. Abbreviations AOF ASF ASP

Archivio dell’Opera di S. Maria del Fiore, Florence Archivio di Stato di Firenze Archivio di Stato di Pistoia

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION: VERROCCHIO EXPERIMENTALIST 1 Work on the lantern began in March 1446; Brunelleschi died a month later, before it was completed. The terminal spire was begun in 1461 under the supervision of Bernardo Rossellino. Howard Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore (London, 1980), pp. 142 and 144. 2 Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 139. See doc. 262.3 (July 9, 1436). 3 Dario A. Covi, “Verrocchio and the Palla of the Duomo,” in Art, the Ape of Nature. Studies in Honor of H.W. Janson, eds. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York, 1981), 151–69, p. 152. On the palla, see also Bruno Boni, “La palla di rame di S. Maria del Fiore,” Notiziario Vinciano 2 (1978): 35–44; and Dario A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. Life and Work (Florence, 2005), 63–69, who also published the relevant documents (pp. 309–29, docs.VI.34). 4 AOF, I.1.4 (Allogagioni, June 27, 1438–June 22, 1475), fols. 80v–81v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 309, doc. IV.34.a. 5 Cesare Guasti, La cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore illustrata con i documenti dell’archivio dell’opera secolare. Saggio di una compiuta illustrazione dell’opera secolare e del tempio di Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence, 1857), p. 113, doc. 332. The Florentine libbra weighed 0.339 kg (Ronald Zupko, Italian Weights and Measures from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century [Philadelphia, PA, 1981], p. 133). 6 Leonardo da Vinci and Buonaccorso Ghiberti provide sketches of the crane. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 67; and Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 171. 7 Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542, ed. Iodoco Del Badia (Florence, 1883), p. 11. For this, and other primary sources that record the event, see Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 66 and n. 200.

8 The exception is Covi, “Verrocchio and the Palla”; and Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 63–69. 9 “[Verrocchio] fece alta braccia quattro, e posandola in sur un bottone, la incantenò di maniera, che poi vi si potè mettere sopra sicuramente la croce; la quale opera finita, fu messa su con grandissima festa e piacere de’popoli. Ben è vero che bisognò usar nel farla ingegno e diligenza, perchè si potesse, come si fa, entrarvi dentro per di sotto; ed anco nell’armarla con buone fortificazioni, acciò i venti non le potessero fare nocumento.” Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, 1550, rev. 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878), vol. 3, p. 365. 10 AOF, I.1.4 (Allogagioni, June 27, 1438–June 22, 1475), fols. 80v–81v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 309, doc. IV.34.a. Although the original palla has not survived, the reconstructed ball made in 1602 appears to be very close to the original, even down to the gilding, as restoration in 1952–55 demonstrated. Ferdinando Rossi, “La laterna della cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore e i suoi restauri,” Bollettino d’arte 41 (1956): 128–43 (esp. pp. 140–41). Documents record that the reconstructed ball was made from metal salvaged from Verrocchio’s palla and on the same scale as the original (Guasti, La cupola, docs. 373–79). One major difference may be the way that the reconstructed palla was attached to the bronze ball below, which does not feature the bronze cannone mentioned in documents. Bernardo Sansoni Sgrilli made an engraving of the reconstructed palla that showed a cross-section of the sphere in 1733, for an illustration of which see my Figure 3. On the construction and reconstruction of the palla, see Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 65.

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11 Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 67, n. 202. See Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage en Italie, ed. Charles Dédéyan (Paris, 1946), p. 189. 12 AOF, I.1.4 (Allogagioni, June 27, 1438–June 22, 1475), fols. 80v–81v; AOF, II.2.3 (Registro di deliberazioni, 1462–72), fols. 64r–v; AOF, II.2.3 (Registro di deliberazioni, 1462–72), fol. 84v; AOF, VIII.1.47 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1467/68–June 1468), fol. 9; AOF, VIII.I.48 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1468), fol. 46; AOF, VIII.I.49 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1468/69–June 1469), fol. 12; AOF, VIII.I.49 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1468/69–June 1469), fol. 59; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 10; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 21;AOF,VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 44 left side; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 46; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 47; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 53; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 62; AOF, VIII. I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469, fol. 65; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 72; AOF, VIII.I.51 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1469/70–June 1470), fol. 5; AOF,VIII.I.51 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1469/70–June 1470), fol. 18; AOF, VIII.I.51 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1469/70– June 1470), fol. 24; AOF,VIII.I.51 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1469/70–June 1470), fol. 38; AOF, VIII.I.51 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1469/70– June 1470), fol. 43; AOF,VIII.I.51 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1469/70–June 1470), fol. 50; AOF, VIII.I.52 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1470), fol. 6; AOF,VIII.I.52 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1470), fol. 23; AOF, VIII.I.52 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1470), fol. 32; AOF, VIII.I.52 (Quaderno di Cassa, July–December, 1470), fol. 62; AOF, VIII.3.8 (Entrata e uscita, begun July 1, 1468), fol. 19r; AOF, VIII.3.9 (Entrata e uscita, begun January 1, 1468/69), fol. 22r; AOF, VIII.3.10 (Entrata e uscita, begun July 1, 1470), fol. 25r. All transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 309– 329, docs VI.34.a–VI.34.cc. 13 A courier bound for Venice was instructed to find Verrocchio in Treviso in 1469. (AOF, VIII.I.49 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1468/69– June 1469), fol. 12 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 312, doc. VI.34.f.) Fees

for the transport of six of the copper sheets via Bologna were paid in August 1469, along with customs duty (AOF, VIII.I.49 (Quaderno di cassa, January 1468/69–June 1469), fol. 12 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 312, doc. VI.34.f), and for two more sheets a few months later (AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 21 left side; and AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di Cassa, July– December, 1469), fol. 46 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 314–317, docs VI.34.i and VI.34.k). 14 AOF, VIII.1.52 (Quaderni di Cassa, July– December, 1470), fol. 6 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 325, doc. IV.34.w. 15 “Ricordati delle saldature con che si saldò la palla di Santa Maria del Fiore.” Ms G 84v, transcribed by Leonardo da Vinci, Il manoscritti dell’institut de France [G], ed. Augusto Marinoni (Florence, 1989), p. 139. This was noted by Boni, “La palla,” pp. 38–39. 16 Sven Dupré, “Optic, Picture and Evidence: Leonardo’s Drawings of Mirrors and Machinery,” Early Science and Medicine 10, no. 2 (2005): 211–36, p. 227. This was not the only time Leonardo demonstrated a fascination with the burning properties of concave mirrors; he considered using concave mirrors to solder the bronze pieces of his monumental equestrian monument of condottiere Giovanni Giacomo Trivulzio and for a project in Rome. It is likely that Leonardo was familiar with Archimedes’ legendary use of a burning mirror to destroy Roman ships at Syracuse – suggested by a record for his desperate search for a work by Archimedes on a sheet that also features a drawing relating to the study of reflection on concave mirrors. The interest in concave mirrors for soldering was shared by a number of fifteenth-century mathematicians (Dupré, “Optic, Picture and Evidence,” pp. 216–34). 17 AOF, VIII.1.52 (Quaderno di cassa, July– December, 1470), fol. 6 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 325, doc. IV.34.w. On this, see Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 67–68. 18 Covi, “Verrocchio and the Palla,” p. 152. The relevant document was transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 310, doc. VI.34.b. 19 The cast palla is not mentioned in documents until autumn of 1469, when it was broken up. Apparently it was never finished. This has been discussed by Covi, “Verrocchio and the

NOTES TO PAGES 4–7

Palla,” p.  152. The document (AOF, VIII.1.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 10 right side) was transcribed in Covi, “Verrocchio and the Palla,” p. 160, doc. 10. 20 Covi, “Verrocchio and the Palla,” p. 154. 21 Other sculptors tended to show figures with their arms close to their sides and posed parallel to the sides of the base. This has been noted by Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven, CT, 1997), p. 64. 22 Pomponius Gauricus, De Sculptura (1504), eds. André Chastel and Robert Klein (Geneva, 1969), p. 207. 23 These points have been noted by Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 173–79. 24 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 256–57; VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, pp. 545–47. 25 ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 286, doc.V.27. 26 ASP, Comune, Consigli, Provvisioni e Riforme, 48 (1483–1492; formerly Archivio Comunale, Provvisioni del Comune, 68), fols. IIIV–112r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 350, doc. VI.51.a. 27 Like the Baptism of Christ, the Madonna di Piazza was painted in tempera and oil on panel, and discrepancies in style and technique similarly suggest it was executed by several different artists. X-radiographs made of the painting have revealed extensive pentimenti, especially in the figures of Saint John the Baptist and the Christ Child, and the use of underdrawings for all of the figures. Spolveri were used for Saint John the Baptist and the Christ Child, and some of the decorative elements, including the vases, but not for the Virgin or Saint Donatus (though underdrawings in pen and ink were discovered for the latter figures when the painting was restored in 1996). (Falletti, “Il restauro della Madonna di Piazza,” pp. 76-77). Carmen Bambach, however, has challenged Falletti’s interpretation of the data, claiming that spolveri are visible only for the vase, which was repeated in the painting. (Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 465, n. 73). Indeed, the poor quality of the photographs published by Falletti make it difficult to assess the extent of the use of spolveri (except for the vase, the images for which in Falletti’s report seems to support Bambach’s

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claims). It is tempting to consider that the use of spolveri may indicate areas where the master painter (Verrocchio) assigned assistants to follow his designs, and that the figures of the Virgin and Saint Donatus were executed by Verrocchio himself, as suggested by stylistic analysis. (This has been suggested too by Kemp, “Verrocchio’s San Donato and the Chiesina della Vergine,” p. 25). For a summary of attributions, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi (Milan, 1966), pp. 111–14, cat. 30. More recently, Anna Padoa Rizzo (“Ancora sulla Madonna di Piazza” in I Medici, il Verrocchio e Pistoia. Storia e restauro di due capolavori nella Cattedrale di S. Zeno: Il monumento al cardinale Niccolò Forteguerri, la Madonna di piazza, ed. Franca Falletti (Livorno, 1996), 66–74, pp. 67–68) attributed the painting to Lorenzo di Credi, who, she argues depended on drawings for the figures of the Virgin and Child, indicated by the technical study undertaken by Franca Falletti (“Il restauro della Madonna di Piazza: nuove immagini per un vecchio problema,” in I Medici, il Verrocchio e Pistoia. Storia e restauro di due capolavori nella Cattedrale di S. Zeno: Il monumento al cardinale Niccolò Forteguerri, la Madonna di piazza, ed. Franca Falletti (Livorno, 1996), 74–83), but was responsible for the design and execution of the two lateral saints; Martin Kemp (“Verrocchio’s San Donato and the Chiesina della Vergine di Piazza in Pistoia,” Pantheon 56 [1998]: 25–34, p. 25) tentatively attributed the figures of the Virgin and Saint Donatus to Verrocchio on the basis of the technical evidence, which suggests that they were executed freely without the use of spolveri (unlike the other figures in the painting); Andrew Butterfield (Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 192) attributed the painting to Credi; Herman Colenbrander (“The Leonardesque Designs for the Madonna di Piazza,” in ‘Aux Quatre Vents.’ A Festschrift for Bert W. Meijer, eds. Anton W. A. Boschloo, Edward Grasman, and Gert Jan van der Sman [Florence, 2002], 33–38, p. 36) has attributed the altarpiece and the related drawings to “a still unknown artist who was greatly under the spell of Leonardo”; and Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 177–78) has argued that Verrocchio designed the composition and the figures but left most, if not all, of the actual painting to his workshop, mostly to Lorenzo di Credi. Liletta Fornasari (“Andrea del Verrocchio e le botteghe toscane: l’atelier del Rinascimento,” in Leonardo e dintorni:

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il Maestro, le botteghe, il territorio, ed. Liletta Fornasari and Carlo Starnazzi, exh. cat., Palazzo del Comune, Arezzo (Arezzo, 2001), 11-90), and Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson (“In search of Verrocchio the painter: the cleaning and examination of the Virgin and Child with Two Angels,” National Gallery of Art Technical Bulletin 31 (2010), 4-41, p. 4) attribute the painting to Lorenzo di Credi. For a recent study of the painting, see Andrea De Marchi, “Due passaggi di Andrea del Verrocchio pittore per Pistoia,” in Il Museo e la città.Vicende artistiche pistoiesi del Quattrocento, eds. Elena Testaferrata, Giacomo Guazzini, and Andrea De Marchi (Pistoia, 2013), 67–95, pp. 78–95, who attributes the painting’s design to Verrocchio and its execution to Lorenzo di Credi. 28 See, for instance, David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius (New Haven, CT, 1998). This attitude has also led to attributions to Leonardo for all or part of works by Verrocchio deemed too groundbreaking or perfect for Verrocchio to have made, such as his tomb for Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici in San Lorenzo (Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 65–67; Adolfo Venturi, La Scultura del Cinquecento, vol. 10 of Storia dell’arte italiana, 11 vols. [Milan, 1901–75], Part I, p. 19); the Silver Altar relief of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Gary M. Radke, “Leonardo, Student of Sculpture,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture, ed. Gary M. Radke, exh. cat. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, October 6, 2009–February 21, 2010, and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, March 23–June 20, 2010 [New Haven, CT, 2010], pp. 56–57); and the Christ and Saint Thomas (Maria Vittoria Brugnoli, “Documenti, notizie e ipotesi sulla scultura di Leonardo,” in Leonardo, saggi e ricerche, ed. Achille Marazza [Rome, 1954], 359–89, p. 377; Theodore Andrew Cook, Adolfo Venturi in Leonardo da Vinci Sculptor [London, 1923], p. 70; and Leonardo da Vinci, I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Adolfo Venturi, 7 vols. [Rome, 1928–52], vol. 1, p. 13). A nuanced consideration of Leonardo’s debt to Verrocchio can be found in Kathleen Weil Garris Brandt’s “Leonardo e la scultura,” Lettura vinciana 38 (April 18, 1998): 9–39. 29 “[A]lquanto dura e crudetta, come quello che con infinito studio se la guadagnò, più che col benefizio e facilità della natura.” VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, pp. 357–58.

30 “[I]l moto ed il fiato.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 4, p. 11 and pp. 7–15. 31 “Veramente mirabile e celeste fu Lionardo.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 4, p. 18. 32 Other examples of fifteenth-century Florentine artists working in different media include Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Masaccio, and the Pollaiuolo brothers. Although Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo worked in a wide range of media (on this, see Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers:The Arts of Florence and Rome [New Haven, CT, 2005]), Verrocchio surpassed them in this regard. According to the Anonimo Magliabechiano (see Carl Frey, ed., Il Codice Magliabechiano, contente notizie sopra l’arte degli antichi e quella ed’ fiorentini da Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti scritte da Anonimo Fiorentino [Berlin, 1892], p. 77), Donatello was a painter. Ghiberti was called pittore by Vasari in the first edition of the Vite. (This point has been discussed by Lorenzo Bartoli, “Rewriting History: Vasari’s Life of Lorenzo Ghiberti,” Word and Image 13, no. 3 [July–September, 1997]: 245–52.) And Ghiberti and Vasari both mentioned fresco work that Ghiberti was involved in at Pesaro before making the bronze doors of the Baptistery (Lorenzo Ghiberti, “Commentario Secondo,” in I Commentari, ed. Ottavio Morisani [Naples, 1947], p. 42; and Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 223). It has also been suggested that Masaccio made terracotta reliefs before joining the guild of doctors and apothecaries, which was associated with painters (James Beck, “Masaccio’s early career as a sculptor,” Art Bulletin 2 [1971]: 177–95; and Paul Joannides, “Masaccio, Masolino and ‘minor’ sculpture,” Paragone 38, no. 451 [1987]: 3–24). Alberti referred to himself as a painter, and there are bronze reliefs attributed to him (Alessandro Parronchi,“Leon Battista Alberti as a Painter,” Burlington Magazine 101 [1962]: 280– 87; and Kurt Badt, “Drei plastische Arbeiten von Leone Battista Alberti,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 8, no. 2 [1957–59]: 78–87). Matteo Civitali, best known as a sculptor, was documented as a painter. (This has been discussed by Steven Bule, “A Unique Partnership: Matteo Civitali and Domenico Orsolino,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi [Florence, 1992], 363.) Inventories sometimes imply that artists moved between media.The inventory of

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the residence of the Sienese artist Neroccio di Landi, made in 1500, lists several hundred items, including pieces of Carrara marble in different sizes, heads and figures of terracotta, pieces of ancient marble, a capital made from serpentine, a head and hands of wax, and pieces of wood for painting. Some of the sculptures in the inventory, however, are ascribed to other artists, including a Madonna in gesso by Donatello and a roughed-out figure of San Bernardino by Vechietta (Gertrude Coor, Neroccio de’ Landi [Princeton, NJ, 1961], pp. 152–59). According to Arne Flaten, an inventory made in 1515 of the estate and workshop of the fifteenth-century medallist, Niccolò Fiorentino, lists much bronze, and many bronze figures and medals, “a small number of humanist and religious texts, wood and marble sculptures, paintings and a wide assortment of tools, waxes and clays.” Flaten, however, has questioned whether Fiorentino worked in other media apart from bronze medals, which other scholars have tentatively suggested, implying that not all of the objects were made by him (Arne R. Flaten, “Portrait Medals and Assembly-Line Art in Late Quattrocento Florence,” in The Art Market in Italy [15th–17th Centuries]. Il Mercato dell’arte in Italia [secc. xv–xvii], eds. Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew, and Sara F. MatthewsGrieco [Modena, 2003], 127–39, pp. 133–34). On fifteenth-century artists working in different media, see also 61-73 in my chapter 1. 33 Verrocchio was not unique in transferring tools and techniques from one medium to another, but the extent to which he did this does appear to have been unusual. 34 Monographic studies on Verrocchio have tended to focus either entirely on his output as a sculptor (with the exception of Passavant’s Verrocchio als Maler), or his work as a painter has been relegated to a separate chapter of a larger study. Even those studies that approach the artist’s oeuvre from a chronological standpoint have ignored Verrocchio’s tendency to transfer tools and processes of making from one material to another.The standard monographic studies on the artist are Hans Mackowsky, Verrocchio (Berlin, 1901); Maud Cruttwell, Verrocchio (London and New York, 1904); Leo Planiscig, Andrea del Verrocchio (Vienna, 1941); Seymour, Sculpture of Verrocchio; Szergej Androsov, Andrea Verrocchio, 1435–1488 (Leningrad, 1984); Piero Adorno, Il Verrocchio. Nuove proposte nella

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civilità artistica del tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence, 1991); Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio; and Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. 35 “[P]erché Andrea mai non si stava.” VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, p. 365. (Verrocchio was never still.) 36 See the catalogue from the important exhibition: Patricia Lee Rubin and Alison Wright, Renaissance Florence.The Art of the 1470s, exh. cat. National Gallery, London, October 20, 1999– January 16, 2000 (London, 1999). 37 “Materiality” has been a topic of interest not only in the history of art but also the history of science. For art history, important studies include Rebecca Zorach, “Everything Swims with Excess: Gold and Its Fashioning in Early Modern France,” Res:Anthropology and Aesthetics 36: Factura (Autumn 1999): 125–37; and Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, IL, 2005). For a useful theorization of making, see Joseph Koerner, “Editorial: Factura,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (autumn 1999): 5–19. For the history of science, Pamela H. Smith’s work stands out, for which see the following: “Giving Voice to the Hands:The Articulation of Material Literacy in the Sixteenth Century,” in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur (Pittsburgh, PA, 2001), 74–93; The Body of the Artisan. Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL, 2004); “Making and Knowing in a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention between the Late Renaissance and Early Industrialization, eds. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, Peter Dear (Amsterdam, 2007), 20–37; Pamela H. Smith and Tonny Beentjes, “Nature and Art, Making and Knowing: Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Life Casting Techniques,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 1 (Spring, 2010): 128–79; and Christie Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith, eds., The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750 (Manchester, 2015). 38 Michael Wayne Cole, “The Cult of Materials,” in Revival and Invention, eds. Sébastien Clerbois and Martina Droth (Oxford, 2011), 1–15, p. 3. 39 Notable exceptions are Wendy Stedman Sheard, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb and the Language of Materials: With a Postscript on His Legacy in Venice,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence,

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1992), 63–90; and Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL, 1995). 40 To list only some of the most important, on bronze: Norberto Gramaccini,“Zur Ikonologie der Bronze im Mittelalter,” Städel Jahrbuch 11 (1987): 147–70; Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materialien: Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der Werkstoffe (Munich, 1994); Elizabeth Dalucas, “‘Ars erit archetypus naturae.’ Zur Ikonologieder Bronze in der Renaissance,” in Von allen Seiten schön. Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock, ed. Volker Krahn, exh. cat., Altes Museum, Berlin, October 31, 1995– January 28, 1996 (Berlin, 1996), 70–81; Michael Wayne Cole, “Cellini’s Blood,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 216–35; Francesca Bewer, “The Sculpture of Adriaen de Vries: A Technical Study,” in Small Bronzes in the Renaissance, vol. 62 of Studies in the History of Art, ed. Debra Pincus (New Haven, CT, 2001), 159–93; Michael Wayne Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, 2002); Michael Wayne Cole, “The Medici Mercury and the Breath of Bronze,” in Large Bronzes in the Renaissance, ed. Peta Motture, vol. 64 of Studies in the History of Art. (New Haven, CT, 2003), 129–53; Martina Droth, Frits Scholten, and Michael Wayne Cole, Bronze: The Power of Life and Death, exh. cat. Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, September 15, 2005–January 7, 2006 (Leeds, 2005); Edgard Lein, Ars Aeraria: Die Kunst des Bronzegießens und die Bedeutung von Bronze in der florentinishchen Renaissance (Mainz, 2004); Jane L. Bassett, The Craftsman Revealed: Adriaen de Vries, Sculptor in Bronze (Los Angeles, CA, 2008); on wood: Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT, 1980), and John T. Paoletti, “Wooden Sculpture in Italy as Sacral Presence,” Artibus et Historiae 13 (1992): 85–100; on porphyry: Suzanne Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence, 1996); on pigments: Spike Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint. Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages (London, 2009). 41 Frits Scholten, ed. Adriaen de Vries , 1556–1626, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam, December 12, 1998–March 14, 1999, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, April 15–August 29, 1999, and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 12, 1999–January 9, 2000 (Los Angeles, CA, 1998); Bruce Boucher, ed. Earth and Fire. Italian

Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 18, 2001–February 3, 2002, and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 14–July 7, 2002 (New Haven, CT, 2001); Gary M. Radke, The Gates of Paradise. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, exh. cat. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, April 28–July 15, 2007, The Art Institute of Chicago, July 28–October 13, 2007, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 30, 2007–January 30, 2008, Seattle Art Museum, January 26–April 6, 2008 (New Haven, CT, 2007); Denise Allen, ed., with Peta Motture, Andrea Riccio, exh. cat., The Frick Collection, New York, October 15, 2008–January 18, 2009 (New York, 2008); Eleonora Luciano, ed., Antico: the Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, November 6, 2011– April 8, 2012 and The Frick Collection, New York, May 1–July 29, 2012 (Washington, 2011); David Ekserdjian, Bronze, exh. cat. The Royal Academy, London, September 15–December 9, 2012 (London, 2012); Ian Wardropper, Tony Sigel, and C. D. Dickerson III, Bernini. Sculpting in Clay, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 3, 2012–January 6, 2013 (New Haven, CT, 2012). 42 Prominent studies include Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT, 1999); Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure (Los Angeles, CA, 2008); and Fredrika H. Jacobs, Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2013). A useful overview of Renaissance studies of materiality is Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts, “Raw Materials and Object Lessons,” in The Routledge History of the Renaissance, ed. William Caferro (London, 2017), 105–24. 43 Among the vast number of studies on this topic, I have found the following especially illuminating: Hanna Rose Shell, “Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy’s Occupation between Maker and Nature,” Configurations 12 (Winter 2004): 1–40; Marjolijn Bol and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “Painting Skin and Water. Towards a Material Iconography of Translucent Motifs in Early Netherlandish Painting,” in Rogier Van der Weyden in Context, ed. Lorne Campbell (Paris, 2012), 214–25; Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence. Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration

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London (Chicago, IL, 2013); Ulinka Rublack, “Matter in the Material Renaissance,” Past and Present 219 (May, 2013): 41–85; Fabian Kraemer, “Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonicon and the Use of Paper Technology in Renaissance Natural History,” Early Science and Medicine 19 (2014): 398–423. 44 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “A ‘New Tradition’ in Thought,” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI, 2012), 86–92, p. 91. 45 For a useful overview of the historiography on material agency, see Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “The Matter of the Medium: Some Tools for Art–Theoretical Interpretations of Materials,” in The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c.1250–1750, eds. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester, 2015), 21–36, pp. 22–26. On material agency, some important studies are: Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998); Timothy Ingold, “Making Culture and Weaving the World,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul Graves-Brown (London, 2000), 50–71; Bill Brown, ed. “Things,” Critical Inquiry Special Issue 28, 1 (2001): 1–363; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005); Brigitte Buettner, “From Bones to Stones: Reflections on Jeweled Reliquaries,” in Reliquiare im Mittelalter, eds. Bruno Reudenbach and Gia Toussaint (Berlin, 2005), 43–59; Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, eds., Material Agency.Towards a NonAnthropocentric Approach (New York, 2008); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, CT, 2010); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Stories of Stone,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1 (2010): 56–63; Michael Wayne Cole, “The Cult of Materials;” Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011); Ittai Weinryb, “Beyond Representation: Things – Human and Non-Human,” in Cultural Histories of the Material World, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013), 172–86; and Ittai Weinryb, “Living Matter: Materiality, Maker, and Ornament in the Middle Ages,” Gesta 52, no. 2 (2013): 113–31. 46 I hope in this way to avoid the significant pitfall identified by Andrew Cole (“Those Obscure Objects of Desire,” Artforum [Summer 2015]:

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318–23) in many studies of materiality, of falling for the allure of an object (the fetishizing of a commodity) by assuming an agency that ignores the cultural context producing that allure. Although I call for a consideration of materials and techniques as possessing a kind of agency, this agency was one recognized by Verrocchio himself rather than the result of a fundamental breakdown between the human and the nonhuman. For a historically nuanced consideration of the blurring between human and nonhuman with ramifications for art history, see Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 2008). 47 Jeffrey F. Hamburger usefully addresses similar issues about approaching Jan van Eyck’s artistry in his article “Seeing and Believing. The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion,” in Imagination und Wirklichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz, 2000), 47–69. Scholars have long recognized the importance of Verrocchio’s formal innovations for later artists, such as the relationship between figures and frame, the representation of states of the soul, and the use multiple viewpoints in his Christ and Saint Thomas, which anticipate later developments in High Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. (See, for instance, the discussion in Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 64–66.) I am proposing to move away from this formal model of analysis by situating Verrocchio’s developments within their broader cultural frameworks. In so doing, formal qualities become more meaningful, revealing, for instance, their role in exploring the relationship between subject (viewer) and object, which, as Hamburger (“Seeing and Believing”) and Kellie Robertson (“Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object,” Literature Compass 5 [2008]: 1–21) have argued in the case of late medieval culture, was highly contested and one crucial for understanding materiality in premodern Europe. Robertson’s essay usefully emphasizes the historical specificity of late medieval subject-object relationships, though it should be noted that the arguments made would be effectively refined by a closer consideration of the decades of work by art historians on devotional art and piety, especially the work of Jeffrey Hamburger.

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48 See, for instance, Robertson, “Medieval Things;” Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” Exemplaria 22 (2010): 99–118; Andrew Cole, “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies,” The Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 106–18; Cole, “Those Obscure Objects of Desire;” and Aden Kumler, “Manufacturing the Sacred in the Middle Ages: The Eucharist and Other Medieval Works of Ars,” English Language Notes 53, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2015): 9–44. For a useful consideration of attitudes towards matter (and its mutability) during the Renaissance, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions. Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago, IL, 2004). 49 A recent important exception to this tendency is Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini: Sculptors’ Drawings from Renaissance Italy, ed. Michael Wayne Cole, exh. cat., Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, October 23, 2014–January 23, 2015 (London, 2014). 50 Günter Passavant, Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler (Düsseldorf, 1959). Other important studies that have addressed Verrocchio’s role as a painter include: Bernard Berenson, “Verrocchio e Leonardo, Leonardo e Credi,” Bolletino d’arte 27, nos. 5 and 6 (1933–34): 193–214, 241–64; Federico Zeri, “Il Maestro dell’ Annunciazione Gardner,” Bollettino d’arte 38 (1953): 125–39 and 233–49; Konrad Oberhuber, “La problème des premières oeuvres de Verrocchio,” Revue de l’art 42 (1978): 63–76; John Shearman, “A Suggestion for the Early Style of Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 109 (March 1967): 121–27; Sheldon Grossman, “The Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate and Some New Paintings from the Circle of Verrocchio,” Report and Studies in the History of Art 2 (1968): 47–69; Craig H. Smyth, “Venice and the Emergence of the High Renaissance in Florence: Observations and Questions,” in Quattrocento, vol. 1 of Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations. Acts of Two Conferences at Villa I Tatti in 1976–1977, eds. Sergio Bertelli and Nicolai Rubinstein (Florence, 1979), 209–49; Dario A. Covi, “Verrocchio and Venice, 1469,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 2 (1983): 253–73; Luciano Bellosi, “Andrea Verrocchio,” in Pittura di luce. Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento, ed. Luciano Bellosi, exh. cat., Casa Buonarroti, Florence, May 16–August 20, 1990 (Milan, 1990), 177–83; Everett Fahy, “Two Suggestions

for Verrocchio,” in Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Mina Gregori, ed. Miklós Boskovits (Milan, 1994), 51–55; Franca Falletti, ed., I Medici, il Verrocchio e Pistoia. Storia e restauro di due capolavori nella Cattedrale di S. Zeno: Il monumento al cardinale Niccolò Forteguerri, la Madonna di piazza (Livorno, 1996); Brown, Leonardo da Vinci; Kemp, “Verrocchio’s San Donato and the Chiesina della Vergine;” Antonio Natali, ed. Lo sguardo degli Angeli. Verrocchio, Leonardo e il Battesimo di Cristo (Cinisello Balsamo, 1998); Luciano Bellosi, “The Landscape ‘alla fiamminga’,” in Italy and the Low Countries: Artistic Relations: The Fifteenth Century. Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Museum Catharijneconceny, Utrecht, March 14, 1994, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Gert Jan van der Sman et al. (Florence, 1999), 97–108; and De Marchi, “Due passaggi di Andrea del Verrocchio pittore per Pistoia.” 51 Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson, “Andrea del Verrocchio’s First Surviving Panel Painting and Other Early Works,” Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1299 (June, 2011): 368–78; and Dunkerton and Syson,“In Search of Verrocchio the Painter. 52 Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio; Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. 53 Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “An Unpublished Crucifix by Andrea del Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1101 (December, 1994): 808–15. 54 Anthony Radcliffe,“New Light onVerrocchio’s Beheading of the Baptist,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence, 1992), 117–23. 55 In addition to the articles by Paolozzi Strozzi and Radcliffe mentioned earlier, the following have contributed to our understanding of Verrocchio’s techniques: David Alan Brown and Charles Seymour, Jnr., “Further Observations on a Project for a Standard by Verrocchio and Leonardo”; Boni, “La palla;” Stephen Rees-Jones, “A Fifteenth-Century Florentine Terracotta Relief: Technology-ConservationInterpretation,” Studies in Conservation 23 (1978): 95–113; Mario Scalini, “La terracotta nella bottega del Verrocchio,” in La civiltà del cotto: arte della terracotta nell’area fiorentina dal XV al XX secolo, ed. Antonio Paolucci, exh cat. Impruneta (Florence, 1980); Jean Cadogan, “Linen Drapery Studies by Verrocchio, Leonardo and Ghirlandaio,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 46 (1983): 27–62; Stefano

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Agnoletti, Flavia Callori, Fabrizio Jacopini, Maria Rosa Lanfranchi and Pietro Ruschi, “Note sul restauro del monumento funebre mediceo di Andrea del Verrocchio,” Kermes 6, no. 1 (February 1988): 10–17; Françoise Viatte, Léonard de Vinci: Les études de draperie, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, December 5, 1989– February 26, 1990 (Paris, 1989); Marco Ciatti and Teresa Cianfanelli, “‘San Girolamo’: attr. Andrea del Verrocchio (Firenze, 1435–Venice, 1488), Firenze, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina,” OPD. Restauro 3 (1991): 181–83; David Alan Brown, “Verrocchio and Leonardo: Studies for the Giostra,” and Claire Van Cleave, “Tradition and Innovation in the Early History of Black Chalk Drawing,” in Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper, vol. 4, Villa Spelman Colloquia, Florence, 1992 (Bologna, 1994), 99–109 and 231–44; Fabio Burrini and Paolo Nencetti, “The Restoration of the Bronze Figures of Christ and St. Thomas,” and Massimo Leoni, “Casting Techniques in Verrochio’s Workshop when the Christ and St Thomas Was Made,” in Verrocchio’s Christ and St Thomas. A Masterpiece of Sculpture from Renaissance Florence, ed. Loretta Dolcini, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 5, 1992–April 17, 1993 (New York, 1992), 25–35 and 83–100; Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini, “L’intervento di restauro,” OPD Restauro 7 (1995): 26–32; Falletti, ed., I Medici, Il Verrocchio e Pistoia; Frits Scholten, “Technical Aspects of Verrocchio’s Candelabrum,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 44, no. 2 (1996): 123–29; Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 54 (on the Tobias and the Angel [National Gallery, London]); Natali, ed., Lo sguardo degli Angeli; Antonio Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli. Tragitto indiziario per il Battesimo di Cristo di Verrocchio e Leonardo,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 42, no. 2/3 (1998): 252–73; Amelio Fara, ed., Leonardo a Piombino e l’idea della città moderna tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence, 1999); Alison Luchs, “Lorenzo from Life? Renaissance Portrait Busts of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Sculpture Journal 4 (2000): 6–23; Antonio Natali, “Il Battesimo di Cristo di Verrocchio e Leonardo: ripensamenti e cronologia,” in Oltre il visibile: indagini riflettografiche, ed. Duilio Bertani (Milan, 2001), 125–44; Richard E. Stone, “A New Interpretation of the Casting of Donatello’s Judith and

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Holofernes,” in Small Bronzes of the Renaissance, ed. Debra Pincus, vol. 62 of Studies in the History of Art (New Haven, CT, 2001), 54–69 (on Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas); Maria Grazia Vaccari, eds., Pollaiolo e Verrocchio, Due ritratti fiorentini del Quattrocento, exh. cat. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, March 28–October 15, 2001 (Florence, 2001); Gary M. Radke, ed., Verrocchio’s David Restored: A Renaissance Bronze for the National Museum of the Bargello, Florence, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, October 7–November 9, 2003, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 22, 2003–February 8, 2004, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 13–March 21, 2004 (Florence, 2003); and Mari Yanagishita, Jennifer Di Fina, Bruna Mariani, and Raffaella Zurlo, “L’altare d’argento di San Giovanni,” in Ori, argenti, gemme: restauri dell’opficio delle pietre dure, ed. Clarice Innocenti, exh. cat., Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, September 30, 2007–January 8, 2008 (Florence, 2007), 62–77. 56 The most thorough study of Verrocchio’s workshop in terms of the contribution of his assistants is Richard David Serros, “The Verrocchio Workshop: Techniques, Production and Influences” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999). 57 See n. 34 earlier. 58 Leonardo’s ideas about painting are recorded in his so-called Trattato della pittura (the Codex Urbinas in the Vatican, Rome), the standard critical edition of which is Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci: Das Buch von der Malerei nach dem Codex Vaticanus (Urbinas) 1270, ed. Heinrich Ludwig, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1882). 59 We cannot be sure of the exact year of his birth because the documents are imprecise: Verrocchio’s father states in his catasto declaration of 1446 (the first mention of Andrea) that Andrea is 12; in 1457 Andrea states that he is 21; in 1470, Andrea claims that he is 33; and in 1480 he gives his age as 45. ASF, Catasto, 665 (S. Croce, Ruote, 1446), No. 176, fol. 449r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 265, doc. I.1; ASF, Catasto, 808 (S. Croce, Ruote, 1457), No. 183, fols. 586r–587r, ibid., p. 268, document I.3; ASF, Catasto, 915, Part I (S. Croce, Ruote, 1469: Campione dei cittadini), fols. 19r–v), ibid., p. 269, doc. I.4; and ASF, Catasto, 1006 (S. Croce, Ruote, 1480), fol. 51r, ibid., p. 271, doc. I.5.

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60 ASF, Catasto, 665 (S. Croce, Ruote, 1446), No. 176, fol. 449r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 265, doc. I.1. On the term fornaciaio, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 3. There was no distinction made in guild records in Florence between kilnmen with respect to their products (Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence [Baltimore, MD, 1980], p. 187).Verrocchio’s father does not mention a kiln in his 1446 catasto declaration, commonly noted in the catasti of fornaciai, but he does record that he owned a property at castello di Certaldo (beyond Impruneta outside Florence), which he inhabited, and perhaps this property had a kiln. ASF, Catasto, 665 (S. Croce, Ruote, 1446), No. 176, fol. 449r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 265, doc. I.1. A small number of kilns operated near the city walls of Florence, but many more kilns operated near Impruneta, which was famous for its clay. “Botteghe, Artigiani e Fornaci,” in Antonio Paolucci, ed., La civiltà del cotto. Arte della terracotta nell’area fiorentina dal XV al XX secolo, exh. cat., Impruneta, May–December 1980 (Florence, 1980), pp. 161ff. 61 ASF, Catasto, 702 (S. Croce, Ruote, 1451), No. 291, fols. 638r–v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 265, doc. I. 2. 62 ASF, Catasto 793 (S. Spirito, Ferza 1457), 137r, transcribed in Doris Carl, “Zur Goldschmiedefamilie Dei mit neuen Dokumenten zu Antonio Pollaiuolo und Andrea Verrocchio,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 26, no. 2 (1982): 129–66, p. 162, doc. XXIII; and Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 271, doc. I.6. On the term fattorino, see Anabel Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge, 1995), p. 84. Before that, Verrocchio probably trained in the bottega of Francesco di Luca Verrocchio, who had workshops on via Vacchereccia and via Calimala. ASF, Catasto, 615 (S. Croce, Bue, 1442), No. 256, fols. 415r–416r; ASF, Catasto, 660 (S. Croce, Bue, 1446), No. 196, fol. 487v; ASF, Catasto, 697, Part I (S. Croce, Bue, 1451), No. 195, fol. 429v; ASF, Catasto, 800 (S. Croce, Bue, 1457), No. 188, fol. 579r, partially transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 18, ns. 11–14. 63 Bemporad has convincingly attributed to Verrocchio the mounting of a sardonyx ewer (Figure 91) that formed part of the Medici collection. The mount consists of a stepped, raised base and a lid and handle. The domed lid was decorated with a foliate design made

up of leaves of different sizes, surmounted by a crown of lilies above which is a palla, itself decorated with the Medici palle, set in a diamond ring, and the handle was decorated in the form of a dragon’s wing. No physical evidence on the vase itself or in any surviving documents can confirm or deny the attribution to Verrocchio, but the stylistic connections Bemporad draws with other works by Verrocchio supports the attribution (Dora Liscia Bemporad, “Per Andrea del Verrocchio orafo,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 16, n. 13 (2002): 189–206, pp. 196–97). 64 Verrocchio received a payment on October 31, 1461, for his entry. Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo, Orvieto, Cam. 1460–1469, unnumbered folio, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 288, doc.VI.29. 65 “Tutto chuesto libro è paghato: chostò lire dieci. Chostò lire tre e mezo la dipintura a dDre’del Verrocchino esta a cchapo a via Ghibellina ; lire sett[]e mezzo chostò la scrittura, a paghare Piero dei Rici. Paghossi detti danari a di 12 di ferraio 1462. Chosta piú la leghatura, e che ci arrogierai di piú.” Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 1591, fol. 175r. 66 During the Renaissance, via Ghibellina was shorter in length than it is today, and therefore the location of the workshop mentioned in the document would have been very close to the house in which Andrea del Verrocchio resided. Although it is not certain that the “Verrocchino” mentioned in the document is the same as Andrea del Verrocchio, it seems more probable that they were the same person, than that two men, both artists, with almost identical names, lived and worked next door to one another, arguments made by Brown, “Leonardo apprendista,” Lettura vinciana 39 (17 aprile 1999, Florence, 2000), p. 13. 67 See n. 65 earlier. 68 The tomb was probably begun around March 20, 1456, when discussions began on furnishing a suitable resting place for Cosimo. Biblioteca Centrale Nazionale di Firenze, MS II.IV, 309, fol. IV (Ricordo of Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent), transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 288, doc.VI.30.b. It was finished by October 22, 1467, recorded in a document for the transferral of Cosimo’s remains. Archivio Capitolare di San Lorenzo, vol. 1938 (4), fol. 12v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 288, doc.VI.30.c.

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69 The David is generally dated to the midto-late 1460s. It was made for the Medici family and only later sold to the Signoria. Verrocchio’s brother, Tommaso, recorded it in a list of debts for objects produced by his brother owed by the Medici, compiled in 1495–96, several years after Verrocchio’s death. Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1), fol. 43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc. 28. Günter Passavant has proposed the David was commissioned by Piero de’ Medici before his death in 1469, though cast c.1475, rather than by his sons Lorenzo and Giuliano, who were recorded later as the owners. Günter Passavant, Verrocchio. Sculptures, Paintings and Drawings, trans. Katherine Watson (London, 1969), p. 15. This proposal was supported by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 46. The change in location for the sculpture, from the Medici palace to the Palazzo Vecchio (which occurred in 1476), led to certain compositional changes to the work. See Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Maria Grazia Vaccari, “Verrocchio’s David: New Facts, New Theories,” in Verrocchio’s David Restored: A Renaissance Bronze for the National Museum of the Bargello, Florence, ed. Gary M. Radke, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, October 7-November 9, 2003, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 22, 2003-February 8, 2004, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 13-March 21, 2004 (Florence, 2003), 13-34, p. 26. 70 John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 28. 71 Visual and radiographic examinations of the sculpture have revealed that it was cast with the use of a direct lost wax model, which explains the excessive weight of the statue (126 kg) and the discrepancies in width of the bronze walls. The head of Goliath was cast separately, using the same method, as indicated by the relatively thick walls, but with a higher lead content than the David. The arms of the main figure were cast solid, and other parts of the body contain core materials, including the support and clay. Conservators found no openings in the David for removing the core material, an iron element protrudes from David’s left heel, and an accumulation of lead in the lower part of the

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David has led conservators to argue that the sculpture was probably cast upright and not upside down (Salvatore Siano, Maria Ludovica Nicolai, and Simone Porcinai, “Verrocchio’s David: Characterization and Conservation Treatments,” in Verrocchio’s David Restored: A Renaissance Bronze for the National Museum of the Bargello, Florence, ed. Gary M. Radke, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, October 7–November 9, 2003, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 22, 2003– February 8, 2004, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 13–March 21, 2004 (Florence, 2003), 97–109, pp. 102 and 104).There are also flaws in the casting and the extensive work with the chisel after the bronze had cooled. Cannon-Brookes noted that there was extensive chiseling on the David, which led him to suggest a date in the mid-1460s or slightly earlier (Peter Cannon-Brookes, “Verrocchio Problems,” Apollo 99 (January 1974): 8–19, pp. 13–14). Butterfield noted the rough surface of the sculpture’s base and interior (Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, p. 204). Covi noted that the casting seams are apparent, a fill is visible on the back side of the right arm just below the shoulder, the feet are chiseled flat underneath, and the visible part of the sole of the left foot is unfinished, as are the palms of the hands, and the head of Goliath. He has also pointed out that the details in the costume, the folds in the eyelids, and the fold of skin in the neck of David were created with a chisel, as were the patterns in the curls of hair and the eyebrows and beard of Goliath. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 46 n. 102 and 47. All of this suggests Verrocchio’s inexperience as a bronze caster. 72 Verrocchio’s brother, Tommaso, recorded it in a list of debts for objects produced by his brother owed by the Medici, compiled in 1495–96, several years after Verrocchio’s death. Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1), fol. 43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc. 28. On the sale, see ASF, Operai di Palazzo, I, fol. 8r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 333, doc. 43. 73 Paoletti has proposed that a green verde antica marble column with white marble base and capital (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) may have been the original support for the David. John T. Paoletti, “Verrocchio’s

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David, Medici Patronage, and Contested Public Spaces,” in Verocchio’s David Restored: A Renaissance Bronze for the National Museum of the Bargello, Florence, eds. Gary M. Radke, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, October 7–November 9, 2003, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 22, 2003– February 8, 2004, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 13–March 21, 2004 (Florence, 2003), 61–81, pp. 64–65. 74 Paolozzi Strozzi and Vaccari, “Verrocchio’s David,” p. 26. 75 On the candelabrum, see Scholten, “Technical Aspects of Verrocchio’s Candelabrum.” 76 Scholten, “Technical Aspects of Verrocchio’s Candelabrum,” pp. 124 and 127. 77 The awarding of the commission may have been contingent on entries in a competition, suggested by the existence of a terracotta group of Christ and Saint Thomas (Figure 102), attributed to Luca della Robbia, today in the Szapmuveszeti Muzeum, Budapest, which may have been a model for a proposed competition for the Mercanzia niche at Orsanmichele. This was first proposed by Paul Schubring, Luca della Robbia und seine Familie (Bielefield, 1905), pp. 68–70, a proposal left open by Giancarlo Gentilini, I Della Robbia: La scultura invetriata del Rinascimento, 2 vols. (Florence, 1992), vol. 1, p. 166 n. 48, but rejected by John Pope-Hennessy, Luca della Robbia (Oxford, 1980), p. 274, the latter arguing it was either a fifteenth-century pastiche or a nineteenth-century forgery. This has been discussed by Bruce Boucher, “Luca della Robbia, Christ and St. Thomas, 1463–5,” in Earth and Fire, p. 120, cat. 9. 78 ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 305 (Deliberazioni July 1–December 31, 1469), fol. 165v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 330, doc.VI.36. 79 The following art historians have questioned whether Verrocchio was a painter at all: Ettore Camesasca, Artista in bottega (Milan, 1966), p. 429; Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa del Perugino (Milan, 1969), p. 85; Cannon-Brookes, “Verrocchio Problems,” pp. 16–17; Sheldon Grossman, “Ghirlandaio’s ‘Madonna and Child’ in Frankfurt and Leonardo’s Beginnings as a Painter,” Städel-Jahrbuch 7 (1979): 101–25, pp. 101–02, 116, 121; and Anna Padoa Rizzo, “Introduzione,” in Maestri e botteghe: Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, eds. Mina

Gregori, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, October 16, 1992–January 10, 1993 (Milan, 1992), 19–22, p. 21. 80 Alessandro Perosa, ed., Il Zibaldone Quaresimale, vol. 1 of Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, 2 vols. (London 1960), pp. 2, 23–24. 81 Benedetto Dei, Memorie Istoriche (1470), 44v and 49r, published in Giuseppina Carla Romby, Descrizioni e Rappresentazioni della citta’ di Firenze nel xv secolo, con la trascrizione inedita dei manoscritti di Benedetto Dei e un indice ragionato dei manoscritti utili per la storia di Firenze (Florence, 1976), Appendix 2, 56–73, pp. 71–72. 82 Luigi Pungileoni, Elogio storico di Giovanni Santi. Pittore e poeta padre del gran Raffaello di Urbino (Urbino, 1822), p. 74. 83 “Nor is our Verrocchio inferior to Phidias: in this one thing he excels since he paints and melts bronze.” (“Nec minor est Phydia noster Verrocchius: uno/ hoc superat quoniam pingit et aera liquat.” Ugolino Verino, Epigrammatum libri septem, in Epigrammi, ed. Francesco Bausi [Messina, 1998], no. 23 [“De pictoribus et sculptoribus florentinis qui priscis graecis equiperari possunt”], vv. 17–18, p. 327; on the dating of the Eppigrami, see ibid., pp. 24–33.) 84 Gauricus, De Sculptura, Chastel and Klein, pp. 258–61. 85 Frey, ed., Il Codice Magliabechiano, p. 89. 86 ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 286, doc.V.27. 87 Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. I), fol. 43r, transcribed in ibid., p. 287, doc.VI.28. 88 ASP, Comune, Consigli, Provvisioni e Riforme, 48 (1483–1492; formerly Archivio Comunale, Provvisioni del Comune, 68), fols. IIIV–112r, transcribed in ibid., p. 350, doc.VI.51.a. 89 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, pp. 365–66. On Verrocchio painting frescoes, Vasari wrote: “[F]ece i cartoni d’una battaglia d’ignudi disegnati di penna molto bene, per farli di colore in una facciata.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 363. 90 Roberta Bartoli, Biagio d’Antonio (Milan, 1999), pp. 31–38. 91 Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 26. 92 “Andrea del Verrocchio dipintore e’ntagliatore.” ASF, Accademia del Disegno, 2 (Debitori e creditori e ricordi, libro rosso A, 1472–1520),

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fol. II left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 277, doc. III.16. 93 ASF, Accademia del Disegno, 2 (Debitori e creditori e ricordi, libro rosso A, 1472–1520), fol. 11 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 277, doc. III.16. This point has been made by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 6–7. Matriculation in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali to which painters were affiliated was a precondition for membership in the Compagnia di San Luca (unfortunately, the records of the guild for the late fifteenth century are missing). For the guild and its statutes as they related to painters see Carlo Fiorilli, “I dipintori a Firenze nell’Arte dei Medici e Speziale e Merciai,” Archivio storico italiano 2 (1920): 6–74. Furthermore, Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini have pointed out that entry into the guild did not mark the beginnings of painters’ activity in that area because “there are numerous instances of enrollments in the guild by older workers whose independent work was so well-known that they could no longer hope to elude the guild’s control.” Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, “Working Together: Masaccio’s and Masolino’s Technique and Technical Innovations in Panel Painting,” in The Panel Paintings of Masolino and Masaccio:The Role of Technique, ed. Carl Strehlke (Milan, 2002), 29–67, p. 29. 94 Perosa, ed., Il Zibaldone Quaresimale, vol.  1 of Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, pp. 2, 23–4. 95 Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1), fol.43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28. 96 ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 305 (Deliberazioni July 1– December 31, 1469), fol. 165v, transcribed in ibid., p. 330, doc.VI.36. 97 Giovanni Poggi, Il Duomo di Firenze: documenti sulla decorazione della chiesa e del campanile, tratti dall’archivio dell’opera, ed. Margaret Haines, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1909, repr. 1988), vol. 1, pp. 240– 43, docs. 1205 and 1206. 98 Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. I), fol. 43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, document VI.28. 99 On this commission, see Chapter 2. 100 Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. I), fol. 43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28.

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1 01 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, pp. 373–34. 102 A document of 1485 states that the altarpiece would have been completed six years earlier if Verrocchio had been paid in total for his work. ASP, Comune, Consigli, Provvisioni e Riforme, 48 (1483–92; formerly Archivio Comunale, Provvisioni del Comune, 68), fols. IIIV–112r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 350, doc.VI.51.a. On the painting’s attribution, see n. 27 earlier in this chapter. 103  AOF, VIII.I.61 (Quaderno di cassa, July– December, 1475), fol. 64 right side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 332, doc. 42. On the standrard, see Enzo Settesoldi, “Il gonfalone del comune di Carrara dipinto da Andrea del Verrocchio,” Paragone 31, no. 363 (May, 1980): 87–91. 104 Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, doc.VI.44.b. 105 Ibid., doc.VI.46. 106 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, pp. 366–67.Vasari’s claim that Verrocchio produced a statue of Marsyas for the Medici is supported by the second item listed in Tommaso’s inventory of goods made for the Medici, which reads: “lo gnudo rosso.” (Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1), fol.43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28). This was pointed out by Francesco Caglioti, “Due restauratori per le antichità dei primi medici: Mino da Fiesole, Andrea del Verrocchio e il ‘Marsia rosso’ degli Uffizi. I,” Prospettiva 72 (1993): 17–42, p. 23. 107 Butterfield (Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 232–33) discusses the documents concerning the commission. 108 Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 233–36. 109  For the documents, see Carl Frey, Die Loggia dei Lanzi zu Florenz: Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung (Berlin, 1885), p. 345. On Florentine artists working in multiple crafts and the guild context, see Alfred Doren, Le arti fiorentine, trans. G. B. Klein, 2 vols. (Florence, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 86–88. On the Florentine painters’ guild, see Irene Hueck, “Le matricole dei pittori fiorentini prima e dopo il 1320,” Bolletino d’arte 57, no. 2 (1972): 114–21. 110 Jean Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio. Artist and Artisan (New Haven, CT, 2000), p. 30. 111 The painter Smeraldo di Giovanni was also a member of the Legnaioli. Margaret Haines, “Il mondo dello Scheggia: persone e luoghi di una carriera,” in Lo Scheggia, eds. Luciano Bellosi and Margaret Haines (Siena, 1999), pp. 38 and 40.

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112 On Florentines of different social rank (including some members of the popolani) as knowledgeable and the implications of this for the reception of works of art, see Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, CT, 2000); and Amy Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. Humanism, History, and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance (New York, 2016). 113 Robert Black has argued that the level of literacy among Florentine males was around 67 to 83 percent. See Robert Black, “Education and the Emergence of a Literate Society,” in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, ed. John M. Najemy (Oxford, 2004), 18–36, p. 18; and Robert Black, “Literacy in Florence, 1427,” in Florence and Beyond. Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy. Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy, eds. David S. Peterson and Daniel E. Bornstein (Toronto, 2008), 195–210. See also, Gene Brucker, “Voices from the Catasto, 1427–1480,” I Tatti Studies 5 (1993): 11–32. 114 Black, “Literacy in Florence, 1427;” Brucker, “Voices from the Catasto,” pp. 17–18; and Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 42. 115 Christian Bec, Les livres des Florentines (1413– 1608) (Florence, 1984). 116  Scholars have assigned the Cento Novelle to Franco Sacchetti, but this is not correct. See Armando F. Verde, “Libri tra le pareti domestiche,” Tradizione medievale e innovazione umanistica a Firenze nei secoli xv–xvi 18 (1987): 1–226, p. 63 n. 54, where he notes that Cento Novelle in inventories contemporary with Verrocchio’s indicates Boccaccio’s Decameron, with further bibliography. 117  ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 286, doc.V.27. 118  According to Dario A. Covi, the earliest printed Moschus recorded is a Greek and Latin edition of Carmen de raptu Helenae, printed by Dionysius Bertochus at Reggio Emilia (Hain 11620), which has been dated c. 1498 by Dietrich Reichling, Appendices ad HainiiCopingeri Repertorium bibliographicum: additiones et emendations (Munich, 1905–11), Fasc. III, 116f; and not earlier than 1501 by Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1900), p. 109f. Paul O. Kristeller has suggested the possibility of a Moschus bound

at the beginning of a volume of other authors. The earliest known incunabulum of Lucian which contains the Muscae laudatio was printed in Venice in 1500 (Hain 10263). See Dario A. Covi, “Four New Documents Concerning Andrea del Verrocchio,” Art Bulletin 48, no. 1 (March 1966): 97–103, p. 99, n. 18. 119 Silvia Rizzo, “Codice e libro a stampa,” in Il Lessico Filologico degli umanisti (Rome, 1973), p. 76. I am grateful to Luca Boschetto for pointing this out to me. See also Salvatore Battaglia, “Gettare in forma: stampara. Libro in forma: in stampa,” in Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, 21 vols. (Turin, 1961), vol. 6, no. 38, p. 173. “In forma” was used in counter distinction from “in penna,” which was also used in inventories to refer to handwritten texts. On this point, see Bec, Les livres des Florentines, p. 51. 120 It is unlikely that Alberti’s Musca was published by 1490, the date of the inventory, as Alberti’s other apologues, including his eulogy to his dog, were not printed until 1499 in a rare edition by Girolamo Massaini and not again until an Italian edition of 1568. See David Marsh, “Aesop and the Humanist Apologue,” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 9–26, pp. 11–12. 121 Gloria Allaire, Andrea da Barberino and the Language of Chivalry (Gainsville, FL, 1997), p. 6. On the oral culture of San Martino, see Blake Wilson, “Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in Piazza San Martino,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (2013): 273–87. 122 Guerrino il Meschino was first published in Padua in 1473 making it a possible candidate. Gloria Allaire, “Un ignoto manoscritto di Guerrino il Meschino,” Bibliofilia: Rivista di Storia del Libro e di Bibliografia 96, no. 3 (September–December 1994): 232–39, p. 234. In a 1484 inventory, the book is referred to as “Guerino Meschino in forma.” Verde, “Libri tra le pareti domestiche,” p. 110. For a history of the printed editions of Guerrino il Meschino, see Z. Ostella, “Il Guerrin Meschino,” Pallante 10, fasc. 9–10 (1932): 29–37. 123 Marco Villoresi, “Un itinerario cavalleresco attraverso il fondo manoscritti della Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze,” in Paladini di carta. La cavalleria figurate, ed. Giovanna Lazzi, exh. cat., Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, May 8– August 8, 2003. (Florence, 2003), 11–25, p. 22. 124 Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 16. Their books included the Bible, the Lives of the Saints, a history of Florence, the Miracles of Our Lady, an account of

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the death of Saint Jerome, a little book of virtues and vices, The Life of Alexander, a book of Saint Bernard, a book by Dante, a book of Lauds, the Gospels, and the Epistles, The Lives of the Church Fathers, extracts from Livy’s Decades, Boccaccio’s Decameron, a dialogue of Saint Gregory, the Little Flowers of Virtue (of Saint Francis), a work by Cristoforo Landino, a treatise of Saint Antoninus, and a poem of the wars of Charlemagne. On the Maiano inventory, see Lorenzo Cèndali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Majano (San Casciano [Val di Pesa], 1926), pp. 183–84. 125  The engraver and cartographer Francesco Rosselli owned seven religious texts, a copy of one of Dante’s works, and an edition of Josephus, presumably in the vernacular. (Iodoco del Badia, “La bottega di Alessandro di Francesco Roselli merciaio e stampatore bottega di Alessandro di Francesco Roselli merciaio e stampatore [1525],” in Miscellanea Fiorentina di erudizione e storia, 2 vols. [Rome, 1978], vol. 2, no. 14, 24–30, p. 26.) And an inventory of the painter Stefano di Lorenzo’s possessions, composed in 1435, included a book of saints in the vernacular, the Virtues of Seneca in the vernacular, the Soliloquies of Saint Augustine, the Letters of Saint Paul, a work of Beato Eusebio, the Mirror of Penitence, a Christian life, a work by Jonah the Prophet, Saint Gregory’s Letters, the Meditations on the Life of Christ, a book on poverty, and a text dedicated to Our Lady. ASF, Notariale Antecosimiano 15591, 237v and 238r. I am grateful to Luca Boschetto for showing me this last document in the Florentine State Archives. 126  The inventory of Filippino Lippi’s bottega records that he had in his possession a bible, Ovid in the vernacular, nine recent texts (including works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio), and a copy of Livy. Doris Carl, “Das Inventar von Filippino Lippi aus dem Jahre 1504,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 31 (1987): 373–91, pp. 388–89. Luca della Robbia’s books included works by Cavalcanti, Jacopone da Todi, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Manetti. Alessio Decaria, “Una copista di classici italiani e i libri di Luca della Robbia,” Rinascimento, s. 2, 47 (2007): 243–87, esp. pp. 245–51. 127  On these efforts, see Giuseppe De Luca, “Introduction,” in Prosatori minori del Trecento: scrittori di religione, ed. Giuseppe De Luca (Milan, 1954), pp. xi–xl.

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128 “Ben è vero, perché tu sé quelli che vi ci fai stare . . . E sappiate che tutte le cose non sono licite a ogni persona.” Alberto Conte, ed., Il novellino (Rome, 2001), pp. 131–32, translated and discussed by Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy. Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 32–33. On attitudes toward vernacular translation, see Cornish, Vernacular Translation, chapter 1, pp. 16–43. 129  The classic study of Dante’s knowledge of, and references to, classical antiquity is Edward Moore, Studies in Dante. First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante (Oxford, 1896). Boccaccio expounded in great detail Dante’s allusions to classical mythology in his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, his unfinished commentary on Dante’s Comedia that was read widely and first delivered in the form of lectures at the church of Santo Stefano di Badia in Florence in 1374. Boccaccio took Dante’s references as an opportunity to relate many references to classical myth and literature, often including extracts from classical texts to discuss specific points. Simon A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 42–47. I thank one of my anonymous readers for pointing this out to me. On Florentine ownership of Dante commentaries, see Bec, Les livres des Florentines, pp. 26; and on the commentaries, Luca Carlo Rossi, “7. Commedia: Early Commentaries,” and Deborah Parker, “8. Commedia: Renaissance Commentaries,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York, 2000), 206–09 and 209–13. 130 Alan K. Smith, “Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC, 1994), 84–106, p. 86. 131 Smith, “Fraudomy,” p. 102 n. 8. On this point see Leon Battista Alberti, Rime e versioni poetiche, ed. Giuglielmo Gorni (Milano, 1975), p.  3ff; and Giuliano Tanturli, “Note alle Rime dell’Alberti,” Metrica 2 (1981): 103–21, pp. 104–06. 132 Renee Watkins, “Il Burchiello (1404–48): Poverty, Politics and Poetry,” Italian Quarterly 54 (1970): 21–87, pp. 37–38. 133 Luca Boschetto, “Burchiello e il suo ambiente sociale: esplorazioni d’archivio sugli anni fiorentini,” in La fantasia fuor de’ confini: Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449–1999). Atti del convegno. Firenze, 1999, ed. Michelangelo Zaccarello, (Rome, 2002), 35–57, pp. 38–39.

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134  Caroline Elam (referred to by Hugh MacAndrew, Old Master Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland, exh. cat., National Gallery, Washington, DC, June 24–September 3, 1990, and Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, November 3, 1990–January 13, 1991 (Washington, DC, 1990, p. 26) has compared the inscriptions on the verso with an autograph of 1470 attributed to Verrocchio by Carlo Pini and Gaetano Milanesi, La scrittura di artisti italiani (sec. XIV–XVII), 3 vols. (Florence, 1876), vol. 1, no. 56, and she believes it is possible that both are by the same person. I have compared the writing on the drawing with that on Verrocchio’s autograph catasto declaration, and I agree with Elam’s attribution to the same hand. The presence of a lute, recorded in the inventory made after the artist’s death, might also suggest that Verrocchio performed poetry. For the inventory, see Covi, “Four New Documents,” p. 103. 135  Two passages in Manetti’s vita allude to Brunelleschi as a poet: the first, probably dating after 1429, metions “certain sonnets” in a discussion of a dispute between Brunelleschi and Donatello while the two were working on the Old Sacristy; and the second, in a discussion of Antonio di Manetto Ciàccheri (one of Brunelleschi’s competitors for the lantern of the cupola in 1436), Manetti mentions a sonnet by Brunelleschi. (Staccioli notes, however, that Manetti does not mention the tenzone by Giovanni Gherardo da Prato.) And Vasari refers to sonnets by Brunelleschi in both editions of the Vite. Giuliano Staccioli, “Profilo congressuale di Filippo Brunelleschi e della tenzone poetica con Giovanni Gherardi” in Der Humanismus der Architektur in Florenz. Filippo Brunelleschi und Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, ed. Wolfgang von Löhneysen (Hildesheim, 1999), 35–55, pp. 42–44. For Brunelleschi’s sonnets, see Filippo Brunelleschi, Sonetti di Filippo Brunelleschi, introduction by Giuliano Tanturli, notes on the text by Domenico De Robertis (Florence, 1977). 136 Grasso is included in Manetti’s vita of Brunelleschi, where it precedes the life of the artist (Antonio Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, ed. Domenico de Robertis (Milan, 1976), pp. 3–44). The story is likely based on fact: its central protagonist, the fat woodcarver, was based on Manetto Ammannatini, a master carpenter with a bottega in Piazza San Giovanni

and a house in Piazza Duomo (Staccioli, “Profilo congressuale di Filippo Brunelleschi,” pp.  40–41). Ammannatini later emigrated to Hungary and acquired considerable wealth there, according to contemporary tax records (Eugenio Battisti, Brunelleschi. The Complete Works, trans. Robert Erich Wolf [New York, 1981; Milan, 2002], p. 326). Grasso is known in five redactions, some of which attribute the tale to Filippo Brunelleschi himself. Given the contemporary practice of oral storytelling, though, it is highly likely that the story was recounted by different people and thus its authorship cannot be securely attributed to any one person. Nevertheless, Brunelleschi’s propensity for practical jokes is a recurring theme in Manetti’s life of the artist (though this cannot be confirmed), including his well-known trick on his arch nemesis Lorenzo Ghiberti after the two were named co-supervisors for the cupola project – Brunelleschi pretended to be sick in order to show up Ghiberti as supervisor of the dome’s construction. (Manetti, Vita, p. 93). This has been discussed by Margaret Haines, “Brunelleschi and Bureaucracy: The Tradition of Public Patronage at the Florence cathedral,” I Tatti Studies 3 (1989): 89–126, p. 115. 137 See Sanne Rusalka Wellen, “‘Andrea del Sarto pittore senza errori.’ Between biography, Florentine society, and literature” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2004). 138 Ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87, fol. 30v. 139 This has been pointed out by John Onians, for example, who has argued Brunelleschi was a volgare, rather than a humanist, architect. John Onians, “Brunelleschi: Humanist or Nationalist?” Art History 5 (1982): 259–72. 140 Giuliano Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi con gli ambienti letterari fiorentini,” in Filippo Brunelleschi, la sua opera e il suo tempo, 2 vols. (Florence, 1980), vol. 1, 125–44. The earliest literary reference to Brunelleschi comes not from a humanist but a vernacular writer, Domenico da Prato, a notary and scribe (and one of the writers to whom was attributed Geta and Birria in one of the commonplace books made in Verrocchio’s workshop). In a letter to his friend Alessandro Rondanelli dated 1413, Domenico da Prato praised Brunelleschi for his ingenuity as an architect. Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” p. 125. On the other hand, Christine Smith (Architecture in the Culture of

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Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400–1470 [New York, 1992]) has discussed the importance of Brunelleschi’s architecture for humanists. On Brunelleschi’s appeal to humanists, see also Gabriella Befani Canfield, “The Florentine Humanists’ Concept of Architecture in the 1430s and Filippo Brunelleschi,” in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Federigo Zeri, ed. Mauro Natale, 2 vols. (Venice, 1984), vol. 1, 112–21, p. 112. 141 Christopher Celenza, The Lost Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, MD, 2004), p. 114. For an important consideration of a fifteenth-century Florentine artist’s engagement with vernacular and Latin literary sources, see Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. 142 Peter Howard, “The Aural Space of the Sacred in Renaissance Florence,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, eds. Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (New York, 2006), 376– 93; Peter Howard, “Preaching to the Mob: Space, Ideas, and Persuasion in Renaissance Florence,” in Mobs: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry, eds. Nancy Van Deusen and Leonard Michael Koff (Leiden, 2012), 203–22; and Wilson, “Dominion of the Ear.” 143  Vittorio Rossi, “Dante nel Trecento e nel Quattrocento,” in Vittorio Rossi, Saggi e discorsi su Dante (Florence, 1930), 293–32, pp. 324–25. 144  Dario Del Puppo, “In margine ai codici delle rime di Burchiello: individuo e società nelle antologie e miscellanee letterarie del Quattrocento,” in La fantasia fuor de’ confini: Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449– 1999), ed. Michelangelo Zaccarello (Rome, 2002), 101–113, pp. 231–33. 145  John Ahern, “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante’s Comedy,” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci (Toronto, 1997), 216–39, p. 214. 146 Ahern, “Singing the Book,” p. 215. 147 Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 44.This is confirmed by an account of Poggio Bracciolini retold in Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 43–44. 148 On this point, see Lauro Martines,“The Politics of Love Poetry in Renaissance Italy,” Interpres 11 (1991): 93–111; and Suzanne Branciforte, “Poetry as Document: A Popolaresco Account of Life in Quattrocento Florence” (M.A. Diss., UCLA, 1986), referred to by Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 45. 149 Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 49.

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150 Franco Franceschi, Oltre il ‘Tumulto’: i lavoratori fiorentini (Florence, 1993), pp. 318–19. 151 Watkins, “Il Burchiello,” pp. 23–24; and Alan K. Smith, “Burchiello,” in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul Grendler, 6 vols. (New York, 1999), vol. 1, 315. This picture of Burchiello’s barber shop as a meeting place for men of different social ranks has been challenged by Luca Boschetto (“Burchiello e il suo ambiente sociale,” pp. 50–51). Boschetto’s claims are significant but not conclusive. Important correctives to Boschetto’s arguments include Domenico De Robertis, “Una proposta per Burchiello,” Rinascimento 8 (1968): 3–119; and Michelangelo Zaccarello, “An Unknown Episode of Burchiello’s Reception in the Early Cinquecento: Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 2725, fols 80r–131v,” Modern Language Review 100, no. 1 (January, 2005): 78–96. 152 Margery A. Ganz, “A Florentine Friendship: Donato Acciaiuoli and Vespasiano da Bisticci,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1990): 372–383, pp. 372–74. 153 Trans. Lauro Martines, Italian Renaissance Sextet (New York, 1994), p. 179. 154  Elena Del Gallo notes that Lodovico Frati (“Cantari e sonetti ricordati nella Cronaca di Benedetto Dei,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 4 (1884), pp. 179–81) has proposed that Lo Za was the brother of Antonio di Tommaso Finiguerra (b. 1389–d. 1464), making him Maso’s uncle, but this cannot be confirmed (Elena Del Gallo “Finiguerri, Stefano, detto il Za,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 45 vols. [Rome, 1997], vol. 48, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti, p. 55). 155  The assistant responsible for the portrait of Seneca may have been Francesco Botticini, evident from a comparison between the pen and ink sketch in ms. 1591 and that of Saint Eusebius in Botticini’s Saint Jerome in Penitence (Lisa Venturini, Francesco Botticini [Florence, 1994], p. 130) and Saint Augustine, a lateral panel for an unknown altarpiece. There are similarities in the expression, the three-quarter view, the pose of the head, and, most significantly, the distinctive three lines of shadow down the right side of the figures’ faces. Botticini is known to have done drawings for manuscripts. He executed a pen and ink portrait of Matteo Palmieri dating from c. 1473 in a manuscript (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence), and the

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earliest references to the artist refer to him as a painter of playing cards, the same profession as his father (Venturini, Francesco Botticini, p. 114, cat. 38, and p. 23). In 1463 Botticini would have been seventeen or eighteen years old, an age when he had very likely completed his apprenticeship but before he had started working as an independent master. We know that Botticini had completed his apprenticeship in Neri di Bicci’s workshop by this date as Neri recorded Botticini’s departure in his invaluable Ricordi, in 1460, one year after the beginning of his training and less than three years before the Riccardiana manuscript was made. Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze (10 Marzo, 1453–24 Aprile, 1475), ed. Bruno Santi (Pisa, 1976), 246, pp. 126–27 and 628, p. 333. Scholars have often wondered whether Botticini spent time in Verrocchio’s workshop, but no documents have been found that confirm this. On this issue, see Venturini, Francesco Botticini, pp. 41–56. 156 ASF, Notarile ante-cosimiano 6085 (formerly D 48) (Ser Giovanni di Ser Paolo Lorenzo Dieciaiuti, 1484–85), fol. 66v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 276, doc. II.12. 157 Del Puppo, “In margine ai codici delle rime di Burchiello,” pp. 107–08. Piero dei Ricci is identified as the scribe of ms. 1591 on fol. 175r. 158 The drawings for Geta and Birria in the Biblioteca Nazionale codex are very close to those in the Riccardiana manuscript (ms. 1591), so close that some scholars have attributed them to the same hand. See Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” p.  127 and n. 27. According to Giunia Adini and Dario Del Puppo, the illustrations in ms. 1591, Biblioteca Riccardiana, were done by an artist working in the styles of Maso Finiguerra and Apollonio di Giovanni (in particular the oriental style of some of the figures). See Giunia Adini and Dario Del Puppo in Immaginare l’Autore. Il ritratto del letterato nella cultura umanistica, ed. Giovanna Lazzi, exh. cat., Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, March 26–June 27, 1998 (Florence, 1998), p. 70, cat. 8. Most recently, Adriana Di Domenico has attributed the drawings in the two manuscripts to the same artist, and she provides a thorough discussion of attributions proposed by other scholars. See Adriana Di Domenico, “Il ‘Cantare del Geta e Birria’ ‘visualizzato’ (e un ritratto del Burchiello) nelle illustrazioni di un codice magliabechiano,” Rivista di Storia della Miniatura nos. 1–2 (1996–97): 123–30, p. 123.To my mind,

however, they are the work of two distinct artists. The sonnets by Brunelleschi can be found on fol. 30v, and by Alberti on fol. 20r, in Ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87. 159 Drawings on the following folios in ms.1591, Biblioteca Riccardiana, have been pricked: 84v; 100r; 101v; 102v; 104r; 105v; 108v; 109v; 111v; 112v; 118r; 119v; 125v; 127r; 128v;129v; 131v; 132r; 133v;134v;136v;139v; 142v; 147v; 149r; 151r; 152r; 153v;155r; 156v; 157v; 160r;166r; 167v;169v;172v;174r. A drawing in ms. 1591 on fol. 153 v features pricking just for the figures, especially obvious for the male figure.The person who did the pricking was so careless that the holes continue through the pages preceding it (back to 148v). 160 There are no indications about the original owner of ms. 2805, Biblioteca Riccardiana that I could find. 161  I have not identified the watermark in ms. 2805, Biblioteca Riccardiana, but based on the stylistic evidence it is likely that it was produced in Verrocchio’s bottega. Dale Kent notes that in the sixteenth century ms. 2805 and ms. 1591 belonged to the same owner: Simone di Giovanni Berti, known as “Lo Smunto,” who was a member of the Accademia della Crusca. See Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 423 n. 81. 162 Ms. Magliabechiano XXI, 87 is 23.6 cm high and 17 cm wide; ms. 1591 is 23.2 cm high and 16.5 cm wide; ms. 2805 is 21.6 cm high and 16.5 cm wide. Ms. 1591 has a watermark similar to Briquet 6653; ms. 2805 has watermarks most similar to Briquet 6645, 6648, 6649, 6644, 6647, 6650, 6651, 6652, 6654, 6655, 6657, 6658, 6662; and 3363, 3390, 3391, 3392, and 3393 (2805 has some other watermarks that I have not been able to identify); Magliabechiano XXI, 87 has a watermark most similar to Briquet 5904, 5907, 5908, 5909, 5910, 5911. Dario Del Puppo claimed that Magliabechiano XXI, 87 and ms. 1591 have the same watermark, while ms. 2805 has a flower watermark similar to Briquet 6653. Del Puppo, “In margine ai codici delle rime di Burchiello,” p. 106 and n. 7. It is not clear if one of the codices was the model for the others, or whether all three codices were copies of a different, common model. Del Puppo has proposed that in the case of the two Riccardiana manuscripts, the correspondence of the same words on each page supports an attribution to the same workshop. And this in turn suggests that the codices were

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not commissioned by a patron, but rather, that they were made in bulk to be sold at a bookshop, in a mode familiar from the practices of the shop of Vespasiano Bisticci. Del Puppo, “In margine ai codici delle rime di Burchiello,” p. 107. 163  The writing overlaps the drawings on the following folios from ms. 1591: 56r, 70r, 79v, 81v, 82r, 87r, 91v, 93r, 153 v, 159r, 160r, 162v, 164v, 166r, 167v, 169v, 172v, 174r. The scribe of Magliabechiano XXI, 87, on the other hand, appears to have written the text first, leaving room for the illustrations. 164  Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, Cartolai, Illuminators and Printers in Fifteenth-Century Italy. The Evidence of the Ripoli Press (Los Angeles, CA, 1988), p. 51. 165 Rouse, Cartolai, Illuminators and Printers, pp. 53–54 and ns. 79 and 80. 166 Ibid., p. 29. And Rouse and Rouse have concluded that “decorators work[ed] for cartolai . . . most often in the shops of the cartolai” (Rouse, Cartolai, Illuminators and Printers, p. 54). Although Rouse and Rouse are referring specifically to the decoration of printed books, their study focuses on this new medium in its earliest years when it imitated the practices of the manufacture of manuscripts and thus can be used in this context. 167 On the attribution to Filippo Brunelleschi, see Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” p. 127.The vernacular version of Geta and Birria found in the Riccardiana and Biblioteca Nazionale manuscripts was a Tuscan adaptation there attributed to Ghigo Brunelleschi and Domenico da Prato, one of only a handful of examples to do this (others present the tale as Ghigo’s alone). Adini and Del Puppo, Immaginare l’Autore, cat. 8, p. 70. In a manuscript contemporary to this one, also in the Biblioteca Riccardiana (ms. 1592, fol. 42v), the scribe attributes the vernacular translation of Vitalis’ story to Boccaccio. See Salomone Morpurgo, I manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze: manoscritti italiani, vol. 1 (Rome, 1893), p. 574. 168 Leonardo da Vinci, The Madrid Codices, trans. and commentary by Ladislao Reti, 4 vols. (New York, 1974), vol. 3, p. 91ff. 169  The coat of arms consists of a bright blue shield with three silver roundels and a silver V, surrounded by a pink and green wreath and two curling ribbons in pink and blue fluttering at the sides. Morpurgo has identified the

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coat of arms as that of the Pieri family. See Morpurgo, I manoscritti, p. 572, cat. 1591. 170  This argument has been presented by Ulrich Pfisterer in his book, Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile 1430–1445 (Munich, 2002). 171 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist (Cambridge, MA,1939; reprint, Baltimore, 1967), p. 5. 172 My approach challenges that of Francis AmesLewis, who, in The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, CT, 2000) proposed that judgment of an artist’s intellect should be based on the works the artist created set against the standards of humanism. In this way, according to Ames-Lewis, art should be judged (and by implication, he suggests that they were judged) on the basis of its success at illustrating classical texts or correspondences to humanist learning. This attitude restricts what counts as intellectual work, and oversimplifies the account of the intellectual culture in which Renaissance artists worked. For a useful critique of Ames-Lewis’ book, see Stephen Campbell, review of The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, by Francis Ames-Lewis, Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (March, 2001): 150–52. Historians of science have been uncovering a growing body of evidence for the sophistication of artisans’ thinking and production. Important examples include Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2007); and Smith, The Body of the Artisan. 173 Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. 174 Smith, The Body of the Artisan. On artisanal epistemology, see also Smith’s articles: “Giving Voice to the Hands”; “Making and Knowing in a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop”; “Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, eds. Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago, IL, 2010), 29–49; and with Beentjes, “Nature and Art, Making and Knowing.” For a useful theorization of making, see Koerner, “Editorial: Factura.” 175 Much recent attention has been paid to objects and their agency (“things that talk,” as Lorraine Daston has expressed it). (Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science [NewYork, 2004].) Important references

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on the history of materials and materiality are mentioned earlier in notes 37–41 and 43. See also the references on agency in n. 45 earlier in this chapter. As Caroline Walker Bynum warns us, this theorizing about objects must

be historically situated. As theorists are themselves shaped by the agency of objects, it is important to contextualize them in order to access this aspect of the objects about which we are writing.

1: VERROCCHIO’S INGENUITY 1 Michael Wayne Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 49 and 185, n. 39. 2 Massimo Leoni, “Casting Techniques in Verrochio’s Workshop When the Christ and St Thomas Was Made,” in Verrocchio’s Christ and St Thomas. A Masterpiece of Sculpture from Renaissance Florence, ed. Loretta Dolcini, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 5, 1992–April 17, 1993 (New York, 1992), 83–100, pp. 89–90. 3 Earlier, for his bronze candelabrum for the Signoria in Florence, dated 1468, Verrocchio had experimented with bronze casting and soldering, for which see my introduction, p. 18-21. At the end of his career,Verrocchio appears to have continued experimenting in bronze casting. The Colleoni monument, which was finished after the artist’s death, was cast in sixteen separate pieces, eight for the horse and eight for the rider. Pieces were joined by a technique known as recasting or rejection (the parts are “sewn” together by threads of metal achieved by pouring molten metal along connecting bridges). Giovanni Morigi and Lorenzo Morigi, “Note tecniche sul restauro del monument a Bartolomeo Colleoni di Andrea del Verrocchio,” in L’industria artistica del bronzo del rinascimento a Venezia e nell’Italia settentrionale, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Venezia, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Ottobre 23 e 24, 2007, eds. Matteo Ceriana and Victoria Avery (Verona, 2008), 459–79. This approach is unlike Verrocchio’s other work in bronze, but although Verrocchio was deceased by the time the Colleoni monument was cast, it is possible that he played a role in determining how it was to be done. Documents attest to his having made a life-size model of the Colleoni horse in 1483, possibly in wax, and later having made clay models of horse and rider. “[E] quo et figura del terra.” ASF, Notarile ante-cosimiano, 20614 (Ser Antonio Ubaldini da

Firenze, 1486–93), fols. 33r–v, transcribed in Dario A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. Life and Work (Florence, 2005), p. 283, doc. V.23. The document is a contract by Lorenzo di Credi, drawn up after Verrocchio’s death in 1488, to complete the Colleoni monument. Divisions inscribed on a related measured drawing by Verrocchio of a horse may represent an initial plan for the piece molds from which the bronze was to have been constructed. The measurements along the horse’s body are not precise (some are longer than the inscriptions would suggest [Gustina Scaglia, “Leonardo’s Non-Inverted Writing and Verrocchio’s Measured Drawing of a Horse,” The Art Bulletin 64 (1982): 32–44, pp. 40–1]), and they conform to Vitruvius’s system of proportions, where the head forms the basic unit (the sixteen sections in Verrocchio’s drawing may derive from Vitruvius’s model of eight heads to the human body) (Carmen C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 22–March 30, 2003 [New Haven, CT, 2003], p. 269). It is possible, then, that these plans were adopted by Alessandro Leopardi when it came time to do the casting. On this, see my entry on Verrocchio’s Measured Drawing of a Horse Facing Left in Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini. Sculptor’s Drawings from Renaissance Italy, ed. Michael W. Cole, exh. cat., Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, October 23, 2014– January 23, 2015 (London, 2014), 142–4, p. 144. 4 See n. 68 in my introduction. 5 Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven, CT, 1997), p. 35. 6 Andrew Butterfield, “Monument and Memory in Early Renaissance Florence,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, eds. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge, 2000), 135–60, p. 140. 7 This is green porphyry from Lacedaemonian quarries. Suzanne Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan. Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince

NOTES TO PAGES 38–39

in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence, 1996), vol. 1, p. 122 n. 12. 8 According to Butterfield, the dark stone frame around the structure is not original; it might date from the eighteenth century when San Lorenzo was repaved; and the gray-brown stone around the roundel of the tomb slab and the apertures is probably post-Renaissance in date as well. Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 205. 9 Porphyry had been used before in Quattrocento arcosolia in Florence, but only as slabs for the tomb backs. Examples include Antonio and Bernardo Rossellino’s monument of Leonardo Bruni in Santa Croce and Desiderio’s tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, also in Santa Croce. See Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style (Cambridge, 1999), p. 182. Both of these structures would have been familiar to Verrocchio, and he may have worked as an assistant on the Marsuppini tomb. For convincing attributions to Verrocchio of parts of the Marsuppini tomb, see Charles Seymour, Jr., The Sculpture of Verrocchio (London, 1971), p. 114; and Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 24–5. 10 Susan McKillop, “Dante and Lumen Christi: A Proposal for the Meaning of the Tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici,” in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici, 1389–1464, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (Oxford, 1992), 245–301, n. 150. 11 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, pp. 186–7. 12 Ibid., p. 105, 129, 143, 172, and 178. Vasari records that these were the usual techniques for working with porphyry. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari On Technique. Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Florence, 1568), eds. Gerald Baldwin Brown, trans. Louise S. Maclehouse (New York, 1960), p. 29. For some primary source documents relating to tools used for working porphyry and other marbles, see Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 2, Appendix IV, pp. 391–7; and Agostino del Riccio, Istoria delle pietre, eds. Raniero Gnoli and Attilia Sironi (Turin, 1996), pp. 125–7. According to Butters, for craftsmen such as gem engravers, stone sawyers, and some stonecutters, working with porphyry would not have posed a problem. Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p.  121. Documents relating to the acquisition of tools for the construction of Cardinal Riario’s palace in Rome suggest Florentines were especially

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competent in working hard stones by the end of the fifteenth century. Simonetta Valtieri, “La fabbrica del palazzo del Cardinale Raffaele Riario (La Cancelleria),” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, ser. XXVII (1982), fasc. 169–74 (1983): 3–25 and Enzo Bentivoglio, “Nel cantiere del palazzo del cardinale Raffaele Riario (la Cancelleria): organizzazione, materiali, maestranze, personaggi,” Quaderni dell’istituto di storia dell’architettura, ser. XXVII, 1982, ns. 169–74 (1983): 27–34), cited in Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 204. On the acquisition of porphyry in fifteenth-century Florence (Rome was the primary site), see Angela Dressen, Pavimenti decorate del Quattrocento in Italia (Venice, 2008), pp. 46–7. Actually, according to Peter Rockwell, the greatest challenge in working with porphyry during the Renaissance was not the reworking of the material (because it had to be acquired from an ancient monument, usually from columns, flooring, or interior cladding), but instead the safe disassembling of the material from its ancient context. Peter Rockwell, The Art of Stoneworking: A Reference Guide (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 195–6. 13 Günther Passavant (Review of Charles Seymour, The Sculpture of Verrocchio, The Burlington Magazine 117 (1975): 55-56, p. 56) notes that the porphyry sarcophagus was made from fragments and cleverly disguised beneath the bronze decoration. See also Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 207, cat. 7. 14 Richard David Serros, “The Verrocchio Workshop: Techniques, Production and Influences” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999), p. 53; Johannes Nathan, “The Working Methods of Leonardo da Vinci and Their Relation to Previous Artistic Practice” (Ph.D. thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1995), p. 126; and Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 207, cat. 7. 15 Serros, “The Verrocchio Workshop,” p. 54. 16 Other Tuscan examples of limewood crucifixes include Crucifix, attributed to Orcagna, 1352– 60, San Carlo, Florence (see Luca Uzielli, Marco Fioravanti, Ottaviano Allegetti, Riccardo Ballerini, Marino Piva, and Renzo Ricci, “Il nuovo ancoraggio per il crofisso ligneo di Andrea Orcagna nella chiesa di San Carlo a Firenze,” in La scultura lignea policroma. Ricerche e modelli operative di restauro, ed. Laura Sperenza (Florence, 2007), 171–84, p. 71); a Crucifix from Badia a Passignano, attributed to Baccio da

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Montelupo (see Maria Donata Mazzoni, “Il Cristo di Badia a Passignano. Problematiche di tecnica artistica,” in L’Arte del Legno in Italia Esperienze e Indagini a Confronto. Atti del Convegno, Pergola, May 2002, ed. Giovan Battista Fidanza [Perugia, 2005], 319–26, p. 319); and the Crucifix attributed to Michelangelo at Santo Spirito, Florence (see Giancarlo Gentilini, ed., Proposta per Michelangelo giovane. Un Crocifisso in legno di tiglio, exh. cat., Museo Horne, Florence, May 8– September 4, 2004 [Turin, 2004]).The crucifixes by Donatello and Brunelleschi, by contrast, were made from pearwood, an uncommon species for Tuscan sculptures (Peter Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others. Construction Techniques in Early Renaissance Wooden Sculptures,” Polychrome Sculpture. Artistic Tradition and Construction Techniques, ed. Kate Seymour, ICOM-CC Interim Meeting, Working Group Sculpture, Polychromy, and Architectural Decoration, Glasgow, April 13–14, 2012, www.icom-cc.org/ul/cms/fck-uploaded/ documents/Polychrome%20Sculpture%20 Papers%202010-2013/POLYCHROME%20 SCULPTURE%20Vol%202%20Glasgow.pdf, 15–23, pp. 17 and 19). 17 Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others.” 18 On the technical construction of Verrocchio’s Crucifix, see Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini, “L’intervento di restauro,” OPD Restauro 7 (1995): 26–32; Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “An Unpublished Crucifix by Andrea del Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1101 (December, 1994): 808–15; Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “Il crocifisso ligneo del Verrocchio: letture,” Artista (1995): 30–53; and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “Il crocifisso ligneo di Andrea del Verrocchio: ritrovamento e restauro.” OPD. Restauro 7 (1995): 11–32, 97–101. For other examples of sculptures built up with stucco, see Ida Giannelli, “Il restauro del Cristo Ligneo attribuito a Michelozzo di Bartolommeo nella chiesa di San Niccolò Oltrano,” in Legno e Restauro. Ricerche e restauri su architetture e manufatti lignei, ed. Gennaro Tampone (Florence, 1989), 276–8; Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others,” pp. 20-21. 19 On the commission and history of the Silver Altar, see Butterfield (Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 218–19) and Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 115–21).

20 Mari Yanagishita, Jennifer Di Fina, Bruna Mariani, and Raffaella Zurlo, “L’altare d’argento di San Giovanni,” in Ori, Argenti, Gemme. Restauri dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure, ed. Clarice Innocenti, exh. cat., Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, September 30, 2007–January 30, 2008 (Florence, 2007), 62–77, p. 70. 21 Despite the common assertion that the silver Executioner was cast (Anthony Radcliffe, “New Light on Verrocchio’s Beheading of the Baptist,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi [Florence, 1992], p. 120), the recent technical study of Verrocchio’s relief revealed that it, too, was made by repoussé (Yanagishita et al., “L’altare d’argento”). According to the conservator of the Silver Altar, Mari Yanagishita, there are only three tiny details on Verrocchio’s relief that were made by casting: the left hands of the Executioner and the Youth with the salver, and the curls on the right side of the head of the Executioner (oral communication). 22 Mari Yanagishita, oral communication. 23 Pollaiuolo’s Birth of the Baptist, for instance, was made by repoussé but from a single sheet of silver, except for one figure. Yanagishita et al., “L’altare d’argento,” p. 70. 24 Verrocchio’s skills as a draftsman were singled out by Vasari in his vita of the artist, proof of which Vasari kept in his famous Libro de’ disegni. Vasari emphasized in particular that Verrocchio’s drawings were made “con molta pacienza e grandissimo giudizio” (with a lot of patience and great judgment). And he celebrated especially Verrocchio’s drawings of heads of young women, “con bell’arie ed acconciature di capelli” (with beautiful expressions and hairstyles), which, according to Vasari, Leonardo always imitated.Vasari was not the only major collector of Verrocchio’s drawings in the sixteenth century, for the vita also mentioned Don Vincenzio Borghini, philologist, historian, artistic advisor, friend of Vasari, and collector, who owned a number of Verrocchio’s drawings. According to Vasari, Borghini owned a design for a tomb for a doge of Venice, the Adoration of the Magi, and a head of a woman painted on paper. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, 1550, rev. 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878), vol. 3, p. 364.

NOTES TO PAGES 44–45

25 Bambach has made the intriguing suggestion that a sheet in Edinburgh may be a page from a sketchbook by the artist. Certainly artists associated with Verrocchio’s bottega kept sketchbooks, including Leonardo and Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, to the latter of whom a group of drawings known as the “so-called Verrocchio sketchbook” is generally attributed. Carmen C. Bambach, “Introduction to Leonardo and His Drawings,” in Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 22–March 30, 2003 (New Haven, CT, 2003), 3–30, p. 9. The verso of the Edinburgh sheet contains several inscriptions that have been convincingly compared to Verrocchio’s hand. On this see p. 26 and p. 260, n. 134. 26 This has been noted by Bambach,“Introduction to Leonardo and His Drawings,” p. 8. 27 Bambach has described the tonal range of black chalk as sculptural (Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 13001600 [Cambridge, UK, 1999], p. 56).Vasari and Armenini both encourage the use of black chalk for this reason, as Bambach has pointed out (p. 56). Cennino Cennini mentions black chalk in his treatise in which he compares it to charcoal, noting that with black chalk “you can . . . draw however you want” (“puoi .  .  . disegnia sechonda che huoi”). Cennino Cennini, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte. A New English Translation and Commentary with Italian Transcription, ed. and trans. Lara Broecke (London, 2015), chapter 34, p. 55. As Francis Ames-Lewis has pointed out, this suggests Cennini’s utter ignorance for the many uses of black chalk. Francis Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT, 1981), p. 53. On the uses of black chalk in fifteenth-century drawings see Claire Van Cleave, “Tradition and Innovation in the Early History of Black Chalk Drawing.” In Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper, Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 4, Florence, 1992 (Bologna, 1994), 231–44, p. 232. Artists before the last third of the fifteenth century were limited also in recognizing the possibilities of working with chalk by the restricted availability of paper. Paper mills were first established at Fabriano in the late thirteenth century, but paper production did not become widespread

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until the first printing presses were set up in Italy in the early 1470s. Jill Dunkerton and Carol Plazzotta, “Drawing and Design in Italian Renaissance Painting,” in Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings, ed. David Bomford (London, 2002), 53–79, pp. 54–5. 28 The attribution of this drawing to Verrocchio has never been questioned since Giovanni Morelli first suggested it in 1891. Ivan Lermolieff (Giovanni Morelli), Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Die Galerien zu München und Dresden (London, 1893), p. 350. 29 This has been noted by Bambach in Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Bambach, p. 249. 30 The drawing has been variously attributed to Verrocchio, Leonardo, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino. For the attribution history, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, trans. Susan Wise, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2003 (Milan, 2003), p. 76, cat. 1; and Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 242–3. 31 Early in the fifteenth-century artists tended to work on parchment, as paper was too expensive, but by the end of the Quattrocento the paper industry had developed sufficiently to fulfill the high demand for paper. Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, pp. 21–3. 32 On the technique of working with silverpoint, see Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, pp. 35–43. 33 To the best of my knowledge, it has not been noticed that this drawing was used as the basis for the head of Christ (in reverse) in the Uffizi Baptism of Christ, a figure generally attributed to Leonardo. The shape of the face, the curling hair, and the position of the eyes and eyebrows are particularly close. 34 Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 76, cat. 1. 35 According to Antonio Natali, the sky, Saint John, Christ’s loin cloth, the rocks behind Saint John, the front-facing angel, the drapery held by his companion, the palm tree, and the land on which the angels are situated were all painted in tempera; Christ and the angel in profile were painted in oil; and the landscape disappearing into the mist and all of the water were painted in oil over a layer already executed in tempera. Antonio Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli,” in Lo sguardo degli Angeli. Verrocchio, Leonardo e il Battesimo di Cristo, ed. Antonio Natali (Cinisello Balsamo, 1998), pp.

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NOTES TO PAGES 45–47

64–78; Antonio Natali, “La Natura Artefatta,” in Leonardo a Piombino e l’idea della città moderna tra Quattro e Cinquecento, ed. Amelio Fara (Florence, 1999), 139–48, p. 140. On the technical analysis of the painting, see Alfio Del Serra, “Il restauro,’ in Lo sguardo degli Angeli.Verrocchio, Leonardo e il Battesimo di Cristo, ed. Antonio Natali (Cinisello Balsamo, 1998), pp. 95–118. 36 Brown argues that Verrocchio worked on the painting in two distinct phases: the second campaign is represented by the frontal angel, which must have been done at the same time as Leonardo’s angel, in the mid-1470s. David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (New Haven, CT, 1998), p.  27. Natali attributed the angel in profile and the landscape background to Leonardo. He proposed that the leaves on the trees were executed by a nervous graphic hand – perhaps that of the young Filippino Lippi or Perugino. And Natali proposes that Botticelli may have painted the front-facing angel (a suggestion first made by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and repeated by Raymond S. Stites, Pietro C. Marani and Ettore Camesasca), but he also does not exclude the possibility that the angel was painted by Verrocchio himself (as David Alan Brown has suggested), based especially on the drawing style used in the underdrawing when compared with Verrocchio’s style. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, “Inizio di Leonardo,” Critica d’arte 2 (March 1954): 102–18; Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, “Inizio di Leonardo,” Critica d’arte 4 (July, 1954): 302–29, pp. 303–4; Raymond S. Stites, “La Madonna del Melograno di Leonardo da Vinci, I” Critica d’arte 15, no. 93 (1968): 59–73, p. 69; Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo. Catalogo completo dei dipinti (Florence, 1989), p. 42; Ettore Camesasca, Artisti in bottega (Milan, 1966), p. 429; and Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli,” pp. 64–78. More recently, Cecchi rejected the attribution of the angel to Botticelli on the grounds that by the time Botticelli was purported to have been working on the Baptism, he was an independent painter and thus unlikely to have accepted such a minor role. Alessandro Cecchi, Botticelli (Milan, 2005), p. 44. And in his Botticelli e l’età di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence, 2007), Cecchi makes no mention of Botticelli’s role in the Baptism (p. 120). Nicholas Penny claimed that the Baptism was executed by three painters “(four, if we include the deplorable hands of

God dispatching the dove from Heaven), one of whom was certainly Leonardo.” Nicholas Penny, “Cast from the Life,” review of The Sculptures of Verrocchio, by Andrew Butterfield, Times Literary Supplement 4957 (April, 1998): 3–4, p. 3. 37 The painting was first recorded at San Salvi by Francesco Albertini in his 1510 guidebook (Memoriale di molte statue et picture sono nella inclyta cipta di Florentia per mano di sculptori et pictori excellenti moderni et antiqui tracto dalla propria copia di messer Francesco Albertini prete fiorentino anno domini 1510, ed. Herbert Percy Horne [Florence, 1909], p. 20, referred to by Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli,” p. 93, n. 5). 38 Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli,” p. 94, n. 62. 39 Jill Dunkerton, “Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Workshop: Re-Examining the Technical Evidence,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 32 (2011): 4–31, p. 7. Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson have attributed a painting of the Madonna and Child with two angels (National Gallery, London), which, if proven correct, provides another case of Verrocchio’s experimental approach to painting. In its technique, it tests the limits of tempera, taking it as far as it will go in terms of intense, saturated colors without being an oil painting. Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson, “Andrea del Verrocchio’s First Surviving Panel Painting and Other Early Works,” Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1299 (June, 2011): 368–78, p. 373. 40 “[U]na testa d’una donna, finissima quanto si possa, dipinta in carta.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 364. 41 For example, the Eyckian Saint Jerome in the Detroit Institute of Arts. On this painting, which is related to another by Jan Van Eyck (or his workshop) that was owned by the Medici (Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 [New Haven, CT, 2004], p. 107), see Maryan W. Ainsworth, Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, ed. Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 14–July 31, 1994 (New York, 1994), p. 70; Barbara Heller and Leon P. Stodulski, “Recent Scientific Investigation of the Detroit Saint Jerome,” in Petrus Christus in Renaissance Bruges: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York, 1995), pp. 131–42, esp. pp. 133–4 for a discussion of the support; and Barbara Heller and Leon P. Stodulski, “St

NOTES TO PAGES 47–48

Jerome in the Laboratory: Scientific Evidence and the Enigmas of an Eyckian Panel,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 72 (1998): 39–55. 42 Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence, p. 120. There is also a convention in Netherlandish painting of heads on intermediate supports that were inserted into larger paintings on canvas, but almost all of those, if not all, were painted on tin leaf, not paper. The workshop of Rogier van der Weyden’s Sforza Triptych (c. 1444 or c. 1460, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels) was described as possibly being a painting on paper or parchment (because a fibrous structure was seen with a microscope), but Griet Steyaert has warned against interpreting the evidence this way, noting that heads painted on intermediary supports for Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments resembled paper or parchment under the microscope, but x-ray fluorescence later demonstrated this to be incorrect. Griet Steyaert, “‘The Seven Sacraments.’ Some Technical Aspects Observed during the Restoration,” in Rogier van der Weyden in Context. Papers Presented at the Seventeenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting held in Leuven, October 22–24, 2009, ed. Lorne Campbell (Paris, 2012), 118–35, p. 125. I am grateful to Carl Strehlke for drawing this to my attention. 43 Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Some Theories about Paper and Parchment as Supports for Early Netherlandish Paintings,” in La peinture dans les Pays-Bas au 16ème siècle. Pratiques d’atelier. Infrarouge et autres méthodes d’investigation, Colloque XII pour l’étude du dessin sous-jacent et de la technologie dans la peinture, Bruges, Settembre 11–14, 1997, eds. Hélène Verougstraete and Roger van Schoute (Leuven, 1999), 251–60, p. 256. On this technique, see also Lorenza Melli, “Sull’uso della carta lucida nel Quattrocento e un esempio per il Pollaiolo,” Paragone 52, no. 36 (2001): 3–9; Elena Parma, ed., Perino del Vaga tra Raffaello e Michelangelo, exh. cat., Galleria civica di Palazzo Te, Mantua, March 18–June 10, 2001 (Milan, 2001); A. Petrioli Tofani, “Pentimenti, metodi di trasferimento, manomissioni,” in Il Disegno. Forme, tecniche, significati, eds. Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Gianni Carlo Sciolla (Milan, 1999), 247–51; C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop, Theory and Practice, 1300– 1660 (New Haven, CT, 1999), p. 134; Maria

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Clelia Galassi, “The Re-Use of Design-Models by Carta Lucida in the XVI Century Italian Workshops: Written Sources and an Example from Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio,” in La peinture dans les Pays-Bas au 16ème siècle. Pratiques d’atelier. Infrarouge et autres méthodes d’investigation, Colloque XII pour l’étude du dessin sous-jacent et de la technologie dans la peinture, Bruges, Settembre 11–14, 1997, eds. Hélène Verougstraete and Roger Van Schoute (Louvain-La-Neuve, 1999), 205–13. 44 The painting does bear a striking resemblance to a terracotta model of Saint Jerome in the Chigi Saracini collection that has been convincingly attributed to Verrocchio by Giancarlo Gentilini (“In morte di Donatello: il ‘primato’ della scultura e la sua difficile eredità,” in Il Quattrocento, eds. Gigetta Dalli Regoli and Roberto Paolo Ciardi, vol. 3 of Storia delle arti in Toscana, 7 vols. [Florence, 1999], 151–75, p. 155; “Perugino e la scultura fiorentina del suo tempo,” in Pietro Vannucci, il Perugino. Atti del convegno internazionale di studio [Perugia ottobre 25–8, 2000], eds. Laura Teza and Mirko Santanicchia [Perugia, 2004], 199–227, p. 202, 213–14, n. 56; and in Il Cotto dell’Impruneta. Maestri del Rinascimento e le fornaci di oggi, eds. Rosanna Caterina Proto Pisani and Giancarlo Gentilini, exh. cat., Basilica and Chiostri di Santa Maria Loggiati del Pellegrino, Impruneta, 2009 [Florence, 2009], pp. 86–9, no. II.9). See also Tommaso Mozzati, Giovanfrancesco Rustici. Le Compagnie del Paiuolo e della Cazzuola. Arte, letteratura, festa nel’età della Maniera (Florence, 2008), p. 27, n. 140, and p. 33, n. 163. 45 The most important studies on the drapery studies are Jean Cadogan, “Linen Drapery Studies by Verrocchio, Leonardo and Ghirlandaio,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 46 (1983): 27–62; Françoise Viatte, Léonard de Vinci: Les etudes de draperie, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, December 5, 1989–February 26, 1990 (Paris, 1989); and Françoise Viatte, “The Early Drapery Studies,” in Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 22–March 30, 2003 (New Haven, CT, 2003), 111–20. 46 Françoise Viatte, who had earlier claimed (Léonard de Vinci, p. 74, cat. 16) that the drapery studies were preliminary studies for other works, has more recently (Viatte, in Leonardo

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da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Bambach, p. 288) expressed the opinion that they were independent works. 47 This has been proposed by Jean Cadogan: “Reconsidering Some Aspects of Ghirlandaio’s Drawings,” Art Bulletin 65 (June 1983): 274–90, pp. 282–3. Paul Hills has made the appealing suggestion that painters’ monochrome designs on linen for Flemish weavers and embroiderers may have inspired Leonardo to make drawings in this technique. Paul Hills, “Leonardo and Flemish Painting,” Burlington Magazine 122 (1980): 609–15, p. 613. 48 Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence, p. 106. 49 On the subjects of Netherlandish paintings on cloth in the Medici collection, see ibid., pp. 110–15. 50 “Andrea del Verrocchio, fiorentino, fu ne’tempi suoi orefice, prospettivo, scultore, intagliatore, pittore e musico.”Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 357. 51 Alessandro Perosa, ed., Il Zibaldone Quaresimale, vol. 1 of Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, 2 vols. (London 1960), p. 24. 52 Benedetto Dei, Memorie Istoriche (1470), 44v and 49r, published in Giuseppina Carla Romby, Descrizioni e Rappresentazioni della citta’ di Firenze nel xv secolo, con la trascrizione inedita dei manoscritti di Benedetto Dei e un indice ragionato dei manoscritti utili per la storia di Firenze (Florence, 1976), Appendix 2, 56–73, pp. 71–2. 53 “[I]l chiaro fonte/ d’umanitate e innata gentilezza/ che alla pittura e alla scultura è un ponte/ Sopra del qual si passa con destrezza/ dico Andrea da Verrocchio .  .  .” Luigi Pungileoni, Elogio storico di Giovanni Santi. Pittore e poeta padre del gran Raffaello di Urbino (Urbino, 1822), p.  74. It should be noted that similar praise was lavished by Santi on Vecchietta, Rossellino, Vittorio Ghiberti, “Andrea da Roma,” and Antonio Riccio. 54 “Nec tibi Lysippe est Thuscus Verrocchious impar,/A quo quicquid habent pictores, fonte biberunt:/Discipulos pene edocuit Verrocchius omnes,/Quorum nunc volitat Tyrrhena per oppida nomen.” Ugolino Verino, De illustratione urbis florentiae (Florence, 1636), p. 46. 55 “Nec minor est Phydia noster Verrocchius: uno/ hoc superat quoniam pingit et aera liquat.” Ugolino Verino, Epigrammatum libri septem, in Epigrammi, ed. Francesco Bausi (Messina, 1998), no.  23 (“De pictoribus et sculptoribus florentinis qui priscis graecis equiperari possunt”), vv. 17–18, p. 327.

56 Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura (1504), eds. and trans. André Chastel and Robert Klein (Geneva, 1969), pp. 258–61. 57 Charlotte Hubbard and Peta Motture, “The Making of Terracotta Sculpture: Techniques and Observations,” in Earth and Fire. Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, ed. Bruce Boucher, exh. cat.,The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 18, 2001–February 3, 2002, and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 14–July 7, 2002 (London, 2001), 83–95, pp. 88–9; and p. 126, cat. 12. 58 Günter Passavant, Verrocchio. Sculptures, Paintings and Drawings, trans. Katherine Watson (London, 1969), p. 26. 59 Radcliffe, “New Light on Verrocchio’s Beheading of the Baptist,” p. 120. 60 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, trans. and ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), p. 121. 61 The third kind of sculptors are those who work solely by addition, like silversmiths. Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, p. 121. 62 One document relating to Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas includes the phrase “per non lasciare quastarsi e perire la bozza et principio di si bella cosa” (ASF, Provvisioni, Registri, 172 [1481], fol. 2v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 300), which several scholars – following Fabriczy – have used to claim that Verrocchio had made a life-size model of Saint Thomas that was purchased by the Università dei Mercanti in 1482 to be placed on public display in the Palazzo della Mercanzia (Cornelis von Fabriczy, “Ancora del tabernacolo col gruppo del Verrocchio in Or San Michele,” L’arte 5 [1902]: 336–40; Irving Lavin, “Bozzetti and Modelli, Notes on Sculptural Procedure from the Early Renaissance through Bernini,” in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes, Akten des 21. Internationaler Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1967], 93–104, p.  100; and Edgar Lein, “Erlauterungen zur Technik des Bronzegusses und zur Bedeutung von Bronze im 15. Jahrhundert am Beispiel des Christus-Thomas-Gruppe von Andrea del Verrocchio,” in Christus-Thomas-Gruppe von Andrea del Verrocchio, eds. Herbert Beck, Maraike Bückling and Edgar Lein [Frankfurt am Main, 1996], 233–57, pp. 233 and 251, n. 7). However, Covi and Butterfield have rightly

NOTES TO PAGES 50–51

expressed caution about interpreting “bozza” in this way, arguing instead that it refers not a model but to an unfinished bronze statue (Dario A. Covi, “Reinterpreting a Verrocchio Document,” Source. Notes in the History of Art 12, no. 4 [1993], 5–12, pp. 7–10; Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 76, n. 28; and Andrew Butterfield, “Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas: Chronology, Iconography, and Political Context,” The Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1069 [April 1992], 225–33, p. 232). Nevertheless, Verrocchio probably did work from three- and two-dimensional models. Vasari says explicitly that Verrocchio made models for the Christ and Saint Thomas, and the artist must have made models given that the sculpture was made from bronze: “fattone i modelli e le forme, le gettò” (he made the models and the molds, and he cast them). (Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 362). Butterfield has suggested that the artist would have worked from small-scale clay or wax models of the figures draped with cloth and placed in a wooden model of the niche (Andrew Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” in Verrocchio’s Christ and St. Thomas. A Masterpiece of Sculpture from Renaissance Florence, ed. Loretta Dolcini, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 5, 1992–April 17, 1993 [New York, 1992], 25–35, p. 74). It appears as though Verrocchio used clay models as visual guides for his work in silver, a practice he could have employed for the Christ and StThomas (Christina Neilson, “Rediscovered Photographs of Two Terracotta Modelli by Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 154, no. 1316 [November, 2012], pp. 762–7). On the use of three-dimensional modelli by Quattrocento artists, see Lavin, “Bozzetti and Modelli,” p. 97. Benvenuto Cellini reported in his Treatise on Sculpture that Donatello used small-scale three-dimensional models (Opere, ed. Bruno Maier [Milan, 1968], p. 830). A contract dated 1464 between Agostino di Duccio and the Opera del Duomo for the figure that became Michelangelo’s David refers to what must have been an undersized wax model (Hannelore Glasser, “Artists’ Contracts of the Early Renaissance,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965, Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts [New York, 1975], p. 118). 63 Passavant, Verrocchio. Sculptures, Paintings and Drawings, pp. 59–60.

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64 Vasari describes this practice in the construction of models, though for marble sculpture. Vasari, Vasari on Technique, pp. 148–51. 65 For a discussion of the quality of pictorialism in Verrocchio’s sculptures, see Timothy Verdon, “Pictorialism in the Sculpture of Verrocchio,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence, 1992), 25–31. 66 This has been noted by David Alan Brown and Charles Seymour, Jr., “Further Observations on a Project for a Standard by Verrocchio and Leonardo,” Master Drawings 12, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 127–33, pp. 129–30. 67 On the technical construction of the Crucifix, see p. 266, n. 18 earlier. 68 Of all the media created in Verrocchio’s workshop, it is assumed that the master played the least direct role in the production of paintings. Technical and stylistic evidence suggests that paintings made in Verrocchio’s bottega were a collaborative effort, regardless of their scale, and judging by Leonardo’s contribution in the Baptism of Christ, Verrocchio depended on his assistants for significant input in his paintings. See pp. 6–7, 21, 45–46, 247–248n27, 268n36, 271–n68, 274n91. Even for small-scale drawings, Verrocchio appears to have collaborated with other artists. Brown has convincingly argued that the Nymph and Cupid was executed by Verrocchio and Leonardo. X-radiography and infrared reflectography have revealed that the drawing was executed in pen and brown ink superimposed over black chalk. Brown has proposed that the sketch was executed in two phases: the first phase was carried out by Verrocchio, who sketched in the figures using black chalk; the drawing was then fixed and elaborated by Leonardo, who reinforced the figures in pen and ink and added the plants and the rocky ledge. Leonardo appears to have attempted to complete Verrocchio’s slight chalk sketch of Cupid, for which only the head and right arm and hand are faintly visible today. David Alan Brown, “Verrocchio and Leonardo: Studies for the Giostra,” in Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, eds. Elizabeth Cropper, Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 4, Florence, 1992 (Bologna, 1994), 99–109, pp. 103–4. 69 A document records how Lorenzo di Credi had “painted an altarpiece of Our Lady and other things,” for which he had been paid independently, while in Verrocchio’s employ.

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ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 286, doc. V.27. The painting has not been identified, and it is not known whether it was sold as a work by Verrocchio or Credi. On the practice of assistants producing works signed by their master, see Martin Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist. Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market (1938), trans. Alison Luchs (Princeton, 1981), p. 311; Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, and Nicholas Penny, Giotto to Dürer. Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery (New Haven, 1991), p. 137; Nicoletta Pons, “Dipinti a più mani,” in Maestri e Botteghe: pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, eds. Mina Gregori, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, October 16, 1992–January 10, 1993 (Milan, 1992), 35–52; Anabel Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 76–7. This occurred also in sculptors’ workshops, for which see Margaret Haines, “Giuliano da Maiano capofamiglia e imprenditore,” in Giuliano e la bottega dei da Maiano. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Fiesole, 1991, eds. Daniela Lamberini, Marcello Lotti, and Roberto Lunardi (Florence, 1994), 131–42, p. 132. 70 Anna Padoa Rizzo, for instance, characterizes Verrocchio’s role in the workshop as that of a grand coordinator. Anna Padoa Rizzo, “Introduzione,” in Maestri e botteghe: Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, eds. Mina Gregori, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, October 16, 1992–January 10, 1993 [Milan, 1992], 19–22, p. 21. 71 See n. 28 in my introduction. 72 See, for instance, Brown, Leonardo da Vinci; and David Alan Brown, “The Presence of the Young Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Workshop,” in Verrocchio’s David Restored. A Renaissance Bronze from the National Museum of the Bargello, Florence, ed. Gary M. Radke, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, October 7–November 9, 2003, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 22, 2003–February 8, 2004, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 13–March 21, 2004 (Florence, 2003), 55–60, p. 55. The most important studies on

Verrocchio as a painter are Günter Passavant, Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler (Düsseldorf, 1959); and, more recently, Dunkerton, “Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Workshop”; Dunkerton and Syson, “Andrea del Verrocchio’s First Surviving Panel Painting”; and Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson “In Search of Verrocchio the Painter:The Cleaning and Examination of The Virgin and Child with Two Angels,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 31 (2010): 4–41. Other important studies include Bernard Berenson, “Verrocchio e Leonardo, Leonardo e Credi,” Bolletino d’arte 27, nos. 5 and 6 (1933–34): 193–214, 241–64; Federico Zeri, “Il Maestro dell’ Annunciazione Gardner,” Bolletino d’arte 38 (1953): 125–39 and 233–49; Konrad Oberhuber, “La problème des premières oeuvres de Verrocchio,” Revue de l’art 42 (1978): 63–76; John Shearman, “A Suggestion for the Early Style of Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 109 (March 1967): 121–7; Sheldon Grossman, “The Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate and Some New Paintings from the Circle of Verrocchio,” Report and Studies in the History of Art 2 (1968): 47–69; Craig H. Smyth, “Venice and the Emergence of the High Renaissance in Florence: Observations and Questions,” in Quattrocento, vol. 1 of Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations. Acts of Two Conferences at Villa I Tatti in 1976–77, 2 vols. (Florence, 1979), 209–49; Dario A. Covi, “Verrocchio and Venice, 1469,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 2 (1983): 253–73; Luciano Bellosi, “Andrea Verrocchio,” in Pittura di luce. Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento, ed. Luciano Bellosi, exh. cat., Casa Buonarroti, Florence, May 16–August 20, 1990 (Milan, 1990), 177–83; Everett Fahy, “Two Suggestions for Verrocchio,” in Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Mina Gregori, ed. Miklós Boskovits (Milan, 1994), 51–5; Franca Falletti, ed., I Medici, il Verrocchio e Pistoia. Storia e restauro di due capolavori nella Cattedrale di S. Zeno (Livorno, 1996); Brown, Leonardo da Vinci; Martin Kemp, “Verrocchio’s San Donato and the Chiesina della Vergine di Piazza in Pistoia,” Pantheon 56 (1998): 25–34; Antonio Natali, eds. Lo sguardo degli Angeli; and Luciano Bellosi, “The landscape ‘all fiamminga,’” in Italy and the Low Countries: Artistic Relations:The Fifteenth Century, Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Museum Catharijneconceny, Utrecht, March 14, 1994, eds. Victor M. Schmidt, Gert Jan van der Sman et al. (Florence, 1999), 97–108.

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73 See, for instance, the important work done by Dunkerton: “Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Workshop” and (with Luke Syson) “Andrea del Verrocchio’s First Surviving Panel Painting” and “In Search of Verrocchio the Painter.” 74 The classic studies of Renaissance workshops are Hanna Lerner-Lehmkuhl, Zur Struktur und Geschichte des florentinischen Kunstmarkets im 15. Jahrhundert (Wattenscheid, 1936); Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist; Camesasca, Artista in bottega; and Mina Gregori, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, eds., Maestri e botteghe: Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, October 16, 1992–January 10, 1993 (Florence, 1992). See also Thomas, The Painter’s Practice and Roberto Cassanelli, ed., La bottega dell’artista tra medioevo e rinascimento (Milan, 1998). 75 This has been noted by Eve Borsook, Review of Le ricordanze, by Neri di Bicci, edited by Bruno Santi, Art Bulletin 61, no. 2 (1979): 313– 18, p. 314. 76 According to Thomas, Neri’s ricordi indicate that the painter did not gradually build up a workforce of assistants as he established himself in the trade. Instead, she argues the fluctuation in the number of assistants over the period covered by the Ricordanze suggests that he needed more assistants at certain periods. Thomas points out that when Neri was commissioned to paint several altarpieces in 1459, only two assistants were recorded in the shop. Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 88–9. 77 Megan Holmes has observed that when Filippo Lippi left the Carmelite order in the 1430s, he had only one principal apprentice at a time in his workshop and “handled an increasing volume of work by entering into contractual relationships with established shops and independent masters.” Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi. The Carmelite Painter (New Haven, 1999), p. 151. Eleven assistants are recorded as having worked for Lorenzo Ghiberti on the bronze doors for the Baptistery from 1403 until June 1, 1407, probably for one year on average; it appears to have increased to twenty-one assistants for the period after 1407, probably up until 1415. Wackernagel pointed out that the first contract for Ghiberti’s bronze doors, dating from 1403, indicates that there were eleven assistants; by the date of the second contract, 1407, there were as many as twenty (Wackernagel, The World

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of the Florentine Renaissance Artist, pp. 310–11). Krautheimer noted, however, that several names are mentioned twice. Seven of the eleven named in the list of 1407 stayed on after that date. According to Krautheimer, this second list probably records the period between 1407 and 1415, suggested by the fact that artists known to have worked on the doors, such as Michelozzo, are not named in the list. Richard Krautheimer and Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 106–9. 78 For the documents, see n. 3 in my introduction. For the Christ and St Thomas, only one assistant is referred to by name, Giuliano d’Andrea; other workers are referred to simply as “workers” (“decto Andrea e i suoi lavoranti”) in a document of December 1487. This has been noted by Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 87, n. 72). 79 Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Dürer, p. 137. 80 William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo at Work: Bernardino Basso, Friend, Scoundrel and Capomaestro,” I Tatti Studies 3 (1989): 235–79, p. 244.The work of others hired by Michelangelo was equally varied (Wallace, “Michelangelo at Work,” p. 276). Though Michelangelo claimed that he did not run a workshop like other artists, Wallace has indicated that his workers fulfilled a wide range of tasks like they did in other botteghe. According to Wallace, the main difference between Michelangelo’s workshop and others was that Michelangelo did not have garzoni, only assistants (Wallace, “Michelangelo at Work,” p. 235ff). 81 Brown and Seymour, Jr. (“Further Observations”) have convincingly attributed a small drawing in the Uffizi to Verrocchio and Leonardo working collaboratively. 82 See n. 54 earlier. 83 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, pp. 366 and 371. 84 Vasari refers to Perugino as one of Verrocchio’s associates (“discepolo”) and claims that Perugino “studied under the guidance of Verrocchio” (“[s]tudiò sotto la disciplina d’Andrea Verrocchio”) in his vita of Perugino.VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, pp. 371 and 568. In his life of Lorenzo di Credi, Vasari mentions Perugino, along with Leonardo, as friends of Credi in Verrocchio’s workshop. Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 4, p. 564. On Perugino in Verrocchio’s workshop (it is often hypothesized that Perugino may have entered Verrocchio’s shop c. 1470), see Fiorenzo Canuti, Il Perugino, 2 vols. (Siena,

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1931), vol. 1, pp. 28–9; Zeri, “Il Maestro dell’ Annunzione Gardner;” Pietro Scarpellini, Perugino (Milan, 1984), pp. 12–19; Serros, “The Verrocchio Workshop,” pp. 232–5; Arnold Victor Coonin, “The Interaction of Painting and Sculpture in the Art of Perugino,” Artibus et historiae 24, no. 47 (2003): 103–20; Antonio Natali, “Nel giro del Verrocchio,” and Tommaso Mozzati, “Produzioni in serie, derivazioni e modelli: Perugino e la bottega di Andrea del Verrocchio,” in Perugino: il divin pittore, eds. Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini, exh. cat., Galleria Nazionale dell’ Umbria, Perugia and Centro Espositivo della Rocca Paolina, Perugia, February 28– July 18, 2004 (Milan, 2004), 81–7 and 95–103; and Michael Kwakkelstein, “Perugino in Verrocchio’s Workshop: The Transmission of an Antique Striding Stance,” Paragone Arte 55, no. 55–6 (May–July, 2004): 45–61. According to Canuti, a manuscript by Raffaello Sozi dating from the middle of the sixteenth century, today in the Comunale di Perugia, records that Verrocchio was Perugino’s teacher (Canuti, Il Perugino, vol. 1, p. 34). 85 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 371. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., p. 372. 88 Ibid., pp. 373–4. 89 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 6, p. 599. 90 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 370. 91 Botticelli is not documented as having worked in Verocchio’s bottega, but Hermann Ulmann hypothesized that the painter spent time in Verrocchio’s bottega before becoming independent, a theory that was rejected by Lightbown. Hermann Ulmann, Sandro Botticelli (Munich, 1893), pp. 15, 20–1, 35–7; Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1978), vol. 1, p. 22. Nevertheless, several scholars have attributed one of the angels in the Baptism of Christ to Botticelli: Ragghianti, “Inizio di Leonardo” (1954), pp. 303–4 and Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli,” pp. 64–78. Cecchi rejected the attribution of the angel in the Baptism of Christ to Botticelli on the grounds that he was unlikely to have accepted such a minor role, given that he was already an independent painter at the time when the Baptism was executed. Cecchi, Botticelli, p. 44. Benedetto Dei records that Botticelli had an independent workshop by 1470. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, vol. 1, p. 21.

92 Ghirlandaio is recorded as having bought some items from Lorenzo di Credi in a court case relating to the liquidation of Verrocchio’s property. Credi sold an item (“item che dipoi decto Andrea fu ito a Venegia”) to Ghirlandaio for six barrels of wine and another item for 18 lire worth of wine. The document was transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, document V.27. On Ghirlandaio’s early career, see Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, “La giovinezza e lo svolgimento artistico di Domenico Ghirlandaio,” L’arte 38 (1935): 167–98, 341–73; Artur Rosenauer, “Zum Stil der frühen Werke Domenico Ghirlandajos,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 22 (1969), 59–85; Ronald Kecks, “La formazione artistica del Ghirlandaio,” in Domenico Ghirlandaio: 1449–94, atti del convegno internazionale, Firenze,Ottobre 16–18, 1994, eds. Wolfram Prinz and Max Seidel (Florence, 1996), 43–60; and Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven, CT, 2000), pp. 23–66. 93 On Botticini’s relationship to Verrocchio, see Lisa Venturini, Francesco Botticini (Florence, 1994), pp. 53 and 261 n. 155 in my introduction. 94 An association with Verrocchio’s workshop is suggested by the convincing attribution to Biagio’s hand entirely of the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter Martyr, Catherine of Siena, Vincent Ferrer, James and a Bishop Saint, c. 1472, Szepmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, one of two paintings that Vasari had attributed to Verrocchio (Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, pp. 365–6). For Biagio d’Antonio’s early career, including a discussion of the Budapest altarpiece, see Roberta Bartoli, Biagio d’Antonio (Milan, 1999), pp. 23–47. 95 Alan Phipps Darr, “Verrochio’s Legacy: Observations Regarding His Influence on Pietro Torrigiani and Other Florentine Sculptors,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence, 1992), 125–39. 96 Giovanni d’Andrea is referred to as a garzone in documents relating to the palla. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 314, 316, 325, 329, docs VI.34.i, k, w, and bb. As Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 68, n. 209) has noted, Giovanni d’Andrea is referred to as “ista cho’llui” (with him) in two other documents (transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 323 and 327, documents VI.34.u and z), rather than as garzone.

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A document dated September 1478 relating to work Verrocchio carried out for Santa Maria Nuova refers to “Giovanni suo garzone,” perhaps this was Giovanni d’Andrea, though that would imply he had been a garzone for almost a decade (he is first referred to as a garzone for Verrocchio in 1469). ASF, Santa Maria Nuova, 4514 (Entrata e uscita, 1477–79), fol. 137v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p.  346, doc. VI.47.b. Francesco d’Antonio is recorded as a garzone in Verrocchio’s workshop in 1469. He is probably the same goldsmith referred to elsewhere in documents relating to Verrocchio’s bottega as Francesco d’Antonio di Veneri, including a document of 1470 when he is paid for silver for the soldering of the palla. AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1469), fol. 46 left side; AOF, VIII.I.50 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1460), fol. 62 left side; and AOF, VIII.I.52 (Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1470), fol. 6 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 316, 318, and 325, docs.VI.34.k, n, and w. Matteo di Masso is recorded as a garzone in Verrocchio’s workshop in a document relating to the palla from 1471, according to Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 68, n. 209), though he did not transcribe the section of this document. Giovanni di Bartolo Tonini is referred to as a garzone in a document relating to the palla (AOF, VIII.I.50 [Quaderno di cassa, July– December, 1469], fol. 65 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 319, doc.VI.34.o). A document relating to the shipping of an iron bombard to Pisa made by Verrocchio in 1484 mentions three unnamed garzoni. ASF, Dieci di Balia, Deliberazioni condotte e stanziamenti, 30, fol. 251v, transcribed in ibid., p. 349, doc. VI.50.b. 97 Gauricus refers to Leonardo as Verrocchio’s pupil in his De scultura (ed. Chastel and Klein, pp. 260–1), and Vasari (Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 371) mentions that Leonardo was a discepolo (associate) of Verrocchio. 98 The question of when Leonardo entered Verrocchio’s studio is a matter of debate. Some scholars have proposed that Leonardo did so c. 1466, when he was thirteen or fourteen, a common age to begin an apprenticeship. For a summary of the scholarly consensus on this point, see Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 7, and p.  176, n. 21. This theory is plausible because when Leonardo’s name was inscribed in the

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payment records of the Compagnia di San Luca in Florence in 1472, marking the beginning of his career as an independent painter, he would have had the usual six-year training period. Other scholars have suggested that Leonardo went to Verrocchio’s studio in 1469, based on the assumption that he accompanied his father to Florence. We know from taxation records that by 1469 his father was residing in Florence. His house was just behind the Palazzo della Signoria in the Piazza di S. Firenze, where the Palazzo Gondi now stands (Jens Thiis, Leonardo da Vinci. The Florentine Years (London, 1913), p. 29). However, Leonardo is listed along with other family members as a “boca” (dependent) in the tax records of Vinci in 1469 (for the document, see Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie rituardanti la vita e le opera di Leonardo da Vinci [Milan, 1919], no. 3, p. 2). As Brown has emphasized (Leonardo da Vinci, p. 176, n. 22), this record does not necessarily mean that Leonard was still residing in Vinci. For a summary of the scholars that hold the view that Leonardo was residing in Florence by 1469, see Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 7, p. 176, n. 22. A note by Leonardo in one of his manuscripts, alluding to Verrocchio’s method for constructing the copper palla for the top of the lantern of the Duomo, begun in 1468 and installed in 1471, suggests he was a member of Verrocchio’s workshop when the master was making the copper sphere. See n. 15 in my introduction. 99 The deed is dated December 13, 1465. ASF, Notarile Antecosiminiano 16826, c. 87v, referred to by Alessandro Cecchi “New Light on Leonardo’s Florentine Patrons,” in Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach, exh. cat.,The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 22–March 30, 2003 (New Haven, CT, 2003), 120–39, pp.  124–5. In his vita of Leonardo, Vasari states that the artist’s father, Piero, who was a good friend of Verrocchio (“molto amico suo”), took some of his son’s drawings to the master and that Verrocchio was suitably impressed by the sketches, so Leonardo was apprenticed with him.Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 4, p. 19. 100 ASF, Compagnia di San Luca, vol. 2, Debitori, Creditori e Ricordi, fol. 93v, transcribed in Beltrami, Documenti e memorie, p. 3, no. 5. 101 Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 68–9. 102 The first accusation lists “Lionardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, sta con Andrea del Verrochio [sic]”

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and the second “Leonardo ser Pieri de Vincio, manet cum Andrea del Verrochio [sic].” Both documents were published by Nino SmiragliaScognamiglio, Ricerche e documenti sulla giovinezza di Leonardo da Vinci (1452–82) (Naples, 1900), p. 145, documents XVI and XVII, and transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 275, docs. II.11.a and II.11.2. 103 See, for instance, Eugène Müntz, Leonardo da Vinci. Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science, 2 vols. (London, 1898), vol. 1, p. 36. The proposal has been repeated by Bambach in Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Bambach, pp. 9 and 228 (under 1476). 104 “Ma più di tutto fu amato da lui Lorenzo di Credi” (Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 372). On Credi’s early career in Verrocchio’s workshop, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi (Milan, 1966), pp. 11–32. 105 The painting was made between November 1473 and September 1474. ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 286, doc. V.27. It is not known whether this painting was sold under the name of Credi or Verrocchio. The note is puzzling if we regard Credi’s age in 1473 as fourteen or fifteen (suggested by his mother’s catasto declaration of 1480–81 in which she gives his age as twenty-one) because it is unusually young for an artist to be identified with a specific work of his master. Covi, however, has argued that the record of Credi’s age in the catasto declaration is incorrect (as it has been shown to be in other cases). Instead, Covi points to an inscription on the back of Credi’s self-portrait in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, which gives the artist’s age as thirty-two and is dated 1488, which would make Credi seventeen or eighteen when he painted the altarpiece while employed in Verrocchio’s bottega. Dario A. Covi, “Four New Documents Concerning Andrea del Verrocchio,” Art Bulletin 48, no. 1 (March 1966): 97–103, p. 99. Serros proposed that Credi was born in 1456 or 1457 and that he did not enter Verrocchio’s workshop until at least 1475–76, at about the age of eighteen or nineteen. His threeyear apprenticeship would have concluded in 1478–79, and by 1479–80 he would have begun his first year as an assistant. The next three years he would have worked as a journeyman (this would explain why he was paid

so little in 1480 and his lack of participation in works such as the Uffizi Baptism). Serros, “The Verrocchio workshop,” p. 265. 106 ASF, Castato, 997 (S. Spirito, Ferza, 1480), fols. 376r–v, transcribed in Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi, pp. 90–1. 107 ASF, Santa Maria Nuova, 5797 (Libro di possessioni dello Spedale di S. Maria Nuova segnato A), fol. 502 right side; and ibid., fol. 526 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 276, doc. II.14. 108 On the sketchbook, see Lermolieff (Morelli), Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei, pp. 350–51; Georg Gronau, “Über das Sogenannte Skizzenbuch des Verrocchio,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 17 (1896): 65–72; Sheldon Grossman, “An Anonymous Florentine Drawing and the ‘So-Called Verrocchio Sketchbook’,” Master Drawings 10 (1972): 15–19; Caroline Lanfranc de Panthou, “Francesco di Simone Ferrucci,” in Autour de Pérugin, Filippino Lippi e Michel-Ange, vol. 1 of Dessins italiens du Musée Condé à Chantilly, ed. Dominique Cordellier, exh. cat., Musée Condé, Chantilly, October 4, 1995–January 8, 1996, 3 vols. (Paris, 1995), 48–73; Johannes Myssok, Bildhauerische Konzeption und plastisches Modell in der Renaissance (Münster, 1999), pp. 113–32; Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci; and Pisani, Francesco di Simone, pp. 82–7 and 142–67. The sheet with the record about money owing for two putti is on Kunsthalle, Hamburg, inv. 21479. On this, see Walter Heil, “A Marble Putto by Verrocchio,” Pantheon 27 (1969): 271–82, p. 277. 109 ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 285–7, doc.V.27. 110 ASV, Notarile, Testamenti (Ser Francesco Malipede), 718, fol. 5r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 279, doc. IV.20. Credi is also referred to as the heir to Verrocchio in a claim filed in 1489/90 by Francesco di Giovanni, a woodworker, against Credi. ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 4513 (Atti in cause straordinarie, January 22, 1489/90–April 30, 1490), unnumbered folios, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 284–5, doc.V.25. 111 ASF, Notarile ante-cosimiano, 11633 (formerly L 123) (Se Matteo Lenzi da Empoli, 1486–89), fols. 96r–97v, transcribed in ibid., pp. 281–2, doc. V.22; and ASF, Notarile ante-cosimiano, 20614

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(Ser Antonio Ubaldini da Firenze, 1486–93), fols. 33r–v, transcribed in ibid., pp. 283–4, doc. V.23. On Credi in Verrocchio’s workshop, see also Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi, pp. 11–32; Gigetta Dalli Regoli,“La Madonna di Piazza:‘. . . Ce n’è d’assai più bella, nessuna più perfetta,’” in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Federico Zeri, ed. Mauro Natale, 2 vols. (Milan, 1984), vol. 1, 213–32; and Anna Padoa Rizzo, Franca Falletti and Luisella Pennucci, “Madonna di piazza,” in Medici, il Verrocchio e Pistoia: Storia e restauro di due capolavori nella cattedrale di S Zeno: Il monumento al cardinale Niccolò Forteguerri, la Madonna di piazza, ed. Franca Falletti (Livorno, 1996), 65–85. 112 Although Vasari refers to Francesco di Simone as “discepolo del...Andrea [del Verrocchio]” (Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 371), one must be cautious in giving too much weight to the terms used by Vasari. Zanobi Machiavelli, who was called allievo (another term for associate) to Benozzo Gozzoli by Vasari, was several years older than his apparent master. In that case, Nicholas Penny has argued that the term allievo appears to have been used for collaborators (“Pittori e botteghe nell’Italia del rinascimento,” in La bottega dell’artista tra medioevo e rinascimento, ed. Roberto Cassanelli [Milan, 1998], 31–55, p. 43). 113 In her 2007 monograph on Ferrucci, Linda Pisani has noted that although it is impossible that Francesco di Simone could have been a pupil of Verrocchio’s, given they were so close in age, nevertheless it cannot be denied that Francesco was strongly influenced by Verrocchio. She has proposed that before Verrocchio’s death, Francesco was merely influenced by Verrocchio. After 1488 it is clear that Ferrucci was connected to Verrocchio’s workshop via Lorenzo di Credi, as indicated by a reference to the painter in a sheet from the so-called Verrocchio sketchbook now in Hamburg that Pisani attributes to Ferrucci. Linda Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci: itinerari di uno scultore fiorentino fra Toscana, Romagna e Montefeltro (Florence, 2007), pp. 37–40. 114 “[E]sercito l’arte dello scharpello quando truovo da fare.” Quoted in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 87, n. 72. 115 “[È] dipintore qua e llà, non tien bottegha.” ASF, Monte comune, Copie del catasto, 84 (1480, San Giovanni, Lion d’Oro), c. 592 verso, transcribed in Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio, doc. 14, p. 344. Another version

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of the declaration is less specific, stating only that Domenico “has no fixed abode” (“Non ha luogo fermo”) ASF, Catasto 1017, II parte, 1480 (San Giovanni, Lion d’Oro), c. 573 recto, published in part by Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, 3 vols. (Florence, 1839), vol. 1, pp. 266–7 (p. 266); and Jacques Mesnil, “Portata al catasto del padre e dell’avo del Ghirlandaio,” Rivista d’arte 4 (1906): 64–9, p. 69. For a discussion, see Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio, p. 155. 116 It was common for assistants to move between workshops. On this see Annamaria Bernacchioni, “Le botteghe di pittura: luoghi, strutture e attività,” in Maestri e botteghe: pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, eds. Mina Gregori, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, , October 16, 1992–January 10, 1993 (Milan, 1992), 23–34, p. 25; and Harriet McNeal Caplow, “La bottega di Michelozzo e i suoi assistenti,” in Michelozzo. Scultore e Architetto (1396–1472), ed. Gabrile Morolli (Florence, 1996), 231–6. The sculptor Pagno di Lapo, for example, moved between the workshops of Jacopo della Quercia and Donatello and Michelozzo. Numerous accounts in Neri di Bicci’s Ricordanze record painters moving between workshops. There is evidence too of assistants moving between painting and sculpture workshops: two of Neri di Bicci’s assistants, Giovanni d’Antonio and Antonio di Benedetto, were employed on a part-time basis by Giuliano da Maiano to carry out some work on festival decorations for the festa di San Giovanni in 1461. Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 67, 86–7, and 332 n. 231, with further bibliography. 117 Such as his David (Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 451rº. On this drawing, see Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 81); Putto with a Dolphin (see Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 12); Putto on a Globe (R.F. 1870–446 and 447, Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre). 118 Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 446v; and Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, inv. 2241v. Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, pp. 78–9. 119 Musée Condé, Chantilly, inv. 20. See Pisani, Francesco di Simone, pp. 83 and 144. Gronau,

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“Das sogenannte Skizzenbuch des Verrocchio,” pp. 68–9, discusses some other examples. 120 Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 12. 121 Inv. RF 450vº, Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre; inv. 1975-6-12-16r, British Museum; and inv. 21 (15)v, Chantilly. The same figure is shown on a sheet in the British Museum (inv. 1952-4-5-1). See Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 81, cat. 22. 122 On the sketchbook, see Lermolieff (Morelli), Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei, pp. 350–1; Gronau, “Das Sogenannte Skizzenbuch des Verrocchio”; Grossman, “An Anonymous Florentine Drawing and the ‘So-Called Verrocchio Sketchbook’”; Panthou, “Francesco di Simone Ferrucci”; Myssok, Bildhauerische Konzeption und plastisches Modell in der Renaissance, pp.  113–32; Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci; and Pisani, Francesco di Simone, pp. 82–7 and 142–67. 123 Musée Condé, Chantilly, inv. 21, 22, and 23. 124 École des Beaux Arts, Paris, inv. 374. 125 One of the sheets, preserved in Hamburg (Kunsthalle, inv. 21479), is inscribed with the names Sandro and Gabriello, the brother and son of Francesco di Simone. This has been discussed by Linda Pisani, “The Exchange of Models in Florentine Workshops of the Quattrocento: A Sheet from the ‘Verrocchio Sketchbook’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 67 (2006): 269–74, pp. 269–71. 126 Heil, “A Marble Putto by Verrocchio,” p. 277. 127 Matteo di Jacopo da Settignano, who was paid in 1489 for his work on the Forteguerri cenotaph, is mentioned in the so-called Verrocchio sketchbook as having gone to Volterra in 1487. Gronau, “Das soggenannte Skizzenbuch des Verrocchio,” pp. 69–70. For the payment to Matteo di Jacopo for work on the Forteguerri monument, see Clarence Kennedy, Elizabeth Wilder, and Pèleo Bacci, The Unfinished Monument by Andrea del Verrocchio to the Cardinal Niccolò Fortueguerri at Pistoia, Studies in the history and criticism of sculpture, 7 (Northhampton, MA, 1932), p. 84, doc. 26. Benintendi, whose name was altered from “Benintendi” to “Intendi bene” and was probably Orsino Benintendi, with whom Verrocchio collaborated to make wax effigies,

and with whom Francesco’s three sons rented a workshop in via del Castellaccio after their father’s death, recorded in their catasto declaration of 1498. ASF, Catasto del 1498, Quartiere di San Giovanni, Gonfalone Vaio, Campione del Monte, filza 131 (no. verde), a c. 620. The document was transcribed in Cornelis von Fabriczy, ““Die Bildahuerfamilie Ferrucci aus Fiesole,” Jahrbuch der königlich preussischen Kunstsammlungen 29 (1908): 1–28, pp. 19–20. The connection between the sons of Francesco di Simone and Orsino Benintendi has been noted by Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 73. And Giovanbattista Bigordi, the younger brother of Domenico Ghirlandaio, who was also a painter, is mentioned in the so-called Verrocchio sketchbook as having purchased two terracruda putti from the workshop of Francesco di Simone and as having sold a knife to a member of the bottega. Pisani, “Exchange of Models in Florentine Workshops,” p. 271. 128 The location of Verrocchio’s house is recorded in his 1457 catasto declaration, published by Covi, “Four New Documents,” p. 101. Brown (“Leonardo apprendista,” p. 13) has pointed to a chapbook in the Biblioteca Ricciardiana of Florence (ms. 1591) fol. 175 recto, dated February 12, 1463 (1462 Florentine calendar), which refers to an artist called “Verrocchino,” whose bottega was located at the head of via Ghibellina. The document reads: “Tutto chuesto è paghato, chostò lire dieci. Chostò lire tre e mezo la dipintura a’ndre’ del verrocchino esta a cchapo a via ghibellina, lire sette e mmezzo chostò la scrittura, a paghare piero dei rici. Paghossi detti danari a dì 12 di febraio 1462.” 129 The document of August 4, 1471, is a contract between Verrocchio and Domenico di Giovanni di Ottaviano, weaver of cloth, and Francesco and Matteo, his sons, for the rental of the property at the corner of via dell’Agnolo, notarized by Ser Piero da Vinci, Leonardo’s father. ASF, Notarile Antecosimiano 16828, c. 176r, referred to by Cecchi “New Light on Leonardo’s Florentine Patrons,” p. 125. 130 Cecchi “New Light on Leonardo’s Florentine Patrons.” 131 Iodoco Del Badia, “Le botteghe di Donatello,” Miscellanea fiorentina 4 (1902): 60–2. 132 The contract with Donatello is dated 1454. Del Badia, “Le botteghe di Donatello,” p. 60. The architect of the early seventeenth-century palazzo Guadagni incorporated part of the old

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Bischeri buildings into the new design: the rounded arch at the far left of the palace belongs to the Bischeri residence, as is confirmed in a drawing of 1611 that records the wishes of the new owner, Alessandro Guadagni, to remove the coats of arms of the Bischeri family and of the Comune, and to construct a new doorway and window. Leonardo Ginori Lisci, I palazzi di Firenze nella storia e nell’arte, 2 vols. (Florence, 1972), vol. 1, p. 467; for the drawing see p. 464, figure 373. 133 Camesasca, Artisti in Bottega, p. 215; and Harriet McNeal Caplow, “Sculptors’ Partnerships in Michelozzo’s Florence,” Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 145–75, p. 148. 134 See Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, p. 18. 135 Filippino Lippi, Giusto d’Andrea, and Scolai di Giovanni all lived above their workshops. Bernacchioni, “Le Botteghe di Pittura,” p. 23. In the catasto declaration of 1481 Botticelli is recorded as “dipintore e lavora in chasa,” Cosimo Rosselli is referred to as “anni quaranta dipintore in chasa,” Botticini as “in una chamera nello studio,” and the painters Pietro and Polito Del Donzello are referred to as living and working in a “cameretta nella studio” (Bernacchioni, “Le Botteghe di Pittura,” p. 23). Botticelli did not keep a separate bottega; he worked in his place of residence on via Nuovo near the church of Ognissanti, as recorded in documents from 1473 and 1480. See Cecchi, Botticelli, p. 60. Filippino Lippi lived and worked in the same building, a casa corte, which consisted of several levels. See the inventory drawn up in 1504, published by Doris Carl, “Das Inventar von Filippino Lippi aus dem Jahre 1504,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 31 (1987): 373–91, pp. 384–9. Filippino Lippi’s bottega has been discussed by Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, p. 19. See also Padoa Rizzo, “Introduzione,” in Maestri e botteghe, p. 20. 136 This is implied by the contents of the Florentine workshop, which includes paintings and marble sculptures. ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 285–7, doc.V.27. 137 “[U]no modello della cupola.” ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia, 1539 (Atti in cause ordinarie, July 23, 1490–March 3, 1490/91), fols. 301r–302v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 286, doc.V.27. Another item mentioned in the same document, referred to as

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“una spera,” has been tentatively connected to the palla by Covi, who suggests it should read as “sfera” (Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 65). 138 Creighton E. Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve (Florence, 1988), pp. 71–6; and Margaret Haines, “Giuliano da Maiano capofamiglia e imprenditore,” in Giuliano e la bottega dei da Maiano. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Fiesole, 1991, eds. Daniela Lamberini, Marcello Lotti, and Roberto Lunardi (Florence, 1994), 131–42, p. 138. The document was transcribed in Doris Carl, Benedetto da Maiano. A Florentine Sculptor at the Threshold of the High Renaissance (Regensburg, 2006), vol.  1, Appendix of Documents, A, p. 446, doc. 8. 139 Caplow, “La bottega di Michelozzo,” p.  232. The Sienese sculptor Jacopo della Quercia appears to have worked in different materials in a single workshop, though not painting. For an inventory of his bottega, see James Beck, Jacopo dell Quercia, 2 vols. (New York, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 518–20, doc. 439. 140 See n. 32 in my introduction. For a discussion of the content of artists’ workshops based on inventory records, see Roberto Cassanelli, “Artisti in Bottega. Luoghi e prassi dell’arte alle soglie della modernità,” in La bottega dell’artista tra medioevo e rinascimento, ed. Roberto Cassanelli (Milan, 1998), 7–29, pp. 16–27. On other artists who moved between media, see Nicoletta Pons, “L’unità delle arti in bottega,” in Maestri e botteghe: Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, eds. Mina Gregori, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, October 16, 1992–January 10, 1993 (Milan, 1992), 251–70; and Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, “Leonardo e la scultura,” Lettura vinciana 38 (April 18, 1998): 9–39. 141 Bernacchioni, “Le Botteghe di Pittura,” p. 24. 142 See n. 35 in my introduction. 143 Interestingly, this situation did not always translate into creativity. See, for instance, the case of Neri di Bicci on which, see Megan Holmes, “Neri di Bicci and the Commodification of Artistic Values,” in The Art Market in Italy (15th–17th Centuries), eds. Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew, and Sara Matthews Grieco (Ferrara, 2003), 213–23. 144 Luciano Bellosi, “Ipotesi sull’origine delle terrecotte quattrocentesche,” in Jacopo della Quercia fra gottico e rinascimento. Atti del convegno di studi, Siena, 1975 (Florence, 1977), 163–79;

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Laura Martini, “La rinascità della terracotta” in Lorenzo di Ghiberti: Materia e ragionamenti, ed. Mina Bacci, exh. cat., Museo dell’Accademia and Museo di San Marco, Florence, October 18, 1978–January 31, 1979 (Florence, 1978), 208–24; Giancarlo Gentilini, “Nella rinascita dell’antichità,” in La civiltà del cotto: arte della terracotta nell’area fiorentina dal XV al XX secolo, ed. Antonio Paolucci, exh. cat., Impruneta, May–December 1980. (Florence, 1980), 67–99; Luciano Bellosi, “Donatello e il recupero della scultura in terracotta,” in Donatello-Studien (Italienische Forsungen, 3.f., XVI), ed. Monika Cämmerer (Munich, 1989), 130–45; and Bruce Boucher, “Italian Renaissance Terracotta: Artistic Revival or Technological Innovation?” in Earth and Fire. Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, ed. Bruce Boucher, exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 18, 2001–February 3, 2002, and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 14–July 7, 2002 (New Haven, CT, 2001), 1–31, pp. 1–5. 145 Broad manner engraving appears to have been introduced in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century by Francesco Rosselli, who may have become acquainted with its necessary tool – a burin with a lozenge-shaped section – while in Buda in the 1470s. David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550 (New Haven, 1994), p. 73; and Sean Roberts, “Tricks of the Trade. The Technical Secrets of Early Engraving,” in Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, eds. Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza (Kirksville, MI, 2013), 182–207, pp. 187–90. 146 Giancarlo Gentilini, I Della Robbia. La scultura invetriata nel Rinascimento, 2 vols. (Florence, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 93–106. 147 As early as the 1420s, painters such as Masolino began experimenting with oil on panel, a new technique that eventually replaced the older method of tempera painting. Ashok Roy, “Perugino’s Certosa di Pavia Altarpiece: New Technical Perspectives,” in The Painting Technique of Pietro Vannucci Called Il Perugino. Proceedings of the LabS Tech, eds. Brunetto Giovanni Brunetti, Claudio Seccaroni, and Antonio Sgamellotti (Florence, 2004), 13–20, pp. 14–16. But oil did not immediately supplant tempera; painters at the end of the fifteenth century (such as Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio) continued experimenting by using both. Jill Dunkerton and Ashok Roy,

“The Materials of a Group of Late FifteenthCentury Florentine Panel Paintings,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 17 (1996): 20–31; Sally Korman, “A St Francis by Botticelli in the National Gallery,” Apollo (2003): 42–9 (with an appendix by Jill Dunkerton, “A Note on the Restoration of the St Francis”); Roy, “Perugino’s Certosa di Pavia Altarpiece,” p. 17; and Catherine Higgit and Raymond White, “Analyses of Paint Media: New Studies of Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 26 (2005): 88–97 (with further references). 148 Alessandro Cecchi, Sandra Freschi, and Nicola MacGregor, “The Conservation of Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo’s Altarpiece for the Cardinal of Portugal’s Chapel,” The Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1151 (February, 1999): 81–8, pp. 82–3; M. Matteini and A. Moles,“Recupero di un pigmento modificato, la biacca di piombo, mediante un trattamento chimico,” in Metodo e Scienza. Operatività e ricerca nel restauro, ed. Umberto Baldini, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, June 23, 1982–January 6, 1983 (Florence, 1982), 253–6. 149 Cecchi et al., “The Conservation of Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo’s Altarpiece,” p. 82; and Nicola MacGregor and Sandra Freschi, “Introduzione al restauro delle opera di Antonio e Piero Pollaiuolo agli Uffizi,” in La stanza dei Pollaiuolo. I restauri, una mostra, un nuovo ordinamento, eds. Antonio Natale and Angelo Tartuferi, exh. cat., Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, December 4, 2007–January 6, 2008 (Florence, 2007), 73–85. Aldo Galli (“The Fortune of the Pollaiuolo Brothers,” in Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo. “Silver and Gold, Painting and Bronze . . .” , eds. Andrea Di Lorenzo and Aldo Galli, exh. cat., Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, November 7, 2014– February 16, 2015 (Milan, 2014), 25–77, pp. 37 and 49) has attributed the paintings in the chapel to Piero. 150 Sonja Brink, “Die Berliner ‘Verkündigung’ und der ‘David’ von Pollaiuolo,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 32 (1990): 153–71; Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, 2005), p. 71. On the attribution of this painting, see the recent discussion by Galli, “The Fortune of the Pollaiuolo Brothers,” pp. 49–50, and cat. 15, 206–9. Piero also used linseed oil for his Coronation of the Virgin (1483, Sant’Agostino, San Gimignano), for which see Daniele Rossi, “Restoring the Coronation of

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the Virgin in San Gimignano (including some observations on Piero del Pollaiuolo’s painting technique),” in Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo. “Silver and Gold, Painting and Bronze . . .,” eds. Andrea Di Lorenzo and Aldo Galli, exh. cat., Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, November 7, 2014– February 16, 2015 (Milan, 2014), 131–7. 151 Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, Alesso Baldovinetti: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven, CT, 1938), pp. 138–50 (esp. 146–7); Matteini and Moles,“Recupero di un pigmento modificato.” 152 Cristina Acidini Luchinat, ed., The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence (London, 1994), pp. 375–7; and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, “Benozzo Gozzoli’s Chapel of the Magi Restored and Rediscovered,” in The Early Medici and Their Artists, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (London, 1995), 125–52, pp. 127–8. 153 Luciano Berti, Alessandro Cecchi, and Antonio Natali, Donatello (Florence, 1986), p. 26. For another example of Donatello’s experimental approach – polychroming terracotta, see Roberto Manni, Andreina Andreoni, and Francesca Kumar, “Annunciazione Cavalcanti,” OPD Restauro 7 (1995): 185–92, p. 187; Andreina Andreoni, Fabio Burrini, Francesca Kumar, and Maria Grazia Vaccari, “I putti dell’‘Annunciazione’ di Donatello in Santa Croce. Vicende, ipotesi e intervento,” in La scultura in terracotta, techniche e conservazione, ed. Maria Grazia Vaccari (Florence, 1996), 246–54, p. 250; and Maria Grazia Vaccari, “The Cavalcanti Annunciation,” Sculpture Journal 9 (2003): 19–37, pp. 21–7. 154 On this, see Bruno Bearzi, “Considerazioni di tecnica sul S. Ludovico e la Giuditta di Donatello,” Bolletino d’arte 36 (1951): 119–23; Bruno Bearzi, “La tecnica fusoria di Donatello,” in Donatello e il suo tempo: Atti dell’VIII convegno internazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, Florence-Padua, September 25–October 1, 1966 (Florence, 1968), 97–105; Bruno Bearzi, “Un itinerario tra i bronzi di Donatello,” in Atti del convegno sul restauro delle opera dell’arte, ed. Annamaria Giusti (Florence, 1981), 95–100; and Brunella Teodori and Ludovica Nicolai, “Donatello, San Ludovico di Tolosa, 1422–25,” Kermes 25, no. 87 (June–September 2012): 7–17. As Artur Rosenauer has noted, the problems of gilding cannot explain the statue’s partially absent back or its hand that consists of an empty glove fixed to an iron rod.Together the evidence suggests that Donatello was inexperienced in

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bronze casting. Artur Rosenauer, Studien zum frühen Donatello: Skulptur im projectiven Raum der Neuzeit (Vienna, 1975), pp. 34–5; and Artur Rosenauer, “Orsanmichele: The Birthplace of Modern Sculpture,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke, vol. 76 of Studies in the History of Art (New Haven, 2012), 167–78, p. 176. 155 Giovanna Agosti and Rosanna Moradei, “Note preliminari sulla tecnica di esecuzione del San Giovanni Battista di Michelozzo,” in La scultura in terracotta. Tecniche e Conservazione, ed. Maria Grazia Vaccari (Florence, 1996), 217–24, p. 223. 156 Alan P. Darr, Peter Barnet, and Antonio Boström, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2 vols. (London, 2002), vol. 1, p. 96. 157 Stiberc, “La scultura lignea policroma del Rinascimento fiorentino,” pp. 199–202. 158 An anonymous sixteenth-century Crucifix (Badia a Passignano), despite its diminutive size (just 83 cm high), was made from more than twenty pieces. Maria Donata Mazzoni, “Il Cristo di Badia a Passignano,” p. 317. Baccio da Montelupo’s San Sebastiano (c. 1506, San Godenzo in Val di Sieve) was made from fourteen pieces of wood. Baccio’s Crucifix (San Marco, Florence) was constructed in a similar manner to his San Sebastiano. An anonymous San Sebastiano (Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, Florence) consists of ten assembled elements. Leonardo del Tasso’s San Sebastiano (1500, Sant’Ambrogio, Florence) was constructed from thirty pieces. See Stiberc, “La scultura lignea policroma del Rinascimento fiorentino,” pp. 208–9. 159 An early fifteenth-century equestrian sculp ture (San Cassiano di Controne, Lucca), sometimes attributed to Jacopo della Quercia, dealt with this in a particularly ingenious manner: the body of the figure down to the waist was made with a large peg at its base so that it could fit within a hollow carved into the top of the horse, which itself consisted of two hollow pieces joined longitudinally. Giovanna Rasario and Luigi Canocchi, “Sculture lignee policrome: modelli operativi di restauro (parte II),” in Laura Sperenza, ed., La Scultura Lignea Policroma. Ricerche e modelli operative di restauro (Florence, 2007), 57–70, p. 59 and 61, and figure 6. See also Giovanna Rasario, ed., Il Cavaliered a San Cassiano. Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello,

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Florence, March 31–June 30, 1995 (Florence, 1995). 160 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 2, pp. 333–4 and 398–9. 161 Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others,” pp. 18–19. 162 Edilberto Formigli, “Ghiberti’s Saint Matthew and Roman Bronze Statuary: Technical Investigations during Restoration,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke, vol. 76 of Studies in the History of Art (New Haven, 2012), 244–56, p. 251. For the ingenuity of Renaissance bronze casters, see Richard E. Stone,“Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting in Italy at the End of the Quattrocento,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal 16 (1981): 87–116; and Richard E. Stone, “Severo Calzetto da Ravenna and the Indirectly Cast Bronze,” The Burlington Magazine 148 (December, 2006): 810–19. For an unusually well-documented case of bronze casting, see Alfred Doren, “Das Aktenbuch für Ghibertis Matthäus-Statue an Or San Michele zu Florenz,” Italienische Forschungen 1 (1906): 1–48. 163 This argument has been made by Richard E. Stone, “A New Interpretation of the Casting of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes,” Small Bronzes of the Renaissance, ed. Debra Pincus, vol. 62 of Studies in the History of Art ( 2001): 55–69, p. 59. 164 Stone, “A New Interpretation of the Casting of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes,” pp. 61–7. 165 Deborah Strom, “Studies in Quattrocento Tuscan Wooden Sculpture” (Ph.D. diss. Princeton University, 1979), pp. 2–3.The hands of Christ in Donatello’s crucifix at Santa Croce were attached to the arms with iron cuffs before the layer of gesso was applied. Stiberc, “La scultura lignea policroma del Rinascimento fiorentino,” p. 205. The body and limbs of the crucifix in San Lorenzo, which Vasari attributed to “Simone,” a follower of Donatello but which Alison Wright has more recently attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo, were made separately and attached to each other with wooden pegs and tow. Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, pp. 90–1; and Umberto Baldini and Barbara Schleicher, “Antonio del Pollajolo Crocifisso,” in Metodo e Scienza: operatività e ricerca nel restauro, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, June 23, 1982–January 6, 1983 (Florence, 1983), 50–3. 166 Sean Roberts, “Inventing Engraving in Vasari’s Florence,” Intellectual History Review (2014): 1–22, p. 13.

167 Roberts, “Inventing Engraving in Vasari’s Florence,” p. 13. 168 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 197, fols 107–108v. Brunelleschi did share secrets with Taccola and suggested holding meetings where knowledgeable artists could exchange information (but the ignorant – namely people like Brunelleschi’s nemesis, the humanist Acquettino – could be left out). F. Prager, “A Manuscript of Taccola, Quoting Brunelleschi on Problems of Inventors and Builders,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1968): 131–49, pp. 132 and 141–2. 169 “E collo ingegno suo e con la pruova e sperienza di quelle, segretamente e con grandissime fatiche e tempo e con pensarle diligentemente, sotto colore di fare altro che quello che faceva, ne venne maestro perfettissimo .  .  .” Antonio Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi preceduta da La Novella del Grasso, ed. Domenico di Robertis (Milan, 1976), p. 67. 170 “[E] Filippo non gli [Donatello] comunicò mai tale pensiero . . .” Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 67. 171 Margaret Haines, “Artisan Family Strategies,” in Art, Memory and the Family in Renaissance Florence, eds. Giovanni Ciapelli and Patricia Rubin (Cambridge, 2000), 163–75, p. 168. Francesco di Giorgio struggled over whether to reveal the workings of machines and mechanical devices in his Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare (Treatises on architecture, engineering and the military arts). He notes that his own acquisition of this knowledge was labored, and his reward for sharing a design or instrument was too often ingratitude for the work that had gone into the inventions, especially among ignorant architects. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militaria, ed. Corrado Maltese, 2 vols. (Milan, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 492–3. This has been discussed by Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001), pp. 134–6. At the heart of the tension between concealing and revealing precious information was artists’ dependence upon visitors for the recognition of their ingenuity. To keep their patrons – and other visitors – interested, artists often withheld information to add to the mystique of their work. On this topic, see Christina Neilson, “Demonstrating Ingenuity: The Display and Concealment of Knowledge in

NOTES TO PAGES 63–67

Renaissance Artists’ Workshops,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 19, no. 1 (spring, 2016): 63–91. 172 Howard Saalman, ed., The Life of Brunelleschi by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, trans. Catherine Enggass (University Park, 1970), p. 129, n. 4. 173 Giovanni Poggi, ed., Il Duomo di Firenze: documenti sulla decorazione della chiesa e del campanile, tratti dall’archivio dell’opera, ed. Margaret Haines, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1909, repr. 1988), docs. 415 and 421. See further Daniel Zolli, “Donatello’s Visions: The Sculptor at Florence Cathedral,” in Sculpture in the Age of Donatello. Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral, ed. Timothy Verdon, Daniel M. Zolli, and Amy R. Bloch, exh. cat., Museum of Biblical Art, New York, February 20–June 14, 2015 (London, 2015), 45–74, p. 52. 174 Doren, “Das Aktenbuch für Ghibertis Matthäus-Statue,” pp. 26–7. 175 This point has been made by Eleonora Luciano, “A More ‘Modern’ Ghiberti:The Saint Matthew for Orsanmichele,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke, vol. 76 of Studies in the History of Art (New Haven, CT, 2012), 213–42, p. 234. 176 Stefania Agnoletti, Annalena Brini, Edilberto Formigli, et al., “Il restauro della statua bronzea del San Matteo di Lorenzo Ghiberti da Orsanmichele in Firenze,” OPD restauro 17 (2005): 47–70, pp. 59–65. 177 Formigli, “Ghiberti’s Saint Matthew and Roman Bronze Statuary,” p. 245. On this see Agnoletti et al., “Il restauro della statua bronzea del S. Matteo,” 47–70, esp. 59–65. 178 Luciano, “A More ‘Modern’ Ghiberti,” p. 221. 179 Francesca Nannelli, “Orsanmichele: Some Recent History,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke, vol. 76 of Studies in the History of Art (New Haven, CT, 2012), 314–38, p. 327. 180 Luca Boschetto, “Ghiberti e i tre compare. Un nuovo documento sulla fusione dei telai della seconda porta del Battistero,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 53, no. 1 (2009): 145–9. 181 Indeed,Vasari celebrated him as a bronze caster (better even than Brunelleschi and Donatello) in his vita: “Lorenzo era migliore maestro di loro nel getto.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 101. (“Lorenzo [Ghiberti] was the best master

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of bronze casting among them [Brunelleshi, Donatello, and Ghiberti].”) 182 Licia Vlad Borrelli, “Considerazioni su tre problematiche teste di cavallo,” Bollettino d’arte 87, no. 71 (1992): 67–82; and Edilberto Formigli, “La grande testa di cavallo in bronzo detta ‘Carafa’: Un’indagine tecnologia,” Bollettino d’arte 87, no. 71 (1992): 83–90. 183 This was first noted by Bearzi (“Considerazioni di tecnica sul S. Ludovico e la Giuditta di Donatello,” pp. 119–20). 184 Nannelli, “Orsanmichele: Some Recent History,” pp. 325–7. 185 Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 144 and vol. 2, p. 398. 186 Roberts, “Inventing Engraving in Vasari’s Florence,” pp. 9–12. 187 It has also been suggested that Masaccio made terracotta reliefs before joining the guild of doctors and apothecaries, which was associated with painters (James Beck, “Masaccio’s Early Career as a Sculptor,” Art Bulletin 2 (1971): 177–95; and Paul Joannides, “Masaccio, Masolino and ‘Minor’ Sculpture,” Paragone 38, no. 451 (1987): 3–24). 188 According to the Anonimo Magliabechiano, Donatello was a painter (Carl Frey, ed., Il Codice Maglibechiano, contente notizie sopra l’arte degli antichi e quella ed’ fiorentinida Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti scritte da Anonimo Fiorentino [Berlin, 1892], p. 77). See also Benvenuto Cellini, Opere di Baldassare Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa, Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Carlo Cordiè (Milan, 1960), p. 795, where he describes Donatello as a painter. Referred to by David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), p. 145 and p. 499, n. 9. Donatello is recorded as a member of the Florentine Compagnia di San Luca (to which painters belonged) in 1412 in a payment for his Joshua, perhaps because he polychromed some of his sculptures. See Poggi, ed., Il Duomo di Firenze, vol. 2, p. 77, no. 420; and Cheryl Korte, “Polychromed Quattrocento Sculpture in Florence,” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2011), pp. 132–8. Actually, it was Bernaba di Michele who painted the Joshua, but Machtelt Israëls points out that although Donatello did not carry out the polychromy, he would have supervised Bernaba’s work (Machtelt Israëls, “‘Sculptured Painting’ in Early Renaissance Florence,” in The Springtime of the Renaissance. Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60, eds.

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Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, exh. cat., Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, March 23– August 18, 2013 and Paris, Musée du Louvre, September 26, 2013–January 6, 2014 [Florence, 2013], 150–7, p. 157, n. 19). And Donatello made a cartoon for one of the stained glass windows of the Florentine Duomo. 189 Luca joined the sculptors’ guild in 1432 and the painters’ confraternity in 1442. Earlier, in 1427, he had enrolled in the wool dyers’ guild (see Korte, “Polychromed Quattrocento Sculpture,” pp. 45–64). 190 Ghiberti was called pittore by Vasari in the first edition of the Vite (This point has been discussed by Lorenzo Bartoli,“Rewriting History: Vasari’s Life of Lorenzo Ghiberti,” Word and Image 13, no. 3 [July–September, 1997]: 245–52). And Ghiberti and Vasari both mention fresco work that Ghiberti was involved in at Pesaro before making the bronze doors of the Baptistery (Lorenzo Ghiberti, “Commentario Secondo,” in I Commentari, ed. Ottavio Morisani [Naples, 1947], p. 42; and Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 223). Ghiberti joined the compagnia di San Luca in 1423. He also registered as a member of the Florentine goldsmiths’ guild in 1409 and 1446, and in the sculptors’ guild in 1432 (see Korte, “Polychromed Quattrocento Sculpture,” pp. 45–64). And Ghiberti made designs for other artists, for which, see Gary M. Radke,“Lorenzo Ghiberti: Master Collaborator,” in The Gates of Paradise. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, ed. Gary M. Radke, exh. cat., High Museum of Art, Atlanta, April 28–July 15, 2007, The Art Institute of Chicago, July 28–October 13, 2007, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 30, 2007–January 30, 2008, Seattle Art Museum, January 26–April 6, 2008 (New Haven, CT, 2007), 50–71, pp. 63–6. 191 Matteo Civitali, best known as a sculptor, is documented as a painter. Graziono Concioni, Claudio Ferri, and Giuseppe Ghirladucci, Matteo Civitali nei documenti d’archivio (Lucca, 2001), Appendix. This has been discussed by Steven Bule, “A Unique Partnership: Matteo Civitali and Domenico Orsolino,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence, 1992), 363; and Maria Teresa Filieri, “Matteo Civitali e Baldassare di Biagio ‘Pictores,’” in Matteo Civitali e il suo tempo. Pittori, scultori e orafi a Lucca nel tardo Quattrocento, ed. Maria Teresa Filieri, exh. cat.,

Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi, Lucca, April 2–July 11, 2004 (Milan, 2004), 78–93. 192 Arnold Victor Coonin, “New Documents Concerning Desiderio da Settignano and Annalena Malatesta,” Burlington Magazine 137, no. 113 (December, 1995): 792–9, p. 799; Louis Waldman, “The Mary Magdalen in Santa Trinita by Desiderio da Settignano and Giovanni d’Andrea,” Pantheon 58 (2000): 13–18, p. 17; and Marc Bormand, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, and Nicholas Penny, Desiderio da Settignano. Sculptor of Renaissance Florence, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 26, 2006–January 22, 2007, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, February 22–June 3, 2007, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, July 1–October 8, 2007 (Milan, 2007). 193 Ellen Callman, “Apollonio di Giovanni and Painting for the Early Renaissance Room,” Antichità Viva 27, no. 3–4 (1988): 5–18. 194 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, pp. 286–90; and Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers. 195 Enrica Neri Lusanna, “Madonna in trono col Bambino,” in Arnolfo: alle origini del Rinascimento Fiorentino, ed. Enrica Neri Lusanna, exh. cat., Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, December 21, 2005–April 21, 2006 (Florence, 2005), cat. 2.9, 242–5, p. 242. 196 Christopher Weeks, “The Restoration of Desiderio da Settignano’s Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce,” The Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 732–8, p. 735. See Roberto Manni, Andreina Andreoni and Francesca Kumar, “L’Annunciazione Cavalcanti: Donatello, Firenze, Chiesa Santa Croce,” OPD Restauro 7 (1995): 185–92; Annamaria Giusti, Case Studies in the Restoration of Medieval and Renaissance Painted Sculpture, forthcoming; and Anne Markham Schulz, The Sculpture of Bernardo Rossellino and His Workshop, (Princeton, 1977), p. 100. 197 John Pope-Hennessy, “The Madonna Reliefs of Donatello,” in his The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture (Princeton, 1980), 71–105, p. 105; John Pope-Hennessy, “The Forging of Italian Renaissance Sculpture,” Apollo 99, no. 146 (1974): 242–67; John T. Paoletti, “Familiar Objects: Sculptural Types in the Collections of the Early Medici,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake McHam (Cambridge, 1998), 79–110, pp. 81–5; Ronald Kecks, Madonna und Kind: Das häusliche Andachtsbild im Florenz des 15. Jahrhunderts

NOTES TO PAGES 67–69

(Berlin, 1988); and Anthony Radcliffe, “Multiple Production in the Fifteenth Century: Florentine Stucco Madonnas and the della Robbia Workshop,” in Renaissance and Later Sculpture in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (London, 1992), 16–23. 198 Giovanni Chellini, Le ricordanze di Giovanni Chellini da San Miniato, ed. Maria Teresa Sillano (Milan, 1984), p. 218. On the relief, see Pope-Hennessy, “The Madonna Reliefs of Donatello”; and Charles Avery and Anthony Radcliffe, “The ‘Chellini Madonna’ by Donatello,” The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 879 (1976): 377–87. 199 Giannelli, “Il restauro del Cristo Ligneo”; and Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the others,” pp. 20–1. 200 On cases of this, see, for instance, Margaret Haines, The Sacrestia delle Messe of the Florentine Cathedral (Florence, 1983); and Wallace, “Michelangelo at Work.” Two of Neri di Bicci’s assistants, for example, Giovanni d’Antonio and Antonio di Benedetto, were employed on a part-time basis by Guiliano da Maiano to carry out some work on festival decorations for the Feast of Saint John in 1461. Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, pp. 86–7. Close to Verrocchio’s circle, see the so-called Verrocchio sketchbook, whose contents suggest an artist moving between different workshops (for instance, making copies after Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Battle of the Nudes and ancient cameos from the Medici collection, as well as Verrocchio’s David), for which, see, Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. 201 Neri di Bicci collaborated with Giuliano da Maiano, Desiderio da Settignano, il legnaiolo Luca Mannucci, and the draper Mariotto Mazzi. Franco Franceschi, “La bottega come spazio di sociabilità,” in Il Quattrocento, eds. Franco Franceschi and Gloria Fossi, vol. 2 of La grande storia dell’artigianato (Florence, 1999), 65–83, p. 70. On the relationships between goldsmiths, spice merchants, and artists, see Alessandro Guidotti, “Battiloro e dipintori a Firenze fra Tre e Quattrocento: Bastiano di Giovanni e la sua clientela (dal Catasto del 1427),” in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini (Florence, 1984), 239–49. It was common for sculptors to have their bronzes cast by others. See, for instance, Donatello, who subcontracted for the casting of his

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work in bronze (Ronald Lightbown, Donatello and Michelozzo: An Artistic Partnership and Its Patrons in the Early Renaissance, 2 vols. [London, 1980], vol. 1, pp. 47–8); Lorenzo Ghiberti, who hired three bronze casters from Burgundy for help with the casting of his North Doors of the Baptistery, and possibly his Saint Matthew too (Boschetto, “Ghiberti e i tre compare”). Adriano Fiorentino was employed as a founder for Bertoldo di Giovanni’s Bellerophon and Pegasus, now inVienna; and Andrea Guaccialotti in Prato cast the first version of the Pazzi conspiracy medal from the cast provided by Bertoldo (Luke Syson, “Bertoldo di Giovanni, republican court artist,” in Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, eds. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephen J. Milner [Cambridge, 2004], 96–133, p. 108. See Wilhelm von Bode, Bertoldo und Lorenzo dei Medici: Die Kunstpolitik des Lorenzo il Magnifico im Spiegel der Werke seines Lieblingkünstlers Bertoldo di Giovanni [Frieburg im Breisgau, 1925], pp. 88–91; James David Draper, Bertoldo di Giovanni: Sculptor of the Medici Household [Columbia, MO, 1992], 176–85, cat. 18. Signed EXPRESSIT. ME. BERTHOLDVS. CONFLAVIT.HADRIANVS; and Draper, Bertoldo di Giovanni, p. 271, doc. 4). And Maso di Bartolomeo, who records in his Libro di Ricordi several references to casting works in bronze for other artists in the mid-Quattrocento (Flaten, “Portrait Medals and AssemblyLine Art,” p. 133). According to Syson, there are numerous cases where Bertoldo di Giovanni designed works that were executed by other artists, e.g., the terracotta frieze for the villa of Poggio a Caiano, designed by Bertoldo but executed by the workshop of Andrea della Robbia, probably after wax models by Bertoldo (some of it was done after Bertoldo’s death) (Syson, “Bertoldo di Giovanni, Republican Court Artist,” p. 108). Ghiberti makes reference in his Commentaries to having made and offered drawings and models as working guidelines to fellow artists (Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, p. 157. See Lorenzo Ghiberti, Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten, ed. Julius von Schlosser, 2 vols. [Berlin, 1912], vol. 1, p. 51). On the use made by other artists of Ghiberti’s designs, see Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, p. 207. When Guariente di Giovanni Guariento was commissioned in 1418 by the Opera of Orsanmichele in Florence to make

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two silver and enameled candelabra for the altar of Saint Anne, he was requested to conform to a design by Lorenzo Ghiberti (ASF, Arch. Or S. Michele, vol. 25, Libro delli Atti e Emanati dai Capitani di Or S. Michele, March 3, 1416–July 10, 1417, c. 42, July 30, 1418, and c. 44v, August 6, 1418; see Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, pp. 390–91, docs. 118 and 119). Mantegna provided drawings for goldsmiths and designed sculptural models (Alison Wright, “Mantegna and Pollaiuolo: Artistic Personality and the Marketing of Invention,” in Drawing 14001600. Invention and Innovation, ed. Stuart Currie [Aldershot, 1998], 72–90, p. 74). Artists sometimes provided drawings for medalists, such as Ambrogio dei Predis, and possibly Pisanello (Flaten, “Portrait Medals and Assembly-Line Art,” p. 129). Neri di Bicci gilded and painted sculptures by Desiderio (Weeks, “Desiderio da Settignano’s Marsuppini Tomb,” p. 737, n. 15. See Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze (Marzo 10, 1453–Aprile 24 1475), ed. and annotated by Bruno Santi [Pisa, 1976], docs. 306 and 369). And Brunetti notes that the practice of painters using materials such as glass, metals, or minerals in their paintings and the fact that these materials were used by several Florentine easel painters c. 1500 emphasizes the circulation of ideas about properties and use of materials among painters, glass manufacturers, ceramicists, and foundrymen (Brunetto Giovanni Brunetti, “The Workshop,” in The Painting Technique of Pietro Vannucci Called Il Perugino. Proceedings of the LabS TECH Workshop, eds. Brunetto Giovanni Brunetti, Claudio Seccaroni, Antonio Sgamellotti, Kermes quaderni, 17 [Florence, 2004], 9–11, p. 10). 202 Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio, pp. 27–8. See Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 1980), p. 413. On the guilds in Florence, see Alfred Doren, Le arti fiorentine, trans. G. B. Klein, 2 vols. (Florence, 1930). 203 The work also features orange wax in the arms of the cross for the halo of Christ. Jennifer Vatelot,“La Vierge adorant l’Enfant de Donatello, dite Madone Piot: étude et restauration,” Techne 36 (2012): 54–61, pp. 55–7. 204 This has been suggested by Vatelot, “La Vierge adorant l’Enfant de Donatello,” pp. 55–7. 205 Examples include Donatello’s Crucifixion (Museo del Bargello, Florence), Ghiberti’s St Matthew (Orsanmichele, Florence), and Luca

della Robbia’s frame for the bronze doors of the north sacristy of the cathedral (though Luca did not complete the task). Marco Collareta, “‘Aes Corinthium’: fortuna letteraris di un materiale antico,” in L’industria artistica del bronzo Rinascimento a Venezia e nell’Italia settentrionale, proceedings of the symposium (Venice, October 23–4, 2007), eds. Matteo Ceriana and Victoria Avery (Verona, 2008), 297–301; Marco Collareta, “L’ultima età dell’oro,” in Bagliori dorati. Il Gotico Internazionale a Firenze 1375– 1440, eds. Antonio Natale, Enrica Neri Lusanna, and Angelo Tartuferi, exh. cat., Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, June 19–November 4, 2012 (Florence, 2012), 62–9; and Formigli, “Ghiberti’s Saint Matthew and Roman Bronze Statuary,” p. 248. 206 Rosenauer, “Orsanmichele: The Birthplace of Modern Sculpture,” p. 176. See Bearzi, “Considerazioni di tecnica sul S. Ludovico e la Giuditta di Donatello,” pp. 121–2; and Bearzi, “La tecnica fusoria di Donatello.” 207 Stone, “A New Interpretation of the Casting of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes,” pp. 64–7 and n. 29. 208 For example, the Madonna and Child attributed to a follower of Donatello (Národni galerie, Prague), though not all the replicas were made in Donatello’s workshop; some were made years later. Charles Avery, “Donatello’s Madonnas Reconsidered” Apollo 124, no. 295 (1986): 174–82, p. 178; Anna Jolly, Madonnas by Donatello and His Circle (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), pp. 100–3; Marc Bormand, Donatello: La Vierge e l’Enfant; deux reliefs en terre cuite (Paris, 2008), pp. 9–11; discussed by Tommaso Mozzati in The Springtime of the Renaissance. Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60, eds. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, exh. cat., Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, March 23–August 18, 2013, and Paris, Musée du Louvre, September 26, 2013–January 6, 2014 (Florence, 2013), p. 183. 209 See n. 198 earlier. 210 Giancarlo Gentilini, “A New, Useful and Beautiful Art. Considerations on the ‘Invention’ of Glazed Sculpture,” in The Springtime of the Renaissance. Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60, eds. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, exh. cat., Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, March 23–August 18, 2013 and Paris, Musée du Louvre, September 26, 2013–January 6, 2014 (Florence, 2013), 188–95, pp. 192–3.

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211 Simona Cristanetti, “The Kress Madonna: Revelations of an Extraordinary Sculpture,” Techne. Centre de Recherches des Musées de France 36 (2012): 47–53. 212 Nicholas Penny, “Non-finito in Italian Fifteenth-Century Bronze Sculpture,” Antologia di belle arti n.s. 48/51 (1994): 11–15. On other artists who moved between media see Pons, “L’unità delle arti”; Weil-Garris Brandt, “Leonardo e la scultura.” 213 These include his Flagellation relief in Perugia, his Jerome in the Wilderness in the Kress collection at the NGA, and much of the Deposition (1470s) for Santa Maria del Carmine. Penny notes that Francesco di Giorgio went as far as to use tools to create a more unfinished appearance in the Deposition where a punch has been used to decrease the legibility of the angels flying around the cross. According to Penny, Francesco did this “to enhance an effect which the process of casting itself often produced.” Penny has also pointed to the traces of a claw chisel in the background of Desiderio’s St Jerome in the Wilderness (NGA, WA) as an equivalent of this in marble. Penny, “Non-Finito,” pp. 13–14. On Donatello’s

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“non-finito,” see also Valentino Martinelli, “Il non-finito di Donatello,” in Umberto Baldini et al., eds., Donatello e il suo tempo,VIII Convegno Internazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1966 (Florence, 1968), 179–94. 214 Peter Dent, “Chellini’s Ears and the Diagnosis of Technique,” in Una insalata più erbe. A Festschrift for Patricia Lee Rubin, eds. Jim Harris, Scott Nethersole, and Per Rumberg (London, 2011), 138–50, p. 144. 215 Jeanette Kohl, “Vollkommen ähnlich. Der Index als Grundlage des Renaissanceporträts,” in Similtudo. Konzepte der Ähnlichkeit in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, eds. Martin Gaier, Jeanette Kohl, and Alberto Saviello (Munich and Paderborn, 2012), 181–207. 216 Jeanette Kohl, “Casting Renaissance Florence: The Bust of Giovanni de’Medici and Indexical Portraiture,” in Carvings, Casts & Collectors. The Art of Renaissance Sculpture, eds. Peta Motture, Emma Jones, and Dimitrios Zikos (London, 2013), 58–71, p. 69. 217 Charles Avery, “La cera sempre aspetta. Wax Sketch Models for Sculpture.” Apollo 119 (1984): 166–76.

2: VERROCCHIO’S MEDICI TOMB: ART AS TREATISE 1 Leonardo Bruni, Leonardi Bruni arretini epistolarum libri VIII, eds. Lorenzo Mehus, Bernardo Paperini, and Giuseppe Rigacci, 2 vols. (Florence, 1741), vol. 2, Book 6, letter 5, p. 46, trans. Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, CT, 2007), p. 36. For a discussion of the quotation (from a letter to Poggio Bracciolini about Donatello and Michelozzo’s Aragazzi tomb), see Ronald W. Lightbown, Donatello & Michelozzo. An Artistic Partnership and Its Patrons in the Early Renaissance, 2 vols. (London, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 128–33. 2 Most scholars attribute the tomb to Verrocchio, but some have attributed it in part (or entirely) to Leonardo. For this latter view, see David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius (New Haven, CT, 1998), pp. 65–67; and Adolfo Venturi, La Scultura del Cinquecento, vol. 10 of Storia dell’arte italiana, 11 vols. (Milan, 1901–75), Part I, p. 19. 3 The most important interpretations of the tomb are Günther Passavant, Verrocchio. Sculptures,

Paintings and Drawings, trans. Katherine Watson (London, 1969), pp. 12–14; Charles Seymour, Jr., The Sculpture of Verrocchio (Greenwich, CT, 1971), pp. 51–55, 161–62; Piero Adorno, Il Verrocchio. Nuove proposte nella civilità artistica del tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence 1991), pp. 65–70; Pietro Ruschi,“Lorenzo a San Lorenzo,” in L’Architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, eds. Gabriele Morolli and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, exh. cat., Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, April 8–July 26, 1992 (Florence, 1992), pp. 117–18; Wendy Stedman Sheard, “Verrocchio’s Medici tomb and the language of materials: With a postscript on his legacy in Venice,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence, 1992), 63–90; Christine M. Sperling, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tombs,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Giofreddi (Florence, 1992), 51–61; Carlo Del Bravo, “Lorenzo e il monumento ‘patri patruoque,’” Artista (1993):

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128–37; and Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven, 1997), pp. 33–55 and 207–09. For complete bibliography on the tomb up to 1997, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 209 (the only significant publication on the tomb post-1997 is Dario A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. Life and Work [Florence, 2005], pp. 89–98). 4 In 1465, King Louis XI of France granted Piero de’ Medici the right to include a blue palla with the royal lily in the Medici coat of arms (ASF, Diplomatico Mediceo, May 1465; and Ricordi del Magnifico, trans.William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Called the Magnificent, rev. Thomas Roscoe (London, 1985), Appendix X, p. 425). Below the lower two conch shells is a flattened space cut in a V-shape with an irregular arched top into which a now-missing element was placed. Serros has suggested a three-dimensional lily, possibly made of cast bronze, was originally placed there (noting the staining of the stone). Richard David Serros, “The Verrocchio workshop: Techniques, production and influences,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999, p. 55. 5 Verrocchio’s brother Tommaso identifies the green stone as “serpentino” in his inventory of 1496 (modern style) (Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1, fol. 43r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28 ); and Giorgio Vasari (Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. 1550; revised 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878), vol. 3, p. 362) simply says the sarcophagus is made from porphyry (“una cassa di porfido”). According to Suzanne Butters (The Triumph of Vulcan. Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence, 1996), vol. 1, p. 122, n. 12), “serpentino” is sometimes used to refer to green porphyry that came from Lacedaemonian quarries in Greece and is, geologically speaking, porphyry. Peter Cannon-Brookes (“Verrocchio Problems,” Apollo 99 (January 1974): 8–19, pp. 8–9) thought it surprising that such a cheap material (serpentine) would be used and proposed that it was “green porphyry.” John PopeHennessy (Italian Renaissance Sculpture (London, 1971), p. 42) also called it “green porphyry.” 6 In the disk on the chapel side, the inscription reads: “PETRO / ETIOHANNIDE / MEDICIS / COSMIPPF / HMHNS.” On the sacristy side, the inscription reads: “PET VIX /

ANLIIIMVDXV / IOHAN / ANXLIIMIIII / DXXVIII.” Christine Sperling established that the inscription “HMHNS” is an abbreviation for “Hoc monumentum heredes non sequitur,” a common feature of classical Roman tombs. Given the peculiar classicism of the forms of the inscriptions and their content, Sperling has proposed that they were composed by Donato Acciaiuoli. Sperling, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tombs,” p. 56–57; on Acciaiuoli, see n. 26. 7 Howard Saalman (“San Lorenzo: The 1434 Chapel Project,” Burlington Magazine 120 (1978): 358–61, p. 363) made this suggestion. Dale Kent (The Rise of the Medici [Oxford, 1978], pp. 70–71) points out that the Medici were careful to give the impression, at least, of working with others and not alone, though most, if not all, of the eight other families involved in the project were Medici allies. 8 On the history of the construction of San Lorenzo (including the chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian) and Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici’s involvement, see Walter Paatz and Elisabeth Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz ein kunstgeschichtesliches Handbuch, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1952–55), vol. 2, p. 465–66; Eugenio Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Complete Works, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York, 1981; Milan, 2002), pp. 179–86 and p. 353, n. 5; Pietro Ruschi, “La sagrestia vecchia,” in San Lorenzo 393– 1993. L’architettura. Le vicende della fabbrica, eds. Gabriele Morolli and Pietro Ruschi (Florence, 1993), 41–46, p. 41; and Howard Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Buildings (London, 1993), p. 116. On the construction of the chapel, see Domenico Moreni, Continuazione delle memorie istoriche dell’Ambrosiana R. Basilica di S. Lorenzo di Firenze, 2 vols. (Florence, 1816–17), vol. 2, p. 361f, doc. VII. Piero Roselli (“Brunelleschi in San Lorenzo. Contributi alla cronologia dell’edificazione,” Antichità viva 18, no. 2 [1979]: 36–43, p. 38; and L’edificazione della basilica di S. Lorenzo. Una vicenda di importanza urbanistica [Florence, 1980], pp. 17–18) proposes that construction of the chapel of Cosmas and Damian was probably begun at the same time as that of the Old Sacristy (1419/20), and both were probably completed in 1428/29. Caroline Elam (“Cosimo de’ Medici and San Lorenzo,” in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici, 1389–1464. Essays in Commemoration of the 600th anniversary of Cosimo de’ Medici’s birth, ed. Francis AmesLewis [Oxford, 1992], 157–80, p. 169) claims

NOTES TO PAGES 80–83

that the chapel and Old Sacristy were finished before Giovanni di Bicci’s death in 1429, citing the date on the lantern’s baldacchino on the Old Sacristy as proof. 9 Francesco Caglioti, “La tomba verrocchiesca dei ‘cosmiadi’ e la basilica di San Lorenzo: antefatti e primi successi,” Annali della scuola normale superiore di Pisa series 4, 1 (1996): 127–54, p. 129 and pp. 138–39, ns. 9 and 10. 10 John Pope-Hennessy, Günther Passavant, and Andrew Butterfield all proposed that the choice of materials was in part dictated by its location within an arch leading to the Old Sacristy. Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, p. 42; Passavant, Verrocchio, p. 14; and Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 54–55. Adorno (Il Verrocchio, p. 67) emphasized the tomb’s placement between two distinct spaces as one its most novel features. 11 “Della qual opera [the tomb of Giovanni and Piero] non si può, nè di bronzo nè di getto, far meglio; massimamente avendo egli in un medesimo tempo mostrato l’ingegno suo nell’architettura, per aver la detta sepoltura collocata nell’apertura d’una finestra larga braccia cinque e alta dieci in circa, e posta sopra un basamento che divide la detta cappella del Sagramento dalla sagrestia vecchia.” VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, p. 362. 12 Caglioti, “La tomba verrocchiesca dei ‘cosmiadi’,” p. 127. Caglioti (p. 132) argues that probably after the construction of Verrocchio’s tomb, Lorenzo’s remains were transferred to the crypt. This puts to rest the proposal by some scholars that the arch was the original doorway by Brunelleschi into the Old Sacristy, and the adjacent door, which now serves as the entrance, was a blind door opened up after the construction of Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero. See, for, instance, Peter CannonBrookes, “Verrocchio Problems,” Apollo 99 (January 1974): 8–19, p. 11; and Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 84. 13 In its evocation of reliquaries, Verrocchio’s monument also points to the reliquary treasury donated by the Medici and kept in the altar decorated with Brunelleschi’s Sacrifice of Isaac competition panel in the Old Sacristy. VasariMilanesi, vol. 2, p. 336. 14 Verrocchio’s brother, Tommaso, mentions the tomb of Cosimo in a 1496 (modern style) inventory of works by the artist: “Per la sepoltura di Chosimo appiè del’altare magiore in San

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Lorenzo.” (Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1, fol. 43r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc. VI.28). On the attribution to Verrocchio, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 35. 15 “[A]vesse tutta una chiesa per larghissimo sepolcro.” Paolo Giovio, quoted in Moreni, Continuazione, vol. 1, p. 113. 16 Moreni, Continuazione, vol. 2, pp. 345–49; Piero Ginori-Conti, La Basilica di San Lorenzo (Florence, 1940), pp. 240–45 (esp. 243); Sperling, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tombs,” pp. 54–55; Janis Clearfield, “The Tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici in San Lorenzo,” Rutgers Art Review 2 (1981): 13–30, p. 25; and Elam, “Cosimo de’ Medici and San Lorenzo,” pp. 157–80. 17 Ida Cardellini, Desiderio da Settignano (Milan, 1962), p. 222. 18 Andrew Butterfield and Caroline Elam, with a contribution from Victor Coonin, “Desiderio da Settignano’s Tabernacle of the Sacrament,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 43, no.s 2/3 (1999): 333–57, pp. 335 and 337. 19 Seymour, Sculpture of Verrocchio, pp. 53–54. Maud Cruttwell (Verrocchio [London, 1904], p. 79) recognized that the chapel side was the view from which the tomb was seen “to best advantage.” 20 Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 49; and Butterfield and Elam, “Desiderio da Settignano’s Tabernacle of the Sacrament,” p. 337. 21 In fact, this part of the tabernacle has been convincingly attributed toVerrocchio by Francesco Caglioti (“Da una costola di Desiderio: Due Marmi Giovanili del Verrocchio,” in Desiderio da Settignano. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Firenze and Villa I Tatti,The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Settignano, 9–12 maggio 2007, eds. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, Joseph Connors, Alessandro Nova and Gerhard Wolf [Venice, 2011], 123–150, pp. 126–27). 22 Luisa Becherucci, Donatello. I pergami di San Lorenzo (Florence, 1979), p. 3; Irving Lavin, “Donatellos Kanzeln in San Lorenzo und das Wiederaufleben frühchristlicher Gebrauche: ein Nachwort,” in Donatello-Studien, ed. Monika Cämmerer (Munich, 1989), 155–69; Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, pp. 167–75. See also Volker Herzner, “Die Kanzeln Donatellos

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in San Lorenzo,” Münchner Jahrbuch 23 (1972): 101–64, pp. 101–03. 23 Andrew Butterfield, “Documents for the Pulpits of San Lorenzo, Florence,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994): 147–53. 24 Moreni, Continuazione, vol. 1, p. 19 n. 1. 25 The source for this sum is given in Alison M. Brown, “Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, 1430– 1476: A radical alternative to elder Medicean supremacy?” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 81–103, p. 85, n. 23. 26 Francis W. Kent, “‘Un paradiso habitato da diavoli’: Ties of loyalty and patronage in the society of Medicean Florence,” in Le radici cristiane di Firenze, eds. Anna Benvenuti, Franco Cardini, and Elena Giannarelli (Florence, 1994), 183–210, pp. 207–08. 27 Robert Gaston, “Liturgy and Patronage in San Lorenzo, Florence, 1350–1650,” in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Art, eds. Francis W. Kent and Patricia Simons (Oxford, 1987), 111–33, pp. 123–27; and Kent, “Un paradiso habitato da diavoli’,” pp. 208–09. 28 Kent, “Un paradiso habitato da diavoli’,” p. 208. Butterfield (Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 51) also notes that the Medici provided the olive and palm fronds for Palm Sunday celebrations, which were kept in the Old Sacristy and which he has connected to the decoration of the marble frame of Verrocchio’s tomb. 29 Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 1992), p. 188. 30 “[Q]uasi che fosse chiamato a vedere una maraviglia del Mondo, vi concorse tutto Firenze.” Quoted by Ferdinando Leopoldo Del Migliore, Firenze città nobilissima illustrata (Florence, 1684), p. 170; and Domenico Moreni (Descrizione della Gran Cappella delle Pietre Dure e della Sagrestia Vecchia eretta da Filippo di Ser Brunellesco situate ambedue nell’Imp. Basilica di San Lorenzo di Firenze [Florence, 1813], p. 65). Unfortunately, neither Migliore nor Moreni identify the manuscript source. 31 Naldo Naldi, Epigrammaton Liber (Budapest, 1943), p. 3. Butterfield (Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 47) was the first to cite this poem in relation to the tomb. 32 The funeral is described by Marco Parenti in a letter (Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo xv ai figliuoli esuli, ed. Cesare Guasti [Florence, 1877], pp. 607–10). See also Sharon T. Strocchia, “Burials

in Renaissance Florence, 1350–1500,” Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, 1981), p. 271. Giovanni de’ Medici, on the other hand, was given a funeral, paid for in 1463 by his heirs. Andrea Alamanno gave the eulogy for Giovanni’s funeral (John M. McManamon, S. J., Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism [Chapel Hill NC, 1989], p. 250). 33 “Fu portato a seppellire secondo io ritrovo senz’altra onoranza, forse perchè cosi egli in sua vita avesse disposto, o perchè con le apparenze non s’accrescesse a’ successori l’invidia; a quali d’essere e non d’apparir grandi importava.” Scipione Ammirato, Istorie Fiorentine di Scipione Ammirato, ed. Ferdinando Ranalli, 2 parts in 6 vols. (Florence, 1848), 2nd part, vol. 5, p. 185, trans. Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 107. In a letter to the Duke of Milan, the Milanese envoy, Sagramoro de’ Mengozzi, notes the connections between Piero’s modest burial and that of his father, Cosimo (Giovanni Soranzo, “Lorenzo il Magnifico alla morte del padre e il suo primo balzo verso la Signoria,” Archivio Storico Italiano 5, 111 (1953): 42–77, p. 45). 34 Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence under the Medici, 1434–94, (Oxford, 1966; 2nd edn, 1997), pp. 197–200. 35 Strocchia, Death and Ritual, p. 188. 36 Ricordi del Magnifico Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici Cavati da due fogli scritti di sua propria mano, estratti da un codice della publica Liberia Magliabechiana e stampati nel nuovo Lunario della Toscana dell’anno 1775, transcribed in Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Appendix X, p. 426, trans. Francis W. Kent, “The Young Lorenzo, 1449–69,” in Lorenzo the Magnificent. Culture and Politics (London, 1996), 1–22, p. 2. On assassination attempts against Lorenzo, see Kent, “The Young Lorenzo,” pp. 7 and 15. 37 This point has been made by Kent, who argues that it was Cosimo’s death in 1464 that marked the beginning of Lorenzo’s apprenticeship, not Piero’s demise in 1469. Kent, “The Young Lorenzo,” p. 10ff. 38 On the political situation in Florence in the 1470s, see Rubinstein, Government of Florence, pp. 199–230. 39 In this, the tomb is in keeping with the public face of the early Medici, including Piero, which, as Alison Brown has argued, was kept deliberately enigmatic because of the need to conceal their power. Alison M. Brown, The

NOTES TO PAGES 86–88

Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Florence, 1992), pp. vii–xiii. 40 Fritz Burger (Geschichte des Florentinischen Grabmals von der altesten Zeiten bis Michelangelo [Strasbourg, 1904], p. 56) and Roberto Paolo Novello (“Giovanni di Balduccio da Pisa,” Ph.D. diss., Università degli Studi Pisa, 1990, p. 74) noted the similarities between the monuments and Verrocchio’s tomb in San Lorenzo. (Note that the grilles in Santa Croce are in a quatrefoil pattern and made from iron, not bronze.) 41 Andrew Butterfield, “Monument and memory in early Renaissance Florence,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 135–62, pp. 143–45 and pp. 153–4. 42 On the latter tomb, see Anne Markham Schulz, The Sculpture of Bernardo Rossellino and His Workshop (Princeton, 1977), p. 64–66; and Howard Saalman, “Strozzi Tombs in the Sacristy of Santa Trinita,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 38 (1987): 149–60. 43 Debra Pincus, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge, UK, 2000), p. 21. 44 See chapter 1, n. 13 earlier. Julian Gardner attributes the medieval practice to the superiority of ancient carvers over that of later sculptors. Julian Gardner, The Tomb and the Tiara: Curial Tomb Sculpture in Rome and Avignon in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1992), pp. 28–29 and 31. 45 Josef Deér (The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily, trans. Gerd Aage Gillhoff [Cambridge, MA, 1959], pp. 149–50) notes that the earliest papal sepulcher made from porphyry dates from 1143. Before that it had been used for saints and martyrs, and earlier still it had been used for imperial tombs. See also Richard Delbrueck, Antike Porphyrywerke (Berlin, 1932), pp. 212–27; Raniero Gnoli, Marmora Romana (Rome, 1971), pp. 66–71; McKillop, “Dante and Lumen Christi”; and Sheard, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb,” pp. 71–76. For a corpus of tombs made from porphyry, see Dario Del Bufalo, Porphyry. Red Imperial Porphyry. Power and Religion (Turin, 2012), pp. 161–73. 46 The idea of using porphyry for the sarcophagus may have come from Lorenzo, who would have known early Christian examples, such as that of Santa Costanza – the daughter of Constantine – in Rome. Like Verrocchio’s, that tomb is set within an arch (though a niche, not an aperture). Butterfield notes that Lorenzo

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must have known the tomb of Santa Costanza as it was returned to its original mausoleum setting in Rome from the Piazza San Marco in the same year (1471) that Lorenzo was studying antiquities with Alberti in Rome. Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 51. 47 There were six examples in Florence: the lost tomb of Count Hugo of Tuscany (d. 1001) in the Badia; the burial chapel of the cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato al Monte; above the tomb of Piccarda and Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici in the Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo; the tomb slab of Cosimo de’ Medici also by Verrocchio, which was positioned directly in front of the high altar and below the cupola of San Lorenzo (this has been noted by Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, p. 43); and on the back walls of Antonio and Bernardo Rossellino’s monument of Leonardo Bruni and of Desiderio da Settignano’s tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, both in Santa Croce. (For these last examples, see Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art. A Reconsideration of Style (Cambridge, UK, 1999), p. 182.) Both of these last structures would have been familiar to Verrocchio, and he may have worked as an assistant on the Marsuppini tomb. The thirteenth-century Venetian tombs of Doge Giovanni Dandolo (1280–89) and his successor, Pietro Gradenigo (1289–311), the latter known only via an eighteenth-century watercolor and wash drawing by Jan Grevembroch, were made from porphyry. And porphyry slabs were attached to the top of the tomb, of c. 1280, of Henry III in Westminster Abbey. Pincus, Tombs of the Doges, pp. 83–86. 48 ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. III, filza 178, c. 48, published in Strozzi, Lettere di una gentildonna, pp. 327-8, trans. Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, p. 43. 49 This has been noted by Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, p. 51. 50 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 362: “E sopra la cassa, per ripieno dell’apertura insino alla volta, fece una grata a mandorle di cordoni di bronzo naturalissimi, con ornamenti in certi luoghi d’alcuni festoni, ed altre belle fantasie tutte notabili, e con molta pratica, giudizio ed invenzione condotte.” [And above the sarcophagus, filling the opening all the way to the vault, made as a grille consisting of mandorlas formed by bronze cords, very naturalistically done, ornamented in places with festoons and other beautiful and

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notable fantasies, made with great practical knowledge, judgment, and imagination]. 51 John Pope-Hennessy (Italian Renaissance Sculpture [London, 1971; rev. 1996], p. 168). The grille for Bernardo Rossellino’s tomb of Neri Capponi (Santo Spirito, Florence) postdates Verrocchio’s tomb: a document records that permission was granted to Capponi’s grandsons in 1488 to break the chapel wall to construct it. Schulz, Sculpture of Bernardo Rossellino, p. 116. 52 Adorno, Il Verrocchio, pp. 66–67. Serros noted a connection with the grille at Prato. Serros, “The Verrocchio workshop,” p. 53. 53 On Verrocchio’s trip to Prato, see Alberto Busignani, “Maso di Bartolommeo, Pasquino da Montepulciano e gli inizi di A.Verrocchio,” Antichità Viva 1, no. 1 (1962): 35–39, pp. 33–39. John Pope-Hennessy attributed the base of the Prato pulpit to Verrocchio. John PopeHennessy, “Deux-Madones en marbre de Verrocchio,” Revue de l’art 80 (1988): 17–25. 54 If this is the case, then it is possible to interpret the knotted design of the bronze netting as an allusion to Dante’s use of the knot in Canto 33, where it figures the beatific vision, as McKillop proposed. McKillop, “Dante and Lumen Christi,” p. 285 n. 188. On the other hand, bronze netting was employed for spaces with nonmiraculous connotations: the window of the door to the Piccolimini library in Siena Duomo; the window of the Chapel of the Priors in the Palazzo della Signoria; and in the gates to the cloister at il Santo, Padua. Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 54. 55 Butterfield and Elam, “Desiderio da Settignano’s Tabernacle,” pp. 335 and 337. 56 This is the interpretation put forward by Seymour, Sculpture of Verrocchio, pp. 53–54. 57 Passavant, Verrocchio, p. 13 and figure 6. 58 Although Patrizia Castelli (“‘Marmi policromi e bianchi screziati’: In margine alle valutazioni estetiche del Traversari,” in Ambrogio Traversari nel centenario della nascita, convegno internazionale di studi, Camaldoli-Firenze, 15–18 settembre 1986, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini [Florence, 1988], 211–24) has proposed that Traversari chose Ghiberti for the commission, there is no evidence for this, according to Georgia Clarke (“Ambrogio Traversari: Artistic adviser in early fifteenth-century Florence?” Renaissance Studies 11 [1997]: 161–78, p. 163).

59 Sperling, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tombs,” pp. 58–59. 60 Serros,“The Verrocchio workshop,” p. 56, n. 101. 61 On the attribution of this work, see Annamaria Giusti, “8. Reliquary casket,” in Art of the Royal Court. Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe, ed. Wolfram Koeppe, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July 1–September 21, 2008 (New Haven, CT, 2008), 116, cat. 8. 62 Richard C. Trexler, “Lorenzo de’ Medici and Savonarola, Martyrs for Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 (1978): 293–308; Francis W. Kent, “‘Lorenzo . . . Amico degli uomini da bene’: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Oligarchy,” in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, Convegno, 1992, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence, 1994): 43–60, pp. 55–58; Francis W. Kent, “Sainted mother, magnificent son: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Italian History and Culture 3 (1997): 3–34, pp. 25–33; Kent, “‘Un paradiso habitato da diavoli’,” pp. 208–10. 63 Trexler, “Lorenzo de’ Medici and Savonarola,” p. 294. On the Medici and the Magi, see Rab Hatfield, “The Compagnia de’ Magi,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 107–61. 64 Kent, “Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son,” p. 26. 65 Giovanni de’ Medici, who died unexpectedly in 1463, did not leave a will. Lorenzo il Magnifico recorded in 1473 (modern style) that Giovanni did not compose a will because he was not yet emancipated from his father (“era in potestà paterna”) and that Piero did not leave a will either. Apparently Piero did give verbal instructions to Lorenzo about what he wanted for his tomb: “Piero our father passed from this life on December 2, 1469 . . . Much afflicted by gout for many years, he did not want to make a will . . . He was buried in San Lorenzo, and his tomb (and of Giovanni his brother), construction of which continues, is more worthy than we know for putting their bones.” (“Piero nostro padre passò da questa vita alli 2 di Dicembre, 1469 . . . molto afflitto dalle gotte, non volle far testamento . . . Fu sepellito in S. Lorenzo, e di continuo si fa la sua sepoltura, e di Gio. suo fratello, più degna che sappiamo per mettervi le loro ossa.”) Ricordi del Magnifico Lorenzo, transcribed by Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Appendix no. X, pp. 425–26.

NOTES TO PAGES 93–95

66 This has been noted by Butterfield (Sculptures of Verrocchio, p. 47). 67 On the diamond as a device of the Medici (and their allies), see Francis Ames-Lewis, “Early Medician Devices,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 122–43, pp. 129 and 132; Francis Ames-Lewis, The Library and Manuscripts of Piero de’ Medici (New York, 1984); Francis Ames-Lewis, “Matteo de’ Pasti and the Use of Powdered Gold,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 29 (1984): 351–62; Brenda Preyer, “The Rucellai Palace,” in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2 of A Florentine Patrician and his Palace, ed. Francis W. Kent, 2 vols. (London, 1960–81), 153ff, esp. 198–201; Howard Saalman, Review of Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone II. A Florentine Patrician and His Palace, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47 (1988): 82–90, p. 89; Lorenz Böninger, “Diplomatie im Dienst der Kontinuität. Piero de’ Medici zwischen Rom und Mailand (1447–1454),” in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469). Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer. Art in the Service of the Medici, eds. Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin, 1993), 39–54, pp. 42 and 43; and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, CT, 2002), chapter 3. 68 The pyramidal shape of Verrocchio’s diamonds may refer to a specific type favored by Piero: there are twenty-seven pointed diamonds listed among his possessions in the inventory made of the Medici palace in 1465. Inventory of 1465 quoted by Maria Sframeli, “I gioielli nell’età di Lorenzo il Magnifico,” in I gioielli dei Medici dal vero e in ritratto, ed. Maria Sframeli, exh. cat., Museo degli Argenti, Palazzo Pitti, September 12, 2003–February 2, 2004 (Florence, 2004), 10–23, p. 12; and Eugène Müntz, Les Collections des Médicis au XVe Siècle (Paris, 1888), p. 36, on “diamante punta” see also pp. 17 and 80. See also Sheard, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb,” pp. 76–77, n. 50. However, one must be cautious in drawing conclusions about actual shapes based on inventory descriptions when the terminology on diamonds was so vague (and new) at this moment. I thank Timothy McCall for this observation. 69 As well as this, the turtles may refer to Piero’s gout, as the shells of turtles were used for medicinal purposes in healing gout, according to Pliny. Sheard, “Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb,” p. 89.

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70 Sheard (“Verrocchio’s Medici Tomb,” pp. 64–65, n. 8) has noted that by 1459, red, white and green had become the Medici family colors. The colors reference poems describing the Medici family, for which see my ns. 106 and 107 later in this chapter. 71 Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 51, 53–54. See Gerhart B. Ladner, “Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of the Renaissance,” in De artibus Opscula XL. Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York, 1961), 303–22. 72 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, pp. 105–06. 73 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 106. 74 John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 49. Butters (Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 106) has called for a revision of the assumption that punning allusions only postdate Lorenzo il Magnifico’s era, and she has argued that Verrocchio’s tomb specifically should be read as materially punning on Piero’s name. 75 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Ital. 1471, on which see Ames-Lewis, “The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici,” pp. 336–37, cat. 88. 76 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, pp. 44–45 (with further bibliography). 77 Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, “Introduction,” in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469). Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer. Art in the Service of the Medici, eds. Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin, 1993), xv–xx, p. xviii; and Andreas Beyer, “Funktion und Representation. Die Porphyr-Rotae der Medici” in Piero de’ Medici il Gottoso’, eds. Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin, 1993), 151–67. 78 “[I]l bronzo propagava la memoria.” Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Stanza I” in Stanze, ed. Raffaella Castagnola (Florence, 1986), verse 98, p. 42. This has been noted by Butterfield (Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 51). The date of Lorenzo’s Stanze is disputed. Some scholars place it (or part of it) in the mid-1470s; others date it after 1486. On this, see Lorenzo de’ Medici, Stanze, pp. lxxxviii–xcviii. 79 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 105. 80 Ibid., p. 106. See Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, eds. Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi, 2 vols. (Padua, 1980), vol. 1, p. 125: “Quella dunque patientia è

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commendata, che di ira facile non s’accende né in le adversitate si flecte: il porphyrico saxo exta cum mysterio notabile al tale expresso, imperoché di tale natura essere affirmarsi, che non solamente nella fornace non si coque, ma etiam gli altri saxi propinqui astanti rende incoctibili. Tale se dimonstra la vera patientia che non tanto se accende, ma gli accensi extincti gli rende.” And Leon Battista Alberti, L’architettura [De Re Aedificatoria], eds. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo Portoghesi, 2 vols. (Milan, 1966), vol. 1, p. 153, book. 2: “At nos de porphirite lapide compertum habemus non modo flammis non excoqui, verum et contigua quaeque circumhereant saxa intra fornacem reddere, ut ignibus nequicquam satis excoquantur. Atqui et terricosum quoque lapidem, quod calcem impuram reddat, respuunt.” 81 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 8, p. 39. 82 Marbodo di Rennes, Lapidari. La magia delle pietre preziose, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome, 2006), pp. 40–41. 83 Mentioned by Martha McCrory, “The symbolism of stones: Engraved gems at the Medici Grand-Ducal Court (1537–1609),” in Engraved Gems: Survivals and Revivals, ed. Clifford Malcolm Brown, vol. 54 of Studies in the History of Art (New Haven, CT, 1997), 158–79, p. 165. 84 Agostino del Riccio, Istoria delle pietre, ed. Raniero Gnoli e Attilia Sironi (Turin, 1996), p. 139. 85 “[I]l diamante importa indomita fortezza contra fuoco e martello, come miraculosamente il prefato Magnifico fu saldo contra le congiure e insidie di messer Luca Pitti.” Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose, ed. Maria Luisa Doglio (Rome, 1978), p. 64, trans. Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 104 and n. 45. 86 The poem, “In Morte del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici,” has been attributed to Poliziano and to Lorenzo il Magnifico’s son Giuliano, but both of these suggestions have been disputed and the author remains unknown. Giosuè Carducci, ed., L’Orfeo e le Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano (Florence, 1863), pp. 382– 92 (on the poem’s author, see p. 382 n. 1; for the specific line quoted, see p. 387). 87 Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici: Collector and Antiquarian (Cambridge, UK, 2006), p. 155. Bernardo Rucellai, Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, explained the practice: “Testimonio sunt litterae gemmis ipsis incisae Laurentii nomen praeferentes, quas ille sibi familiaeque suae prospiciens scalpendas curavit,

futurum at posteros regii splendoris monumentum.” Bernardo Rucellai, De Bello Italico Commentarius, after 1495, quoted in Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 363, doc. 247. (“Witness the letters inscribed on the gems themselves, displaying the name of Lorenzo, whose carving he charged to be done for his own sake and that of his family, as a future memorial for posterity of his royal splendor.” Trans. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 148.) 88 Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Dallas, TX, 1980), pp. 127 and 132–41. Pietro Barbo’s collection of gemstones were believed to have talismanic powers, for which see Eugène Müntz, Les arts à la cour des papes pendant le XVe et le XVIe siècle, 3 parts (Paris, 1878–82), part 2, pp. 149–51. 89 On inscribed talismans, see Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Particularly in England (Oxford, 1922), pp. 121–32. On the Magi, see pp. 125–26; on Christ, see pp. 127–32. On Lorenzo and Christ, see my n. 62 earlier. 90 Bartolomeo Masi, Ricordanze di Bartolomeo Masi Calderaio Fiorentino dal 1478 al 1526 (Florence, 1906), pp. 16–17. 91 This taste in objects made from precious stones appears to have begun with Cosimo de’ Medici, who owned a small number of hardstone vessels. On this, see the contemporary testimony recorded by Angelo Fabroni, Magni Cosmi Medicei Vita (Pisa, 1789), p. 153. It was part of a growing interest in such objects from his circle, especially Niccolò Niccoli, much of whose collection was probably absorbed into the Medici collection after Niccoli’s death in 1437. Müntz, Collections des Médicis, pp. 6–8. 92 Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, eds. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi, 2 vols. (Milan, 1972), vol. 2, libro venticinquesimo, p. 692. On Giovanni’s taste for antique objects, see Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, 3 vols. (Florence, 1839), vol. 1, p. 158, doc. LVII; Vittorio Rossi, “L’indole e gli studi di Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici,” Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei, classe di scienze morali, storiche e Filologiche series 5, 2 (1893): 38–60 and 129–50; and Francesco Caglioti, “Bernardo Rossellino a Roma: I stralci del carteggio mediceo (con qualche briciola sul Filarete),” Prospettiva 64 (October 1991): 49–59. 93 This is recorded in a letter of 1455, transcribed in Gaye, Carteggio, vol. 1, p. 163, doc. LXI.

NOTES TO PAGES 96–99

94 Gino Corti and Frederick Hartt, “New documents concerning Donatello, Luca and Andrea della Robbia, Desiderio, Mino, Uccello, Pollaiuolo, Filippo Lippi, Baldovinetti and others,” Art Bulletin 44 (1962): 155–67, p. 157, n. 12. This has been noted by Christopher B. Fulton, An Earthly Paradise.The Medici,Their Collection and the Foundations of Modern Art (Florence, 2006), p. 47. 95 Marilena Mosco,“Lorenzo il Magnifico. I vasi,” in Il museo degli Argenti. Collezioni e collezionisti, eds. Marilena Mosco and Ornella Casazza (Florence, 2004), 31–45, p. 31. See Detlef Heikamp and Andreas Grote, I Vasi, vol. 2 of Il Tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico, exh. cat., Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, 1972 (Florence, 1974), pp. 165–66. 96 Filarete, Trattato, vol. 2, libro venticinquesimo, pp. 687–88. 97 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 70, 73–74, 375–77, and 379, and docs. 289, 292, and 293. 98 Francis Ames-Lewis, “Art in the service of the family,” in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469). Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer. Art in the Service of the Medici, eds. Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin, 1993), 207–20, p. 209; Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,” Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacobs (London, 1960), 279–311. 99 For a recent consideration of Piero’s collection of hardstone vessels and its links with practices at other European courts, see Eva Helfenstein, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Magnificent Cups: Precious Vessels as Status Symbols in FifteenthCentury Europe,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (Fall, 2013): 415–44. Piero’s patronage extended far beyond the decorative arts to architecture, for which, see, for instance, Beverley Louise Brown, “The patronage and building history of the tribuna of SS. Annunziata in Florence: A reappraisal in light of new documents,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 25 (1981): 59–142; Diane Finiello Zervas, “‘Quos volent et eo modo quo volent’: Piero de’ Medici and the Operai of SS. Annunziata, 1445–55,” in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, eds. Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (London, 1988), 465–79; and Wolfgang Liebenwein,“Die ‘Privatisierung’ des Wunders: Piero de’ Medici in SS. Annunziata und San Miniato,” in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469). Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer. Art in the Service of the Medici, eds. Andreas Beyer and

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Bruce Boucher (Berlin, 1993), 251–90. Against the picture of Piero’s taste as “decorative” see Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art, pp. 35–36 and 244–48; and Fulton, An Earthly Paradise, p. 37. 100  “[A]veva a presso di sé raccolta se alcuna cosa preziosa o rara si trovava.” Niccolò Valori, Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici, ed. Enrico Niccolini (Vicenza, 1991), p. 104. On Lorenzo as a collector see Melissa M. Bullard “Possessing antiquity: Agency and sociability in building Lorenzo de’ Medici’s gem collection” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance. Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, eds. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden, 2006), 85–111. 101 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 5. 102 Bernardo Rucellai “De erbe Roma” in Codice topografico della città di Roma, eds. Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, no. 91 (Rome, 1940–53), vol. 4, p. 445, lines 17–21. 103 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 6. On Lorenzo’s record, see Ricordi del Magnifico Lorenzo, 1–2v; on the transaction with Sixtus IV, see Raymond De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank 1397–1494 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), pp. 198–99. 104 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 67–68, 70–71, 92, 96, 106, 189–91, and doc. 97, p. 305; doc. 109, pp. 307–08; doc. 293, pp. 378–79. 105 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Stanze, I, pp. 3–58, for instance, canto 37, pp. 17–18: “Non colonne marmoree in altezza/ reggon le picciolette e basse mura/ dello edifizio; non li dà bellezza/ petra di gran saldezza, chiara e dura;/ non opra di scultor che ’l vulgo prezza,/ non musaico alcun, non v’è pittura,/ non gemme orientali, argento od oro,/ ma molto più gentile e bel lavoro.” (“[There are] no tall marble columns [to] hold the small and low walls/ of the building; beauty is not provided by a solid, bright and hard stone/ [there is] no work by a popular sculptor,/ [there are no] mosaics or a painting,/ [there are no] oriental gems of silver or gold/ but a much more gracious and noble work.”) On the dating of the poem, see n. 78 earlier. The connection between materials and the beloved in the Selve d’amore has been noted by Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 150. 106 Alberti Advogdrii Vercellensis, “De Religione et Magnificentia Illustris Cosmi Medices Florentini,” Book 2, transcribed in Giovanni

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NOTES TO PAGES 99–101

Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum, 18 vols. (Florence, 1742), vol. 12, p. 142, trans. Gombrich, “The early Medici as patrons of art,” p. 294. 107 “Figure e ’ntagli v’è di serpentini/ e d’alabastri e di porfidi e marmi . . .” Anonymous, Le Onoranze Fiorentine del 1459 published in Nerida Newbigin, “Le Onoranze Fiorentine del 1459. Poemi anonimo,” Letteratura italiana antica 12 (2011): 17–135, p. 45, lines 1171–72. 108 Rab Hatfield, “Some unknown descriptions of the Medici palace in 1459,” The Art Bulletin 52, no. 3 (September 1970): 232–49, p. 234. 109  Mario Scalini (“The formation of the fifteenth-century collection, its dispersion and the return to Florence of the Medici treasures,” in Treasures of Florence. The Medici Collection 1400–1700, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat [Munich and New York, 1997], 29–50, p. 29) has noted the connection between tomb marker and poem. 110 Helfenstein, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s magnificent cups.” 111 Anna Lenzuni, ed., All’ombra del Lauro: Documenti librari della cultura in età laurenziana (Milan, 1992), pp. 103–04. 112  Cosimo de’ Medici quoted in Nicolai Rubinstein, “The De optime cive and the De principe by Bartolomeo Platina,” in Tradizione classica e letteratura umanistica: Per Alessandro Perosa, ed. Roberto Cardini, 2 vols. (Rome, 1985), vol. 1, 375–89, p. 385. At the same time, Kent has emphasized how Lorenzo did not adhere to this advice, at least in so far as completing works begun by his ancestors, preferring to patronize other institutions (though often anonymously), most notably, the Benedictine convent of Le Murate. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 64–67. 113 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1994), p. 293. 114 “Bestattung” and “Totenkult” in Der Kleine Pauly, Lexicon der Antike, eds. Konrat Ziegler, Walther Sontheimer, Hans Gärtner, 5 vols. (Munich, 1975), vol. 1, cols. 873–76; v, 891–901. 115 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 135. See doc. 163, pp. 322–23. 116  Trans. Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 147 and doc. 217, p. 342, see also discussion on p. 132. 117 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 133. 118 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 147. See doc. 217, 52–54, p. 342 and n. 1, pp. 342–43.

119 Louis Green, “Galvanno Fiamma, Azzone Visconti and the revival of the classical theory of magnificence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 98–113. Although it has been claimed that the first appearance of magnificence was in the 1450s (Gombrich, “The early Medici as patrons of art,” pp. 285–87), Peter Howard (“Preaching magnificence in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 61, no. 2 [Summer, 2008]: 325–69), has drawn attention to its currency in sermons by preachers in Florence as early as the 1420s. 120  “Puossi colle ricchezze conseguire fama e autorità adoperandole in cose amplissime e nobilissime con molta larghezza e magnificenza.” Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari, 1960), vol. 1: Libri della Famiglia Cena Familiaris–Villa, p. 141. It was expressed also in Francesco Filelfo’s Convivia Mediolanensia (composed in 1443 and dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti). See Anthony David Fraser Jenkins, “Cosimo de’ Medici’s patronage of architecture and the theory of magnificence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 33 (1970): 162–70, p.166. 121 Galvano Fiamma, Opusculum de rebus gestis ab Azone, Luchino et Johanne, vicecomitibus, ab anno MCCCXXVIII usque ad annum MCCCXLII, ed. Carlo Castiglioni, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 12, pt. 4 (Bologna, 1938), xii, 4, p. 20, trans. Green, “Galvanno Fiamma,” p. 104. 122 This was expressed also by Timoteo Maffei, rector general of the Augustinian Canons, in his mid-fifteenth-century praise for Cosimo de’ Medici’s expenditure, In magnificentiae Cosmi Medicei Florentini detractors (c. 1454–56). (Jenkins, “Cosimo de Medici’s patronage of architecture,” p. 166). Howard (“Preaching magnificence,” pp. 358 and 360) has argued that the idea of magnificence gained currency among some early fifteenth-century Florentine preachers who used magnificence to express the virtue of the city’s citizens as a whole. By the 1480s, however, the positive attitude towards magnificence had changed in Florence and expenditure by individuals was no longer regarded as an expression of the populace, but only as vanity. 123  The treatise is on fols. 22–47 in Ms. 1591, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. On the translation, see Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobilità in Italia, secoli XIV–XVIII (Rome, 1988), p. 10.

NOTES TO PAGES 101–103

124 “[Q]uesta nobilità della generazione è adornata dalla abondanza delle ricchezze le famiglie, e’ domestichi in apparenza più floridamente appaiono: e l’amicizie di fuori con salutevole sollecitudine si conservano . . . Conviensi addunque chi vuole essere liberale; abbia abondanzia di beni della fortuna . . . Sicchè l’abbondanza de’ beni presta grandissimo aiuto allo adornamento della nobilità.” Ms. 1591, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, fols. 27v and 28r. 125 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art (Baltimore, 1993), p. 243. 126 Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art, pp. 246–49. For Lisa Jardine (Worldly Goods. A New History of the Renaissance [New York, 1996], p. 34), too, the Renaissance represents the birth of “bravura consumerism,” and the period can be characterized as a “celebration of the urge to own.” 127 Alessandro Polcri, “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza tra Marsilio Ficino, Timoteo Maffei e Cosimo de’ Medici,” Italian History and Culture 13 (2008): 111–34, especially p. 123. My thanks to Michael W. Cole for alerting me to this essay. 128 Filippo Luigi Polidori, ed., Istorie fiorentine scritte da Giovanni Cavalcanti, 2 vols. (Florence, 1838–39), vol. 2, p. 210, referred to in Dale Kent, “The importance of being eccentric: Giovanni Cavalcanti’s view of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Florence,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 101–32, pp. 130–31. 129 Giovanni Cavalcanti, Nuova opera, ed. Antoine Monti (Paris, 1990), p. 120, cited in Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 46. 130  “[p]orre l’arme sua in nessun luogo, non curando che tanta sua liberale e generosa carità restasi nelli occhi humani, ma che solo permanessi viva nella divina mente.” Archivio Peruzzi de’ Medici, 239, quoted in Francis W. Kent, “Lorenzo de’ Medici, Madonna Scolastica Rondinelli, e la politica di mecenatismo architettonico nel convento delle Murate a Firenze (1471–72),” in Arte, committenza ed economia a Roma e nelle corti del Rinascimento: 1420–1530. Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma, Ottobre 24–27, 1990, eds. Arnold Esch and Christoph Luitpold Frommel (Turin, 1995), 353–83, pp. 356–59.The chronicle is kept in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence (II II 509).

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131 Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 47. 132 “[È] or colombo e dopo il gozo pieno/ diventerà falcon marino e soro.” Burchiello, I sonnetti di Burchiello, ed. Michelangelo Zaccarello (Turin, 2004), CXL, p. 197. See Polcri, “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza,” esp. pp. 122–23 for a discussion of Burchiello’s sonnet. The sonnet appears on fol. 166r in ms. Magliabechiano XXI.87, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, which seems to have been made in Verrocchio’s workshop. 133 Stephen J. Campbell, Cabinet of Eros. Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d`Este (New Haven, CT, 2006), p. 50ff. On the “dark” side of spending, see also Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics. Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991); Rebecca Zorach, “Everything swims with excess: Gold and its fashioning in sixteenth-century France” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics (spring, 2000): 125–37; Rebecca Zorach, “Desiring things,” Art History 24, no. 2 (April, 2001): 195–212; and Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue. Art in Renaissance Italy (London, 2001). And on Florence specifically, see the important essay by Polcri, “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza.” 134 Pincus, Tombs of the Doges. 135 See the discussion earlier in this chapter, including ns. 32–38. 136  According to Evelyn S. Welch (Shopping in the Renaissance. Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600 [New Haven, CT, 2005], p. 303), the acquisition of goods during the Renaissance was a complex affair that depended upon social relations and networks (and served to articulate those relationships and networks) and personal issues, rather than on price, production, and demand. On the close relationship between culture and politics in Florence under Lorenzo il Magnifico, see Melissa M. Bullard, “Lorenzo de’ Medici: Anxiety, image making, and political reality in the Renaissance,” in Lorenzo de’ Medici. Studi, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence, 1992), 3–40; Mario Martelli, “Firenze,” in Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografica, II. L’Èta moderna, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Torino, 1988), 25–201; Mario Martelli, Angelo Poliziano. Storia e metastoria (Lecce, 1995); and Mario Martelli, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento. Il filtro degli anni Sessanta (Florence, 1996).

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137 “Fu sepellito el di seguente nella chiesa di San Lorenzo in terra e nella sepulture innanzj per lui ordinate sanza alchuna honoranza o pompa funebre.” MAP, filza 163, cc, 2r–2v, quoted in Polcri, “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza,” p. 114. 138 Polcri, “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza,” pp. 114–15. 139 Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, p. 52. See also Zorach, “Everything swims with excess.” 140  Patricia Lee Rubin, “Magnificence and the Medici,” in The Early Medici and Their Artists, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (London, 1995), 37–50, pp. 38–39. 141 Filarete, Trattato, vol. 2, libro venticinquesimo, pp. 686 and 688. 142 “Clarissimi viri Cosmas et Laurentius fratres neglectas diu Sanctorum reliquias Martyrum religioso studio ac fidelissima pietate suis sumptibus aereis loculis condendas colendasque curarunt.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 234. This has been discussed by John Paoletti, “Fraternal piety and family power: The artistic patronage of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici,” in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici, 1389–1464, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (Oxford, 1992), 195–219, p. 200. 143 John T. Paoletti, “Strategies and structures of Medici artistic patronage in the 15th century,” in The Early Medici and Their Artists, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (London, 1995), 19–36, pp. 28–29. 144  Rubin, “Magnificence and the Medici,” pp. 39–40. 145 Ricordi del Magnifico, transcribed in Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Appendix X, p. 426, trans. Gombrich, “Early Medici,” p. 284–85. 146 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 179. 147 Green, “Galvanno Fiamma,” pp. 102–03. 148 Giovanni Pontano, Liber Prior: De Fortitudine bellica et heroica . . . De Fortitudine domestica. Liber posterior, in Opera omnia, f. 73v–86r, quoted in Evelyn S. Welch, “Public magnificence and private display. Giovanni Pontano’s De splendore (1498) and the domestic arts,” Journal of Design History 15, no. 4 (2002): 211–21, p. 215. Welch also discusses the dating of Pontano’s treatises in her essay (p. 213). 149 Francesco Tateo, “Le virtù sociali e l’immanità nella trattatistica Pontaniana,” Rinascimento n.s., no. 5 (1965): 119–64, p. 228, quoted in Welch, “Public Magnificence and Private Display,” p. 215. 150 On the distinction between magnificence and splendor, see Welch, “Public magnificence and private display,” p. 214.

151 Welch, “Public magnificence and private display,” p. 217. 152 Filarete, Trattato, vol. 2, libro venticinquesimo, pp. 687–88. 153 Nofri Tornabuoni to Lorenzo de’ Medici, June 4, 1491, MAP 42.85, in Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, doc. 151, p. 318, trans. on p. 117. 154 “A me pareva cosa artificiosissima, ma poi che questo la haveva . . . mostro singularum particular[i]um artificium et difficultatem, mi pare ancora più mirabile. Bisogna considerare singulariter omnia, et si vedrà che mana et che ochio et ragione hebbe lo artifice . . . sia tante cose e così perfectamente finite.” February 2, 1487 (1496 s.f.), formerly Pistoia, Private Collection, discussed by Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 118 (my translation is indebted to theirs but with minor changes). 155  Trans. Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 128. 156 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 5, p. 368. 157 Ernst Kris, Meister und Meisterwerke der Steinschneidekunst in der italienischen Renaissance, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1929), vol. 1, p. 35. 158 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 136–40. 159 See discussion in Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 141–45. 160 Reported by Francesco Malatesta in a letter to Isabella d’Este, May 12, 1502, AG, 1104, referred to by Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 119. 161 On this, see Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love. Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton, 1992); Paola Ventrone, ‘Les tems revient – ’l tempo si rinuova.’ Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico, exh. cat., Palazzo MediciRiccardi, Florence, April 8–June 30, 1992 (Florence, 1992). On Florence and signorial dynasties, see Timothy McCall’s forthcoming book, Brilliant Bodies. 162 Billi’s vita is known in two manuscripts. Only one (the Petrei) includes the specific detail about the portals. Antonio Billi, Il Libro di Antonio Billi esistente in due copie nella Biblioteca nazionale di Firenze, ed. Carl Frey (Berlin, 1892), p. 35, trans. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 156. The plan for linking palace and church is also mentioned in the later (also sixteenth-century) Codice Magliabechiano. (Carl Frey, ed., Il Codice Magliabechiano [Berlin, 1892], p. 89). 163 On this plan, see Isabelle Hyman, “Fifteenthcentury Florentine studies: The Palazzo

NOTES TO PAGES 106–108

Medici and a ledger for the church of San Lorenzo,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1968, Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts (New York, 1977), pp. 113–21; Isabelle Hyman, “Notes and speculations on S. Lorenzo, Palazzo Medici, and an urban project by Brunelleschi,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34, no. 2 (1975): 98–120; and Dale Kent, The Rise of the Medici (Oxford, 1978), p. 69. 164 Hyman, “Notes and speculations,” pp. 102–06, 109–20. 165 Filarete, Trattato, vol. 2, libro venticinquesimo, p. 687. 166  On this point, see the sources discussed by Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart. Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua (University Park, PA, 2008), pp. 59–61. 167 On the origins of this idea in medieval thought (which is doubtless a misunderstanding of Aristotle), see Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools. Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition 1200–1350 (Leiden, 1992), p. 57ff; and Odd Langholm, The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury (Bergen, 1984), p. 58ff. 168 Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools, pp. 237 and 339. On early modern critics of scholastic usury theory, especially the idea that human industry can fructify money, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis of Usury, Chapter 5. 169 Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools, pp. 64, 87 and 140. 170 “Nullum fructum habet pecunia ex sua natura, sed tantum ex utentis industria” (Astesani da Asta, Summa Astensis, 2 vols. [Rome, 1728], vol. 1, Third Book, Article 3, p. 325). Translated in and discussed by Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis of Usury, pp. 102–05 and n. 43. 171 On the popularity of Astesanus’s writings, see Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Somme de casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen âge (XII–XVI siècles) (Louvain, 1962), pp. 59–60; and Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, 1977), p. 35. 172  “[P]ecunia ex se sola minime est lucrosa, nec valet se ipsam multiplicare: sed ex industria mercantium fit per eorum negotiationes lucrosa” (Sant Antonino [Sancti Antonini], Summa Theologica, 4 parts [Verona, 1740; repr. Graz, 1959], part 2, title 1, chapter 7, section 16, col. 99). This has been discussed by

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Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (London, 1954), p. 105; and Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis of Usury, pp. 103–04. Antoninus’s works circulated widely in fifteenth-century Florence, both in written and oral form, for which, see Peter Francis Howard, Beyond the Written Word. Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–1459 (Florence, 1995), pp. 22–29. 173 “[I]llud quod in firmo proposito domini sui est ordinatum ad aliquod probabile lucrum, non solum rationem simplicis pecuniae sive rei, sed etiam ultra hoc quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi, quam communiter capitale vocamus.” [Saint] Bernardino da Siena, De Evangelio aeterno in Opera Omnia, 8 vols. (Florence, 1950–65), vol. 4, sermon 34, art. 1, cap. 3, p. 170. ([T]hat which in the firm intention of its owner is set aside for the purpose of earning a certain probable profit has not only the simple nature of money or of a thing, but beyond that the purpose of seeding profit – and we commonly call it capital.) This has been discussed by Raymond De Roover, San Bernardino of Siena and Sant’Antonino of Florence. The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages (Boston, MA, 1967), p. 29. 174 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ, 1993; repr. 2012), pp. 51–52. The story and its implications for materiality have been discussed by Brigitte Buettner, “From bones to stones: Reflections on jeweled reliquaries,” in Reliquiare im Mittelalter, eds. Bruno Reudenbach and Gia Toussaint (Berlin, 2005), 43–59, p. 51. The tale finds echoes with the writings of some defenders of Medici wealth in the mid-fifteenth century (such as Timoteo Maffei and Marsilio Ficino), for which see Polcri, “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza,” pp. 125–34. 175 Michael Wayne Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, UK, 2002), p. 51; and Frits Scholten, “Bronze, The mythology of a metal,” in Bronze. The Power of Life and Death, eds. Martina Droth, Frits Scholten, and Michael Cole, exh. cat., Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, September 13, 2005–January 7, 2006 (Leeds, 2005), 20–35, p. 26. On metals as living and the role of artist as discerner of life in metal, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, 2010), pp. 52–61. Given that many Renaissance bronzes were made from melted medieval bronzes

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(themselves made from melted-down ancient bronzes), these sculptures imply a process of resurrection within their very material. Ittai Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK, 2016), p. 3. 176 Quoted in Cole, Cellini, p. 51. 177 The wreath on the chapel side of the tomb shows (clockwise from top to bottom): strawberries, chestnuts, poppies, grapes, pinecones, broad beans, Alder, pear, Medler, and oak with acorns. (The plants on the sacristy side are the same but appear in different order.) The fruits and plants were identified by Professor Lucia Tongiorgio Tomasi (Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 192 n. 80). The shells on the lid spill forth nuts, plums, figs, pinecones, pin needles, beans or peas, chestnuts, and fruit, possibly grapes. These have been identified by Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 207–08, cat. 7. Philipp Fehl (“Verrocchio’s Tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici: Ornament and the language of meaning,” in Italian Echoes in the Rocky Mountains, eds. Sante Matteo, Cinzia Donatelli Noble, and Madison V. Sowell (Provo, UT, 1990), 47–60, p. 52) and Serros (“The Verrocchio workshop,” p. 53) has proposed that the turtles were cast from nature, indicated by their scale (life size) and specific surface details. Johannes Nathan suggested that Verrocchio used plaster casts for the extraordinarily accurate plant forms, proposals made also by Butterfield. (Johannes Nathan, “The working methods of Leonardo da Vinci and their relation to previous artistic practice,” Ph.D. diss, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1995, p. 126; Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 207, cat. 7). Verrocchio may have learned the technique of life casting in Ghiberti’s workshop, in which casting natural forms directly in bronze was practiced. On life casting, see Noberto Gramaccini, “Das genaue Abbild der Natur – Riccios Tiere und die Theorie des Naturabgusses seit Cennini,” in Natur und Antike in der Renaissance, eds. Herbert Beck und Peter C. Bol, exh. cat., Liebieghaus, Frankfurt, December 5, 1985–March 2, 1986 (Frankfurt, 1985), 198–225; and Pamela H. Smith and Tonny Beentjes. “Nature and art, making and knowing: Reconstructing sixteenth-century life casting techniques,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 128–79.

178 Scholten, “Bronze, the mythology of a metal,” p. 26. 179  For the transcription, see Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 226. 180 Seymour, Sculpture of Verrocchio, p. 173, n. 8. 181 Bernard Palissy, for instance, describes the generation of minerals (including metals) in the matrice (womb) of the earth. Bernard Palissy, Les oeuvres de maistre Bernard Palissy, ed. Bernard Fillon, 2 vols. (Niort, France, 1888), vol. 2, p. 84. This terminology has been discussed by Scholten, “Bronze, the mythology of a metal,” p. 26. 182  “Propter quod etiam dicit Hermes, quod genitrix metallic est terra quae portat ipsum in ventro suo.” [Saint] Albertus Magnus, Mineralium in B. Alberti Magni, Opera Omnia, ed. Augusti Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris, 1890), vol. 5, Liber III, Tractus II, Caput 1, p. 75; trans. in [Saint] Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford, 1967), Book Three, Tractate 2, chapter 1, p. 186. Works by Albert were in the possession of the library at Santa Croce. See Curzio Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce in Firenze,” Rivista delle biblioteche e degli archivi 8 (1897): 16–31, 99–113, 129–47, p. 22. Proof of the popularity of his works can be assessed by a humorous fable told by Archbishop Antoninus in his Summa, in which the devil, disguised as a preacher, goes to a convent library to prepare a sermon and among the works the devil requests are “the works of Albert the Great.” See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 90–93 and n. 55. On the popularity of Albert’s works in Renaissance Italy, see Martin Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geistesleben (Munich, 1936), pp. 290, 395–400, and 407–08; Bruno Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale (Bari, 1942); Bruno Nardi, Nel mondo di Dante (Rome, 1944); Bruno Nardi, Studi di filosofia medievale (Rome, 1960); and Edward P. Mahoney, “Albert the Great and the Studio Patavino in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto, 1980), 537–63, pp. 541–42. 183 “[C]on la mia solita animosità, accompagnata dal fondamento dell’arte, subito dètti modi a riscitare un morto.” Benvenuto Cellini, “Della scultura,” in Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin, 1971), p. 773. From a later era (but reflecting earlier

NOTES TO PAGES 111–113

attitudes), Franz Matthias Ellmayr (1722– 801), superintendent of the brass foundry in Rossenheim, Germany, compared brass production to resurrection. Claus Priesner, “Die Vorrede,” in Bayerisches Messing. Franz Matthias Ellmayrs “Mössing-Werkh AO. 1780”: Studien zur Geschichte, Technologie und zum sozialen Umfeld der messingerzeugung im vorindustriellen Bayern (Stuttgart, 1997), 98–102. This has been noted by Pamela H. Smith, “Alchemy as the imitator of nature,” in Glass of the Alchemists: Lead Crystal-Gold Ruby, 1650–1750, ed. Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk (Corning, 2008), 22–33, p. 29. 184 Cole, Cellini, p. 51. See Gaetano Moroni, Dizionario di erudizione storico ecclesiastica da S. Pietro sino ai nostri giorni, 103 vols. (Venice, 1840–79), vol. 54, p. 138; and Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo [.  .  .] nel quale si ragiona della qualità, diversità, e proprietà dei colori, Venice, 1565 (Bologna, 1985), p. 18rv. Red substances in general were associated with blood and regeneration (Pamela H. Smith discusses the case of coral in ““Vermilion, mercury, blood, and lizards: Matter and meaning in metalworking,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, eds. Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago, IL, 2010), 29–49, pp. 41–42). 185 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, pp. 45, 49–51, and further bibliography in ns. 71–76. 186 The statue is mentioned by Johann Fichard, Italia, 3 vols., Frankfurtisches Archiv für altere deutschen Litteratur und Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1815), vol. 3, 1–130, p. 102. This has been noted by Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 51. Note that Caglioti dated this sculpture to 1477–78, which would date the Marsyas to a mere four to five years after the San Lorenzo tomb was completed. Caglioti, “Due ‘restauratori’ per le antichità dei primi Medici.” Prospettiva 72 (1993) and 73/74 (1994): 17–42 and 74–96, p. 92 n. 19. 187 “Che alcune vene bianche e sottili, che erano nella pietra rossa, vennero intagliate dall’artefice in luogo appunto che paiono alcuni piccolo nerbicini che nelle figure naturali, quando sono scorticate, si veggiono. Il che doveva far parere quell’opera, quando aveva il suo primiero pulimento, cosa vivissima.”Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 367, translated in Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in

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the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT, 1999), p. 373, n. 70. 188 “Et est ex lapide porphiro, quo colore mire refertur ipsius excoriati Marsiae forma.” Fichard, Italia, vol. 3, p. 102. This has been noted by Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 51. 189 Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, pp. 274–75. See Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 2, Appendix XVIII, 2 (g), p. 492 and Appendix XIX, 2 (a), p. 494. Butters (Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 275, n. 50) notes that “piantorsina” is probably a local variation on the term “branchorsina,” which can be identified as “acanthus mollis.” For one other recipe that includes acanthus, see Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 2, Appendix XIX, 4, p. 495. 190 The blood of a fox is an ingredient mentioned in a recipe for cutting stone in a Quattrocento recipe book. See Bianca Silvia Tosatti, Il Manoscritto Veneziano. Un manuale di pittura e altre arti – miniature, incisione, vetri, vetrate e ceramiche – di medicina, farmacopea e alchimia del quattrocento (Milan, 1991), p. 194, fol. 98r, no. 521. The Mappae Clavicula suggests placing a gemstone in the blood of a “he-goat that has never copulated,” mixed with its urine, for a night. Mappae Clavicula. A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques, eds. Cyril Stanley Smith and John G. Hawthorne (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 76, no. 290.The blood of a goat is suggested as an ingredient in which the diamond can be heated and then worked in Marbodo di Rennes, Lapidari. La magia delle pietre preziose, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome, 2006), pp. 40–41. And the Pseudo-Savonarola recommends the blood of a fox, or of a “becho,” for cutting precious stones and glass. Pseudo-Savonarola, A far littere de oro. Alchimia e tecnica della miniatura in un ricettario rinascimentale, ed. Antonio P.Torresi (Ferrara, 1992), p. 95, c. 102r. According to Albertus Magnus, metals are often produced in stones. Magnus, Book of Minerals, Book III, Tractate I, chapter 1, p. 153. 191 Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Sciences, London (London, 1975), pp. 52–53, quoted in Butters, vol. 1, pp. 106–07. 192 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 358. Jill Dunkerton has suggested that some of Verrocchio’s work as a jeweler may be represented in paintings attributed to Verrocchio and/or his workshop

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(Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, and Nicholas Penny, Giotto to Dürer. Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery [New Haven, CT, 1991], pp. 148 and 151). 193  Dora Liscia Bemporad, “Per Andrea del Verrocchio orafo,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 16, n. 13 (2002): 189–206, pp. 196–97. The attribution was repeated with some reservation by Scalini (“The formation of the fifteenth-century collection,” pp. 37–38); and by Almut von Gladiss (in Giovanna Damiani and Mario Scalini, eds., Islam specchio di Oriente. Rarità e preziosi nelle collezioni statali fiorentine, exh. cat., Palazzo Pitti, Florence, April 23–September 1, 2002 [Livorno, 2002], p. 79). For a recent consideration of the ewer (with bibliography), see Paola Venturelli, Il Tesoro dei Medici al Museo degli Argenti: Oggetti preziosi in cristallo e pietre dure nelle collezioni di Palazzo Pitti (Florence, 2009), pp. 40–41. 194  See, for instance, those illustrated in Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 95. On the vases from the Medici collection, with further bibliography, see Heikamp and Grote, eds., I vasi, vol. 2 of Il Tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico; and Venturelli, Il Tesoro dei Medici al Museo degli Argenti, pp. 23–47. 195 Bernardo Bellincioni, Le Rime di Bernardo Bellincioni, ed. Pietro Fanfani (Bologna, 1876), p. 106, sonnet 127, trans. Evelyn S. Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. 242–43. 196 Denise Allen, “Crafting a Profession: Cellini’s Discussion of Precious Stones and Jewelry

in His Treatises,” in Marks of Identity, ed. Dimitrios Zikos (Pittsburgh, PA, 2012), 42–61, pp. 50, 52–53, and 60. 197 Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 81–82. 198 Verrocchio’s transformation of brute matter into something noble might be usefully considered too alongside Leon Battista Alberti’s Profugiorum ab aerumna, libri III (also known as Della Tranquillità dell’animo), composed in the vernacular in 1441 or 1442. In this text, Alberti argues that the artist (an architect) could be elevated as moral exemplar. Alberti’s claim finds parallels with ideas expressed by Boccaccio and Lorenzo Valla. On this, see Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400–1470 (New York, 1992), pp. 3–18. The argument that Verrocchio’s inventiveness on the tomb serves as an ornament to the Medici may find further support in Naldo Naldi’s poem cited earlier, which compares the monument to the “labor of Caria” – an allusion to the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. As Christine Smith has explored (Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, pp. 46–49), humanist celebrations of the Seven Wonders of the World rested on the human intellect and imagination of their creators.

3: BRIDGING DIMENSIONS: VERROCCHIO’S CHRIST AND SAINT THOMAS AS ABSENT PRESENCE 1 On the relevance of this quotation for another Quattrocento sculpture – Donatello’s Habakkuk for the Florentine Duomo – see Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 179–81. 2 The interpretation put forward in this chapter greatly extends and refines a proposal made by Geraldine Johnson that Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas should be understood as a meditation on the art of sculpture, thematized through the emphasis on touching. Geraldine A. Johnson, Review of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, by Andrew Butterfield, Art Bulletin 84, no. 3 (September, 2002): 526–28, p. 527. See also Geraldine A. Johnson, “Touch,

tactility, and the reception of sculpture,” in A Companion to Art Theory, eds. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford, 2002), 61–74. 3 On the sculpture’s position at Orsanmichele, see Diane Finiello Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello (Locust Valley, NY, 1987), p. 99. 4 Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, pp. 99–151, esp. p. 112. There is some dispute about the date of the niche, whether it is original or a 1460s replacement, but a technical examination of the site made possible by the removal of Verrocchio’s sculptures during World War II established that the niche must have been made for Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse: a small socket was

NOTES TO PAGES 120–122

discovered at the base of the niche (filled in, apparently, when the Christ and Saint Thomas was installed) into which the base of Saint Louis’ crozier fitted precisely. Nevertheless, some controversy about the date, and about the niche’s author, remains, for which see Horst W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1957; repr. 1963), vol. 2, pp. 45–56; and Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, pp. 109–17 and 138–53 (Zervas concludes the tabernacle was finished in 1422 – supported by a document of 1460 – and proposes that it may have been made by Andrea Fruschetta of Settignano, who is mentioned in a document of 1422 as working for the Parte Guelfa, though possibly after a design by Donatello or Brunelleschi). 5 The last record of Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse in place at Orsanmichele dates from 1451, and no mention is made of offerings to the statue in 1452, suggesting the sculpture was removed sometime between 1451 and 1452. Diane Finiello Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 2 vols. (Modena, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 211–12. 6 ASF, Mercanzia, 295 (Deliberazioni, 1462–63), cc. 120r–v, transcribed in Dario A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. Life and Work (Florence, 2005), pp. 289–90, doc.VI.31.a. 7 According to a document of September, 1463 (ASF, Mercanzia, 254 [Deliberazioni]), Luca della Robbia had been commissioned to make the stemma in January or February of that year. (Allan Marquand, “Some unpublished monuments by Luca della Robbia,” American Journal of Archaeology 8, no. 2 (1893): 153–70, p. 154). 8 ASF, Mercanzia, 296 (Deliberazioni, 1463–64), fols. 140v–141r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 290, doc.VI.31.b. On the purchasing of metal for Renaissance bronze sculpture in general, see Francesca Bewer, “The De La Pirotechnia ofVannoccio Biringuccio (1480–537) and bronze sculpture,” M. Phil thesis, The Warburg Institute, July, 1985, pp. 79–81. 9 The documents oscillate between mentioning one or two statues (ASF, Mercanzia, 295 (Deliberazioni, 1462–63), fols. 120r–v; ASF, Mercanzia, 296 (Deliberazioni, 1463– 64), fols. 140v–141r; ASF, Mercanzia, 299 (Deliberazioni, 1465–66), fols. 104v–105r; ASF, Mercanzia, 299 (Deliberazioni, 1465–66), fol. 120r [actually fol. 220r]; ASF, Mercanzia, 300 (Deliberazioni, 1466–67), fol. 77v; ASF, Mercanzia, 300 (Deliberazioni, 1466–67), fol. 104r; ASF, Mercanzia, 302 (Deliberazioni,

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1467–68), fols. 101r–v; ASF, Mercanzia, 307 (Deliberazioni, 1470), fol. 30r; ASF, Mercanzia, 316 (Deliberazioni, 1475–76), fols. 51r and 52r; all transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 289–92, docs. IV.31.a–i). It is only in ASF, Mercanzia, 316 (Deliberazioni, 1475–76), fols. 109v and 110v (transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 293, doc. iv.31.j) that there is a precise reference to two figures. 10 ASF, Mercanzia, 296 (Deliberazioni, 1463–64), fols. 140v–141r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 290, doc. IV.31.b. 11 See n. 9 earlier in this chapter. 12 ASF, Mercanzia, 300 (Deliberazioni, 1466– 67), c. 104r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 291–92, doc. IV.31.f. 13 ASF, Mercanzia, 299 (Deliberazioni, 1465–66), fols. 104v–105r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 291, doc. IV.31. c. 14 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, 1550, rev. 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878), vol. 3, pp. 362–63; and vol. 2, p. 404. This has been noted by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 73, n. 11. 15 Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 73. 16 Paul Schubring, Luca della Robbia und seine Familie (Bielefield, 1905), pp. 68–70. Allan Marquand (Luca della Robbia [Princeton, 1914], pp. 201–02, no. 55); Walter Bombe (“Die Sammlung Adolph v. Beckerath,” Der Cicerone 8 (1916): 167–86, p. 171); and Jolán Balogh (Katalog der ausländischen Bildwerke des Museums der bildenen Künste in Budapest, 2 vols. [Budapest, 1975], vol. 1, pp. 61–62, no. 54) accepted Schubring’s suggestion. Pope-Hennessy rejected it, on the grounds that the work was “either a fifteenth-century pastiche derived from the bronze door [by Luca in the Florentine cathedral] or that it is a nineteenth-century forgery” (John Pope-Hennessy, Luca della Robbia [Oxford,1980], p. 274, cat. 86). Gentilini left open the possibility of Schubring’s proposal (Giancarlo Gentilini, I Della Robbia: La scultura invetriata del Rinascimento [Florence, 1992], vol. 1, p. 166 n. 48). Bruce Boucher agreed with Schubring and Gentilini, noting that the terracotta group “consequently documents a forgotten episode in the Mercanzia commission, a period between 1463–65 in which Luca was a serious contender for the bronze group” (Earth and Fire. Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, ed. Bruce Boucher, exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 18, 2001–February 3, 2002, and The Victoria and

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Albert Museum, London, March 14–July 7, 2002 [New Haven, 2001], p. 120, cat. 9). 17 Andrew Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” in Verrocchio’s Christ and St. Thomas. A Masterpiece of Sculpture from Renaissance Florence, ed. Loretta Dolcini, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 5, 1992–April 17, 1993 [New York, 1992], 25–35, p. 57. 18 Andrew Butterfield (“Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas: Chronology, Iconography, and Political Context,” The Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1069 [April, 1992], 225–33, p. 226; and “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” p. 57) has pointed out that the bronze for one figure is mentioned in a document of 1470 (ASF, Mercanzia, 305, fol. 30r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 292, doc. iv.31.h), implying that it was cast sometime between then and 1476, when another document (ASF, Mercanzia, 316 [Deliberazioni, 1475–76], fols. 51r and 52r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 292, doc. iv.31.i) mentions a bronze figure. A later document (ASF, Mercanzia, Libro di Debitori e Creditori, filza 14103, Libro B rosso, fols. 131–13r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 294–96, doc. iv.31.n) makes clear that this figure must be Christ. This chronology was laid out by Butterfield (“Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas,” p. 226; and “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” p. 57). Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 75) proposed that the figure of Christ was modeled between 1472 and 1476 and cast by the beginning of 1477. A document of 1479 (ASF, Mercanzia, filza 14103, cc. 13v–13r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 294, doc. iv.31.n) refers to the figure of Christ as “è presso e ffornita,” which Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 75) translates as “is at hand.” Butterfield, on the other hand, transcribed it as “è presso affornita,” which he translates as “almost finished” (“Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas, p. 233, doc. 5). 19 Butterfield, “Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas,” pp. 226–27. Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 75) suggests it was modeled c. 1479 or just before, and cast that year, and that was almost certainly cast by 1481. A document of 1479 (ASF, Mercanzia, filza 14103, cc. 13v–13r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 294, doc. iv.31.n) records that the figure of Saint

Thomas is ready to be cast (“è a ordine di gittarlla”). 20 ASF, Provvisioni, Registri, 174 (1483), fols. 7v–8v, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 301–03, doc. iv.31.y. 21 Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542, ed. Iodoco del Badia (Florence, 1883), p. 45. 22 The document was first published by Butterfield, “Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas,” p. 233, doc. 5. Possibly the inscription was to be the same as that included in an illumination of 1479 depicting Christ and Saint Thomas in the frontispiece for the book of statutes of the Otto di Guardia, a principal organ of justice in Florence, that was commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was keen to control the group. The inscription, which appears on the base of the tabernacle, is from Ecclesiastics 19:4: “He who is quick to believe is light at heart.” Butterfield has convincingly argued that here the inscription should be understood in terms of Lorenzo’s attempt to control the group, a proposal supported by the presence of the Medici coat of arms with a crown in the frontispiece (Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” pp. 65–66). An alternative possibility is that the intended inscription may have repeated that which appeared beneath the now-lost fresco by Paolo Uccello of Doubting Thomas over the entrance to the Medici family church of San Tommaso (‘INDIA TIBI CESSIT’), which John Paoletti has interpreted as a reference to the Medici, arguing that it refers to Thomas’ travels to India when he baptized the Magi, with whom the Medici connected themselves (John Paoletti, “. . .Ha fatto Piero con volunta del padre. . .: Piero de’ Medici and Corporate Commissions of Art,” in Piero de’Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469). Kunst im Dieste der Mediceer/ Art in the Service of the Medici, eds. Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher [Berlin, 1993], 221–50, pp. 234–35). Erin Benay and Lisa Rafanelli, on the other hand, propose that the inscription below Uccello fresco’s highlights how India yielded to Thomas (referring to the saint’s life after Christ’s Resurrection) because he doubted and then came to believe. They argue that the lost fresco, which showed a group of Apostles, as well as Thomas, around Christ, emphasizes how it was a collection of believers who pursued the truth and that it was as a group that they came

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to believe (Erin Benay, “The pursuit of truth and the Doubting Thomas in the art of early modern Italy,” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2009, pp. 162–63; and Erin E. Benay and Lisa M. Rafanelli, Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art [Farnham, Surrey, 2015], pp. 133–34). 23 The subject appears in courtrooms and assembly halls in Siena, Scarperia, Certaldo, and Pistoia. On this, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 61–62; Edna Carter Southard, The Frescoes in Siena Palazzo Pubblico, 1289–1539. Studies in Imagery and Relations to Other Communal Palaces in Tuscany (New York, 1979), pp. 100–01, 460–61; Benay, “The pursuit of truth,” pp. 129–41, 156–57, and 176– 80; and Benay and Rafanelli, Faith, Gender and the Senses, pp. 126–31. 24 Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” p. 64. 25 The 1463 operai consisted of Piero de’ Cosimo de’ Medici, Leonardo di Bartolomeo Bartolini, Dietisalvi Neroni, Pandolfo Pandolfini, and Matteo Palmieri. In 1466 the group changed to include Girolamo di Matteo Morelli (replacing the deceased Pandolfo Pandolfini) and Lorenzo de’ Medici (who replaced his father Piero); Dietisalvi Neroni was exiled that year. In 1483 Bongiano Gianfigliazzi took over Girolamo di Matteo Morelli’s duties at the Mercanzia, presumably including his role as operaio, and Antonio Pucci was introduced to the operai, probably replacing Matteo Palmieri, who died in 1475. This has been discussed by Butterfield, “Verrocchio’s Christ and St. Thomas,” pp. 228– 30; and Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” p. 60. 26 Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea delVerrocchio,” pp. 53–79. Diane Zervas (Orsanmichele a Firenze, vol. 1, pp. 218–19) has challenged the theory of Medici influence on the Christ and Saint Thomas, pointing out that judicial reforms were enacted in the 1470s (and thus years after the sculpture’s subject had been decided) and that the guild’s financial difficulties in paying for the statue would surely have been overcome had the sculpture’s completion been a Medici priority. 27 This has been noted by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 85. 28 This has been noted by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 85 and n. 60. See Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 363: “metter la mano al costato di

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Cristo.” Francesco Bocchi (Le bellezze della citta di Fiorenza [Florence, 1591], p. 31) made the same error. A page earlier, Vasari (VasariMilanesi vol. 3, p. 362) described the action as “un San Tommaso di bronzo, che cercasse la piaga di Cristo.” ([A] Saint Thomas in bronze, that searches for the wound of Christ.) 29 See, for instance, the examples by Duccio di Buoninsegna;Tino da Camaino;Taddeo Gaddi; Zanino di Pietro; Luca della Robbia; Cima da Conegliano; anonymous late fourteenth-century artist working at the Palazzo Pretorio, Scarperia; Giovanni di Bartolomeo Cristiani; Giovanni Toscani; Paolo Uccello (according to the Codex Rustici); Bicci di Lorenzo; Mariano del Buono; and Pier Francesco Fiorentino. These are illustrated in Sabine Schunk-Heller, Die Darstellung des ungläubigen Thomas in der italienischen Kunst bis um 1500 unter Berücksichtigung der lukanischen Ostentatio Vulnerum, Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft, band 59 (Munich, 1995), Figures 69, 75, 85, 88, 93, and 116; and in Benay, “The pursuit of truth,” Figures 40, 56, 59, 60, 61, 65, and 66. 30 Examples of Christ shown giving the sign of benediction include Tino da Camaino’s representation of the Doubting Thomas scene on the Tomb of Gastone della Torre (Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, Florence) and Taddeo Gaddi’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Galleria Nazionale dell’Accademia, Florence), both illustrated in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, Figures 52 and 54. 31 “Toccate il vero com’io, e crederete/.  .  .La mano al vero e gli occhi al sommo cielo. . .” Franco Sacchetti, Il Libro delle Rime, ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence, 1990), poem no. 243, p. 374; trans. and discussed by Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 62. 32 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 29–30. On excerpts from The Golden Legend in Florentine zibaldoni, see Salomone Morpurgo, I manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze: manoscritti italiani, vol. 1 (Rome, 1893), index (under “Varagine Jacopo”), p. 712. 33 Ms. 1591, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence contains the “Evangel of Saint John” translated by Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti, but the text does not include the interaction between Christ and Thomas. On the “Evangel of Saint John,” see Francesco d’Altobianco Alberti,

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Rime, ed. Alessio Decaria (Bologna, 2008), pp. 210–12. On Alberti’s translation, which was dedicated to Piero de’ Medici, see Mario Martelli, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento. Il filtro degli anni Sessanta (Florence, 1996), p. 304. 34 “Pure s’ i’ parlo, i’ m’ odo, , veggio e sento,/ E più che d’altro di questa mi scocco;/ Po’ , s’ i’ mi tocco delle volte ben cento,/ Dicendo: l’ giuro a dio, ch’ i’ pur mi tocco./ Questo come è che l’esser mio si è spento?” Geta e Birria, ed. Costantino Arlia (Bologna, 1879), p. 49. 35 François Quiviger, “Relief is in the mind: Observations on Renaissance low relief sculpture,” in Depth of Field. Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy, eds. Donal Cooper and Mariko Leino (Bern, 2007), 169–89, p. 177. 36 On this practice, see Federico Ghisi, “Un processionale inedito per la Settimana Santa nell’opera del Duomo di Firenze,” Rivista Musicale Italiana 55 (Oct–Dec, 1953): 362–69, p. 363; Solange Corbin, La Deposition Liturgique du Christ au Vendredi Saint. Sa place dans l’histoire des rites et due theater religieux (Paris, 1960), pp. 15–16; John T. Paoletti, “Wooden sculpture in Italy as sacral presence,” Artibus et Historiae 13 (1992): 85–100; and Geraldine A. Johnson, “A taxonomy of touch: Tactile encounters in Renaissance Italy,” in Sculpture and Touch, ed. Peter Dent (Surrey, 2014), 91–106, pp. 94–95. 37 On paxes and the sense of touch, see Adrian W. B. Randolph, Touching Objects. Intimate Experiences in Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (New Haven, CT, 2014), pp, 218–37. 38 Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven, CT, 2013), pp. 200–01 and 269–71. 39 Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 201. 40 See, for instance, the account of translation of the relics of Saint Zenobius from San Lorenzo to Santa Reparata, recounted in a late-Quattrocento life of the saint, when the crowd pushed forward to touch the coffin with the saint’s body inside. Sally J. Cornelison, “When an image is a relic: The St. Zenobius panel from Florence Cathedral,” in Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, eds. Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery (Tempe, AZ, 2006), 95–113, p. 97. 41 Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 201; and Johnson, “A taxonomy of touch,” p. 94. 42 Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 200. 43 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Holy dolls: Play and piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,” in

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 310–30, pp. 325–26. In a case concerning a miraculous crucifix, it apparently became animated only when it was touched, with the transformation remaining invisible to the eye. It was only through touch that the crucifix’s sacred power could be experienced. The miracle occurred in Switzerland and was apparently recorded in a fourteenth-century text from a Swiss convent (Enrico Castelnuovo, Imago Lignea: sculture lignee nel Trentino dal XIII al XVI secolo [Trent, 1989], p. 16, who does not provide his source; discussed by Paoletti, “Wooden sculpture,” p. 92, and Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 201). For examples of mystics embracing Christ crucified, see Jacqueline E. Jung, “The tactile and the visionary: Notes on the place of sculpture in the Medieval religious imagination” in Looking Beyond. Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2010), 203–40. 44 Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Nights in Times Past (NewYork, 2005), p. 122. See also Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana, IL, 2012), p. 11. 45 Donald Beecher, “The lover’s body: The Somatogenesis of Love in Renaissance Medical Treatises,” Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réform 24 (1988): 1–11, p. 8ff. 46 Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, 2000), p. 29. 47 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV scritte da Vespasiano da Bisticci, eds. Angelo Mai and Adolfo Bartoli (Florence, 1859), p. 478ff. See Richard Krautheimer with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 301–02. 48 On the equivalence of touching and seeing, see the essays in Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge, UK, 2012). 49 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), pp. 10–11. This has been noted by Johnson, “Touch, tactility, and the reception of sculpture,” p. 63. 50 David C. Lindberg, “The science of optics,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago and London, 1978), 338–38, p. 340. On medieval theories of vision and its effect on art, see, for instance, Michael Camille, “Before the gaze. The internal senses and late medieval

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practices of seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance. Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 197– 223; and Cynthia Hahn, “Visio Dei. Changes in medieval visuality,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance. Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 169–96. On competing theories of vision during the Middle Ages and their influence on literature, including Dante, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil. Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto, 2004). 51 Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. Nicco Fasola (Florence, 1942), p. 98, trans. Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven, CT, 2003), p. 152. 52 On the discovery of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, see Alison M. Brown, “Lucretius and the Epicureans in the social and political context of Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 9 (2001): 11–62, pp. 11–12. 53 “[T]actus enim, tactus, pro divum numina sancta,/ corporis est sensus.  .  .” “[C]orpora quae feriant oculos. . .” Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. William Henry Denham Rouse, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1924; repr. 1953), book 2, lines 434–35, p. 114; and book 4, line 217, p. 262. This has been discussed by Elizabeth D. Harvey, Sensible Flesh. On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia, 2003), p. 4 54 Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Ancient Christian Writers 41–42, trans. John Hammond Taylor, 2 vols. (New York, 1982), vol. 2, Book 12, pp. 178–231. Augustine’s Literal Meaning of Genesis was available at the S. Croce library (Curzio Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce in Firenze,” Rivista delle biblioteche e degli archivi 8 (1897): 16–31, 99–113, 129–47, p. 101). His writings were also often copied in vernacular Florentine commonplace books, owned by people of all social levels during the Renaissance. On this, see Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 83–84 and 428 ns. 147 and 148; and Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, p. 684. On the influence of Augustine’s theories during the Renaissance, see Meredith J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance. Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (New York, 2005), esp. pp. 129–32. 55 Jung, “The tactile and the visionary,” p. 207. On Augustine’s theory, see the other essays in

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the volume Looking Beyond.Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ, 2010). See also Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (London, 2002); and Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2000). Saint Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John. Homilies on the First Epistle of John. Soliloquies, vol. 7 of A Select Library of the Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff, 14 vols. (Buffalo, NY, 1888), p. 439. Voragine’s Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 216.This was noted by Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 434, n. 13. Robert Grosseteste, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, quoted in Richard William Southern, Robert Grosseteste:The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1986; 2nd edn., 1992), p. 168 (“Sollertia vero est vis penetrative qua visus mentalis non quiescit super rem visam, sed penetrat ipsam usque ad rem aliam sibi naturaliter coniunctam, sicut si visus corporalis cadens super coloratum non quiesceret ibi, sed penetraret usque ad complexionem corporis colorati, a qua complexione egreditur color, et iterum penetraret ipsam complexionem donec apprehenderet elementares qualitates ex quibus provenit complexio; sic, cum visus mentis non quiescit super rem visam, sed penetrat ipsam cito donec apprehenderit causam vel effectum rei vise, hec vis penetrative velociter sollertia est.” Robertus Grosseteste, Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros, ed. Pietro Rossi, Unione Accademica Nazionale Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Testi e Studi, II [Florence, 1981], I:19, p. 281). This has been discussed by Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 71. “Sed species non est corpus, neque mutatur secundum se totam ab uno loco in alium, sed illa quae in prima parte aeris fit non separator ab illa, cum forma non potest separari a material in qua est, nisi sit anima, sed facit sibi simile in secundam partem, et sic ultra. Et ideo non est motus localis, sed est generatio multiplicata per diversas partes medii; nec est corpus quod ibi generator, sed forma corporalis non habens tamen dimensiones per se, sed fit sub dimensionibus aeris: atque non fit per defluxum a corpore luminoso, sed per educationem de potentia materiae aeris.”

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Roger Bacon, “De Scientia Perspectiva,” in The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1897), vol. 2, Part 5, Dist. 9, ch. 4, pp. 71–72. (“[A] species is not body, nor is it changed as regards itself as a whole from one place to another, but that which is produced [by an agent] in the first part of the air [or other medium] is not separated from that part, since form cannot be separated from the matter in which it is, unless it be soul, but the species forms a likeness to itself in the second position of the air, and so on. Therefore it is not a motion as regards place, but is a propagation multiplied through the different parts of the medium; nor is it a body, which is there generated, but a corporeal form, without, however, dimensions per se, but it is produced subject to the dimensions of the air; and it is not produced by a flow from a luminous body, but by a renewing from the potency of the matter of the air.” Roger Bacon, The Opus majus of Roger Bacon, trans. Richard Belle Burke, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 489–90 [5.1.9.4.].) “Tunc enim substantia agentis activa tangens sine medio substantiam patientis potest ex virtute et potentia sua activa transmutare primam partem patientis quam tangit. Et redundat actio in profundum illius partis, quia illa pars non est superficies, sed corpus quantumcunque sit parva; nec sine profunditate sua potest accipi nec intelligi, et ideo nec tangi nec alterari.” Roger Bacon, “De multiplicatione specierum,” in Opus Majus, ed. Bridges, vol. 2, Part 1, ch. 3, p. 436. (“[T]he active substance of the agent, touching the substance of the recipient without intermediary, can alter, by its active virtue and power, the first part of the recipient that it touches. And this action flows into the interior of that part, since that part is not a surface, but a body, however small it may be; nor can it be perceived or understood without its depth – and therefore without depth it can be neither touched nor altered.” Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, Part 1, chapter 3, in David C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature: a Critical Edition with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus [Oxford, 1983], pp. 52–53.) Discussed in Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, pp. 74–75).

60 Bacon, Opus majus, trans. Burke, vol. 2, ch. 3, p. 470 (5.1.7.3). (“Nam recipit speciem rei visae, et facit suam virtutem in medium usque ad visibile.” Roger Bacon, “De Scientia Perspectiva,” in Opus Majus, ed. Bridges, vol. 2, Part 5, Dist. 7, ch. 3, p. 52). Discussed in Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 86. 61 Bacon, Opus majus, trans. Burke, vol. 2, p. 445, chapter 2 (5.1.4.2). “[E]t ideo oportet ut sit aliquantulum spissus, quatenus patiatur a speciebus passionem quae est de genere doloris.” Roger Bacon, “De Scientia Perspectiva,” in Opus Majus, ed. Bridges, vol. 2, Part 5, Dist. 4, ch. 2, p. 27. Discussed in Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 96. 62 Graziella Federici Vescovini, “Il problema delle fonti ottiche medievali del Commentario Terzo di Lorenzo Ghiberti,” in Lorenzo Ghiberti nel suo tempo. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Firenze, Ottobre 18–21, 1978), 2 vols. (Florence, 1980), vol. 2, 349–87; and Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. Lorenzo Bartoli (Florence, 1998), pp. 14–15. 63 “Il tatto, il qual si fa maggior fratello” (Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone. A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas [Leiden, 1992], ch. 23, line 39, p. 223). 64 “Dammi cosa ch’io la possa veddere e toccare et non solamente la possa uddire. E no biasmare la mia ellettione de l’havermi io messa la tua opera sotta ’l gomito e questa del pittore tengo con due le mani, dandolla alli miei occhi. Perché le mani da lor medessime hanno tolto a servire a più degno senso.”Trans. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone, ch. 27, lines 15–19, pp. 234–35. On touch in Leonardo’s Paragone, see Jodi Cranston, “The touch of the blind man,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 224–42. 65 Jung, “The tactile and the visionary,” pp. 208–09. 66 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Seeing and believing. The suspicion of sight and the authentication of vision in late medieval art and devotion,” in Imagination und Wirklichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz, 2000), 47–69, p. 48. 67 Jung, “The tactile and the visionary,” p. 210. See, for instance, cases of women who were rewarded with being able to touch and hold

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the Infant Christ Child, discussed in KlapischZuber, “Holy dolls,” pp. 325–26. 68 “[L]’affetto suo ardentissimo sì lo ce ’ncorporao/ lo cor li stemperao como cera a segello:/ empremettece quello ov’era trasformato.” Jacopone da Todi, Laudi, trattato e detti, ed. Franca Ageno (Florence, 1953), pp. 248–49. This has been noted by Gregory F. LaNave, “Bonaventure,” in The Spiritual Senses, eds. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge, UK, 2011), 159–73, p. 170; and Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 139. 69 Aristotle, On the Soul; Parva Naturalia; On Breath, ed. and trans., Walter Hett (London, 1964), Book 3, chapter 8, pp. 180–81. 70 “[Fides] . . . comprehendit immensa, apprehendit novissima, ipsam denique aeternitatem suo illo vastissimo sinu quodammodo circumcludit.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, 8 vols., eds. Jean Leclercq, Charles Hugh Talbot, and Henri Rochais (Rome, 1957–80), vol. 2, Sermon 76, III.6, p. 258, trans. Gordon Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 2002), p. 57. Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs were a favorite inclusion in Florentine zibaldoni. (Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 84). They were also in the possession of S. Croce’s library. Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce,” p. 104. 71 Rudy, Mystical Language, p. 57. 72 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, trans. Kilian Walsh, introduction by Jean Leclerq, vol. 2 of The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1971–81), vol. 3, Cistercian Fathers Series: Number Seven, Sermon 28, IV:10, p. 96. (“Tanges manu fidei, desiderii digito, devotionis amplexu; tanges oculo mentis.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, vol. 1, Sermon 28, IV.10, p. 199). Discussed by Rudy, Mystical Language, p. 57 (and for a broader discussion of touch, see Rudy, pp. 49, 54, 56–61). 73 Rudy, Mystical Language, p. 45. 74 “Quia SPIRITUS ANTE FACIEM NOSTRAM CHRISTUS DOMINUS, cui adhaerentes in osculo sancto, unus spiritus ipsius dignatione efficimur.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, vol. 1, Sermon 3 III.5, p. 17. See also Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,

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Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, vol. 2, Sermon 83, III.6, p. 302. For a discussion, see Rudy, Mystical Language, p. 59. 75 “Ardorem desiderii patrum suspirantium Christi in carne praesentiam frequentissime cogitans, compungor et confundor in memetipso. . . . Illorum ergo desiderium flagrans et piae exspectationis affectum spirat mihi vox ista: OSCULETUR ME OSCULO ORIS SUI.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, vol. 1, Sermon 2, I:1, pp. 8–9. (“During my frequent ponderings on the burning desire with which the patriarchs longed for the incarnation of Christ, I am stung with sorrow and shame . . . I pray that the intense longing of those men of old, their heartfelt expectation, may be enkindled in me by these words: ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.’” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, vol. 3 of The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 2, Sermon 2, I:1, p. 8). Discussed by Rudy, Mystical Language, p. 60. 76 Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, p. 688. 77 For instance, Gregory of Nyssa, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, and Bernard of Clairvaux. See Gavrilyuk and Coakley, The Spiritual Senses, p. 9. On the presence of works by Bonaventure and Bernard of Clairvaux in Florentine zibaldoni, see Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, pp. 688 and 689. 78 “[M]axime unit ei qui est summus spiritus; propter quod dicitur primae ad Corinthios sexto: Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est.” Saint Bonaventure, Opera Omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi, 1882–902), 3:292a, trans. Rudy, Mystical Language, pp. 107–08. 79 “In hoc autem transitu. . . oportet quod relinquantur omnes intellectuales operationes, et apex affectus totus transferatur et transformetur in Deum.” Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum in Opera Omnia, vol. 12, chapter 7, p. 21, trans. by Rudy, Mystical Language, pp. 107–08. There is some controversy about the meaning of Bonaventure’s words here, for which, see Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200–1350 (New York, 1998), pp. 110–12. 80 Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, p. 689. His works were also in the collection at Santa Croce. (Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce,” pp. 106–07).

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81 “Corpus hominis resurgentis oportet esse tactivum: quia sine tactu nullum est animal. Oportet autem ut resurgens sit animal, si sit homo. Corpus autem aereum non potest esse tactivum, sicut nec aliquod aliud corpus simplex: cum oporteat corpus per quod fit tactus, esse medium inter qualitates tangibiles, ut sit quodammodo in potentia ad eas, ut Philosophus probat in libro de Anima. Impossibile est igitur quod corpus hominis resurgentis sit aereum et simile ventis.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles. Liber Quartus cum commentariis Francisci de Sylverstris Ferrariensis Sancti Thomae Aquinatis. In Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, Opera omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P.M. edita, vols. 13–15 (Rome, 1918–30), vol. 15, ch. 84, par. 14, p. 269. (“The body of man when he rises must have the capacity to touch, for without touch there is no animal. But that which rises must be animal if it is to be man. But an aerial body can have no capacity for touch, just as no simple body can, for the body in which the touch sensation takes place must be midway between the tangible qualities so as to be in potency to them, as the Philosopher proves in De anima. It is impossible, then, that the body of man who rises be like the air or the winds.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book 4: Salvation, ed. Charles J. O’Neil [Notre Dame, IN, 1975], ch. 84, par. 14, pp. 322–33.) 82 “[S]et homo secundum tactum multum differt in certitudine cognitionis ab aliis animalibus. Vnde, quia homo habet optimum tactum, sequitur quod sit prudentissimum omnium aliorum animalium, quia et in genere hominum ex sensu tactus accipimus, quod sunt ingeniosi et aliqui non ingeniosi, et non secundum aliquem alium sensum. Qui enim habent duram carnem et per consequens habent malum tactum, sunt inepti secundum mentem, qui uero sunt molles carne et per consequens boni tactus, sunt bene apti mente. Vnde etiam alia animalia habent duriores carnes quam homo. Set uidetur quod aptitudo mentis magis respondeat bonitati uisus quam bonitati tactus, quia uisus est spiritualior sensus et plures differencias rerum demonstrat. Set dicendum est quod duplici ex causa bonitas mentis respondet bonitati tactus. Prima ratio est quia tactus est fundamentum aliorum sensuum omnium: manifestum est enim quod organum tactus diffunditur per totum corpus et quodlibet instrumentum

sensus est etiam instrumentum tactus; unde ex hoc quod habet meliorem tactum, sequitur quod simpliciter habet meliorem sensitiuam naturam et per consequens quod sit melioris intellectus, nam bonitas sensus est dispositio ad bonitatem intellectus. Ex hoc autem quod aliquid habet meliorem uisum uel auditum, non sequitur quod sit melius sensitiuum simpliciter, set solum secundum quid. Alia ratio est, quia bonitas tactus sequitur bonitatem complexionis siue temperanciam: cum enim instrumentum tactus non possit esse denudatum a genere tangibilium qualitatum eo quod est ex elementis compositum, oportet quod sit in potentia ad extrema saltem per hoc quod est medium inter ea; ad bonam autem complexionem corporis sequitur nobilitas animae, quia omnis forma est proportionata suae materiae. Unde sequitur, quod qui sunt boni tactus sunt nobilioris anime et perspicacioris mentis.” Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri De anima, in Sancti Thomae de Aquino, Opera Omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, ed. René Antoine Gauthier (Rome, 1984), vol. 45, no. 1, liber 2, ch. 19, p. 149. (”[T]he touch of man is far superior to that of other animals in exactitude of apprehension. This pre-eminence of touch in man is the reason why man is the wisest of animals; moreover, among men it is in virtue of fineness of touch, and not of any other sense, that we discriminate the mentally gifted from the rest. Those whose bodily constitution is tough, and whose sense of touch is therefore poor, are slow of intellect; whilst those of a delicately balanced constitution with, in consequence, a fine sense of touch are mentally acute. This too is why the other animals have flesh of a coarser texture than man.Yet it might seem that mental capacity corresponded rather to excellence of sight than of touch, for sight is the more spiritual sense, and reveals better the differences between things. Still, there are two reasons for maintaining that excellence of mind is proportionate to fineness of touch. In the first place touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the other senses is also an organ of touch, and the sense of touch by itself constitutes a being as sensitive. Therefore the finer one’s sense of touch, the better, strictly speaking, is one’s sensitive nature as a whole, and consequently the higher one’s intellectual capacity.

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For a fine sensitivity is a disposition to a fine intelligence. But an exceptionally good hearing or sight does not imply that the sensitivity as a whole is finer, but only that it is so in one respect. The other reason is that a fine touch is an effect of a good bodily constitution or temperament. For as the organ of touch is itself necessarily endowed with tangible qualities (being composed of the elements) it needs to be in a condition of potency to extremes of the tangible at least by itself constituting a mean between them. Now nobility of soul follows upon a well-balanced physical constitution; because forms are proportionate to their matter. It follows that those whose touch is delicate are so much the nobler in nature and the more intelligent.” Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St.Thomas Aquinas, trans. Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries (New Haven, CT, 1951), lec. 19, pars. 482–85, pp. 303–04. This has been discussed by Jung, “The tactile and the visionary,” p. 208. Thomas’ idea finds visual expression in an anonymous diagram from Saxony (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München [Clm 5961,VD innen]) showing the workings of the brain that includes the inscription “touch is located in all parts of the body” in a band around the figure’s neck. Illustrated in Carl Schoonover, ed., Portraits of the Mind. Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (New York, 2010), p. 23. 83 Berthold Louis Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolo Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Library of San Marco (Padua, 1972), pp. 18–19; Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce,” p. 108; and Peter Howard, Beyond the Written Word. Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus, 1427–1459 (Florence, 1995), p. 61. 84 Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy (New York, 2011), p. 112. On Giordano da Pisa, see Carlo Delcorno, “Predicazione volgare e volgarizzamenti,” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome. Moyen-Age, Temps Modernes 89 (1977): 679–89, pp. 684–85; Giordano da Pisa, Quaresimale fiorentino 1305–1306, ed. Carlo Delcorno (Florence, 1974); Carlo Delcorno, Giordano da Pisa e l’antica predicazione volgare (Florence, 1975); Giordano da Pisa, Sul terzo capitolo del Genesi, ed. Cristina Marchioni (Florence, 1992); Giordano da Pisa, Prediche

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inedite dal ms. Laurenziano Acquisti e Doni 290, ed. Cecilia Iannella (Pisa, 1997); and Lina Bolzoni, Rete delle immagini: predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena (Turin, 2002), p. 105. 85 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 90–93. 86 “Nelle mani, e in tutti gli altri membri è diposto il toccare; imperò che l’assaggiare della bocca e della lingua è più aguto che ’l toccamento delle mani, o degli altri membri” Aldobrandino da Siena, Trattato dei cinque sensi dell’uomo con altre scritture del buon secolo della lingua: allegate nel Vocabolario della Crusca (Florence, 1872), p. 2. 87 “À moltissime dolceze, le quali el viso nolle comprehende, né con forte luce, né con temperate, solo la mano a toccarlo la truova.” Ghiberti, I commentarii, p. 108. This has been discussed by Amy Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. Humanism, History, and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance (New York, 2016), p. 227. 88 “Ancora nel senso del tatto, il quale diriva da esso senso comune, non si ved’elli istendersi colla sua potenzia insino alle punte delle dita, le quali dita, subito che ànno tocco (su) l’obbieto, immediate il senso à giudicato se è caldo o freddo, se è duro o molle, se è acuto o piano.” Leonardo da Vinci, Codex atlanticus in Il Codice Atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci nella Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, ed. Giovanni Piumati (Milan, 1894–904), text S. 945–1311, p. 971, fol. 270v, b. This has been discussed by Kenneth D. Keele, “Leonardo da Vinci’s physiology of the senses,” in Leonardo’s Legacy. An International Symposium, ed. Charles Donald O’Malley (Berkeley, CA, 1969), 35–56, p. 52. 89 Martin Kemp, “The handy worke of the incomprehensible creator,” in Writing on Hands. Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, eds. Claire Richter Sherman and Peter M. Lukehart, exh. cat., Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, September 8–November 25, 2000, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, December 13, 2000–March 4, 2001 (Seattle, WA, 2001), 22–27, p. 22. 90 “Incredulus etiam ille discipulus Thomas tetigit latus perforatum, et exclamavit:‘Dominus meus et Deus meus’ . . . Tangere autem, credere esse.” Augustine, Opera Omnia, 7 vols., in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Patrologia Latina, ed. JacquesPaul Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1841–902), vols. 38–39, Sermon 245, chs. 2–3, p. 1152. (“That

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unbelieving disciple Thomas touched his pierced side, and exclaimed, ‘My Lord and my God’ . . . Touching means believing” Augustine of Hippo, Sermons (230-272B) on the liturgical seasons, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. 7 of The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century, 41 vols. [Hyde Park, NY, 1993], pt. 3, Sermon 245, pp. 100–01). 91 Saint Bonaventure, Holiness of Life, Being St. Bonaventure’s Treatise De perfectione vitae ad sorores, trans. Laurence Costello (Saint Louis, MI, 1928), pp. 63–64. (“Accede ergo tu, o famula, pedibus affectionum tuarum ad lesum vulneratum, ad lesum spinis coronatum, ad lesum patibulo cruces affixum, et cum beato Thoma Apostolo non solum intuere in manibus eius fixuram clavorum, non solum mitte digitum tuum in locum clavorum, non solum mitte manum tuam in latus eius, sed totaliter per ostium lateris ingredere usque ad cor ipsius Iesu, ibique ardentissimo Crucifixi amore in Christum transformata, clavis divini timoris confixa, lancea praecordialis dilectionis transfixa, gladio intimae compassionis transverberata, nihil aliud quaeras, nihil aliud desideres, in nullo alio velis consolari, quam ut cum Christo tu possis in cruce mori.” Saint Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae ad sorores VI.2 in Decem opuscula ad theologiam mysticam spectantia, 2nd edn. [Quaracchi, 1900], p. 314). 92 George Marcil, ed., Anthony of Padua, Sermons for the Easter Cycle (New York, 1994), p. 102.This has been discussed by Benay and Rafanelli, Faith, Gender and the Senses, p. 107. 93 “[I]l cuore dentro per amore si consuma e si dissolve, come dice la Sposa:Vi scongiuro, figliuole di Hierusalem, se troverete il mio diletto, che me lo annunciate, perch’io mi consumo per amor suo [Cant. 5]. Desidera ancora dissolversi e esser con Cristo [Phil. 1]; e solamente in quello diletta. Dico adunque che questo è toccare e maneggiare il Verbo, perché questo intelletto e questo amore può esser da solo Dio; perché è sopra la natura creata che l’uomo, lasciate le cose visibili, seguiti con tutto il cuore le cose invisibili con tanto lume, tanto amore e desiderio.” Girolamo Savonarola, “Della celsitudine del Verbo di Dio per il senso del toccare,” Prediche di Fra Girolamo Savonarola de’ predicatori (Florence, 1845), Sermon 3, pp. 29–30. Benay (“The pursuit of truth,” p. 6; and Benay and Rafanelli, Faith, Gender and the Senses, pp. 130–31) discusses Savonarola in these terms. 94 Most, Doubting Thomas, p. 62–63.

95 Most, Doubting Thomas, p. 58. 96 “Videbat tangebatque hominem, et confitebatur Deum, quem non uidebat neque tangebat; sed per hoc quod uidebat atque tangebat, illud iam remota dubitatione credebat. Dicit ei Iesus : Quia uidisti me, credidisti. Non ait: tetigisti me ; sed : uidisti me ; quoniam generalis quodammodo sensus est uisus.” Saint Augustine of Hippo, Sancti Aurelii Augustini in Iohannis Evangelium Tracatus CXXIV, ed. Willems Radbodus, CCL 36 (Turnhout, 1954), pp. 667–68. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Tractates on the Gospel of John 112–24, trans. John W. Rettig (Washington, DC, 1995), Tractate 121, p. 61. 97 “Non hoc casu, sed divina dispensatione gestum est . . . nobis Thomae infidelitas ad fidem quam fides credentium disciplulorum profuit, quia dum ille ad fidem palpando reducitur” Gregory the Great, Homiliarum In Evangelia, Lib. II, Homil. XXVI, P. L. 76, col. 1197, 1201, trans. C. W. Marx, “The virtues of scepticism: A medieval interpretation of Thomas’ doubt,” Neophilologus 71 (1981): 296–304, p. 298. There was a copy of Gregory’s Homilies on the Gospels recorded in the collections of the libraries at San Marco and Santa Croce. Ullman and Stadter, The Public Library, Appendix IV, “San Marco’s Catalogue,” p. 159; and Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce,” p. 103. Gregory’s sermons are recorded in at least one Florentine a commonplace book (Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, p. 697), written by a saddlemaker in 1445 that later passed through the hands of a wool-trimmer and a shoemaker (Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 74). On the reception of Gregory’s works during the Renaissance (including Florence specifically), see Ann Kuzdale, “The Reception of Gregory in the Renaissance and Reformation,” in A Companion to Gregory the Great, eds. Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo (Leiden, 2013), 359–86, pp. 363–67, with further bibliography. 98 “Thomas autem non solum vidit, sed etiam vulnera tetigit” (Thomas not only saw the wounds but he touched them). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 55: The Resurrection of the Lord (3a. 53–59), ed. C. Thomas Moore (London, 1976), IIIa q. 54 a.4, p. 34. 99 Meditations on the Life of Christ. An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. Ital. 115, trans. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, 1961), p. 370. 100 Voragine, Golden Legend, p. 217.

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101 “Se io non veggio nelle mani sue i forami de’ chiavelli, e metta il dito mio ne’ luoghi de’ chiavelli, e metta la mano mia nel lato suo, io non crederò.” Il Diatessaron Toscano in Il Diatessaron il volgare italiano. Testi inediti dei secoli XIII–XIV, eds. Venanzio Todesco, P. Alberto Vaccari, and Marco Vattasso (Vatican City, 1938), 173–368, chapter 179, lines 25–28 and 1–9, pp. 364–65. For another example from a Tuscan Gospel harmony, see Jacopo Gradenigo, Gli Quattro Evangelii concordati in uno, ed. Francesca Gambino (Bologna, 1999), p. 302.The 1471 Bible printed by Nicholas Jenson reads:“Se io non vederò nelle sua mani le fissure de’ chiodi, e metterò il mio ditto nello cavito dell chiodi, e se non metterò la mia mano nel suo costato, io non crederò.” Carlo Negroni, ed., La Bibbia Volgare secondo la rara edizione del I Ottobre MCCCCLXXI, vol. 9: Nuovo Testamento: i quattro Evangeli e gli atti degli Apostoli (Bologna, 1886), John 20: 25, pp. 585–86. On the two printed Bibles, see Kenelm Foster, “Vernacular scriptures in Italy,” in The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe, vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge, UK, 1969), 452–65, pp. 453–54. Vernacular bibles were used and circulated widely in Renaissance Florence. Lay readers purchased them (from a cartolaio – bookseller – or secondhand) or borrowed them (from other lay owners or from religious institutions – especially those connected closely with the urban laity, such as the Mendicants and the so-called Yesuati – or from confraternities). Most surviving Tuscan biblical manuscripts are not complete Bibles but consist of the New Testament (especially the Gospels), a harmonized version of the Gospels, the Gospels accompanied by a commentary by Augustinian friar Simone Fidati da Cascia, or a liturgical form of a Gospel Lectionary. (On vernacular Scriptures [complete Bibles and Gospel harmonies], see Foster, “Vernacular scriptures in Italy.” On the surviving manuscripts of vernacular Tuscan bibles, their readership, and use, see Sabrina Corbellini, “The plea for lay Bibles in fourteenth and fifteenth century Tuscany: The role of confraternities,” in Faith’s Boundaries. Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, eds. Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore [Turnhout, 2012], 87–112; and Sabrina Corbellini, “Vernacular Bible manuscripts in late medieval Italy: Cultural appropriation and textual transformation,” in Form

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and Function in the Late Medieval Bible, eds. Eyal Poleg and Laura Light [Leiden, 2013], 264–81.) Rhymed Gospels were also source material for confraternal laude and street performances. In addition, street performers recited devotional tracts in the vernacular, making texts, doctrine (sometimes heretical), and exegeses accessible to a wide audience (Cyrilla Barr, The Monophonic Lauda and the Lay Religious Confraternities of Tuscany and Umbria in the Late Middle Ages [Kalamazoo, 1988], p. 148; and Rosa Salzburg, “The word on the street: Street performers and devotional texts in Italian Renaissance cities,” The Italianist 34, no. 3 (2014): 336–48. On the accessibility of doctrinal questions, see Salzburg, “The word on the street;” and also Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 59 and 102–04). 102 “Tomaso, uno de’ dodoci il quale era detto Didimo, non era con loro quando venne Gesù. Adunque dissero a lui gli altri discepoli: Noi vedemo il Signore. Ed egli disse a loro: Se io non veggio nelle mani sue i forami de’ chiavelli, e metta il dito mio ne’ luoghi de’ chiavelli, e metta la mano mia nel lato suo, io non crederò. E dopo otto dì, erano anche i discepoli suoi dentro e Tomaso con loro. E Gesù venne, stando le porte chiuse, e stette in mezzo e disse: Pace sia a voi. E poi disse a Tomaso: Metti qua il ditto tuo, e guarda le mani mie, e fa’ in qua la mano tua e mettila nel lato mio; e non essere incredulo, ma fedele. Rispuose Tomaso e disse: Signor mio e Dio mio. E Gesù disse a lui: Inperò che tu m’ài veduto, ài creduto. Beati coloro che non videro, e credettoro.” Il Diatessaron Toscano in Il Diatessaron il volgare italiano, chapter 179, lines 25–28 and 1–9, pp. 364–65. For another example from a Tuscan Gospel harmony, see Gradenigo, Gli Quattro Evangelii concordati in uno, p. 302. On manuscripts of Tuscan Gospel harmonies dating from the fifteenth century, see Gradenigo, Gli Quattro Evangelii concordati in uno, pp. 178–82. The printed Bible reads: “Ma Tomaso, uno de’ dodici, il quale è detto Didimo, non era con loro quando venne Iesù. Dissero a lui poi gli altri discepoli: noi abbiamo veduto il Signore. E quello disse a loro: se io non vederò nelle sue mani le fissure de’ chiodi, e metterò il mio ditto nello cavito delli chiodi, e se non metterò la mia mano nel suo costato, io non crederò. E dopo gli otto giorni un’altra volta erano gli discepoli suoi rinchiusi in casa, e Tomaso era con loro. Ed essendo le porte serrate, venne Iesù, e stette

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in mezzo di loro, e disse: pace sia a voi. E poi disse Tomaso: poni il digito tuo qui nelle mie mani, e poni la tua mano nel mio costato, e non essere più incredulo, ma fedele. Rispose Tomaso, e disse: Signore mio, e Dio mio. E Iesù disse a lui: Tomaso, perchè tu mi hai veduto, hai creduto; (e imperò) beati coloro che non hanno veduto, e hanno creduto” (Negroni, La Bibbia Volgare, vol. 9: Nuovo Testamento, John 20: 24–29, pp. 584–85). On lay readers of these texts, see the references in n. 101, p. 313 earlier. 103 Glenn W. Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA, 2005), p. 49. 104 Most, Doubting Thomas, p. 55. 105 Jean Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere. On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York, 2008), pp. 6–7. 106 Nancy, Noli me tangere, p. 48. 107 Verrocchio’s sculptures exhibit, therefore, the quality of pictorialism, for which, see Timothy Verdon, “Pictorialism in the sculpture of Verrocchio,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Florence, 1992), 25–31. 108 Dario A. Covi (“Andrea del Verrocchio 1435– 1488,” in Encyclopedia of Sculpture, ed. Antonia Boström, 3 vols. [New York and London, 2004], vol. 3, 1721–22, p. 1722) has described Thomas’ gesture “as if respectfully restraining from touching him [Christ].” 109 William Diebold, “‘Except I shall see . . . I will not believe’ (John 20:25): Typology, theology, and historigiography in an Ottonian ivory diptych,” in Objects, Images, and the Word. Art in the Service of the Liturgy, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2003), 257–73, esp. p. 263. 110  Diebold, “‘Except I shall see,” 257–73, esp. p. 263. 111  This may have been the message intended by the Mercanzia, if we are to believe the account of Luigi Passerini (writing in 1866), who claimed that the judges commissioned the statues to symbolize the idea that a sentence should not be handed down in court until the truth has been touched by the hand (Luigi Passerini, Curiosità storico-artistiche fiorentine 2 vols. [Florence, 1866], vol. 1, p. 131). This has been noted by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 81. Passerini cites a document of March 26, 1481, as his source (Curiosità storico, p. 132, n. 1), but the document he cites does not support

his claim (ASF, Provisioni, Registri, 172 [1481], fols. 2v–3v, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 299–301, doc. iv.31.x). 112 “[I]n San Tommaso si scorge la incredulità e la troppa voglia di chiarirsi del fatto” VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, p. 363. This is Paul Barolsky’s elegant translation. Paul Barolsky, “Verrocchio’s vision in bronze,” in Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Italy, eds. Andrew Ladis and Shelley E. Zuraw (Athens, GA, 2001), 191– 93, p. 191. The verb chiarire is the Italian for claresco in Latin, which translates as “to grow bright.” 113 Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, pp. 73–76. The location of the statues would have meant that their lustrous surfaces would catch the rays of the rising sun and sunlight throughout the day. In addition, the sunlight would have reflected off the niche, made from polished and gilded marble. On the niche and sunlight, see Kristen Van Ausdall, “Tabernacles of the sacrament: Eucharistic imagery and classicism in the early Renaissance,” Ph. D. diss., Rutgers University, 1994, p. 130; and David Boffa, “Divine Illumination and the Portrayal of the Miraculous in Donatello’s St Louis of Toulouse,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 31, no. 4 (2004–05): 279–91, p. 289. 114 On Riemenschneider’s manipulation of light at Rothenburg, see Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT, 1980), pp. 189–90. My thanks to Michael Cole for making this connection. Closer to Verrocchio is Lorenzo Ghiberti, who, Amy Bloch has convincingly argued, planned how the fall of light would affect the frame figure of Samuel on the Gates of Paradise so that there is a long shadow behind him to indicate his status as ghost (Dante used the word ombra – shade or shadow – in this way in the Commedia). (Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, p. 251). 115 Kristen Van Ausdall, “The Corpus Verum: Orsanmichele, tabernacles, and Verrocchio’s Incredulity of Thomas,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (Firenze 1992), 33–49, p. 37ff. 116 John 10:9. On the metaphor of Christ as door, see Gervase Rosser, “Beyond naturalism in art and poetry: Duccio and Dante on the Road to Emmaus.” Art History 35, no. 3 (2012): 474–97, pp. 493–94.

NOTES TO PAGES 139–143

117 “[Q]uod manus in illis fenestris fornacis ardentissimi amoris iesu(. . .) posuerat.” Ubertino da Casale, Arbor vitae crucifixae (1305), 358aC, trans. Alexander Murray, Doubting Thomas in Medieval Exegesis and Art (Rome, 2006), p. 56. 118 Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce,” p. 139. On translations into the vernacular of the Arbor vitae crucifixae, see Ubertino da Casali, Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu, ed. Charles T. Davis (Turin, 1961), pp. iii–iv, with further references. For Bernardino’s debt to Ubertino, see Bernardino da Siena, Opera Omnia, ed. Panifico Perantoni, 9 vols. (Quaracchi, 1950–65), vol. 6 (1959), pp. 65–180. Bernardino’s sermons were copied in Florentine zibaldoni (for which, see Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, p. 688). Urbertino’s works were the subject of sermons directed to a lay audience at Santa Croce in Florence, for which see Delcorno, “Predicazione volgare e volgarizzamenti,” p. 682. 119 “[A]t the time of his resurrection he [Christ] was, as it were, in a sort of intermediate state between the solidity of the body as it was before his passion and the condition of a soul uncovered by any body. This explains why ‘when his disciples and Thomas with them were gathered together, Jesus came after the doors had been shut and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then he said to Thomas, Reach hither your finger,’ and so on.” Origen, Contra celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, UK, 1953; repr. 1980), Book 2, chapter 62, p. 113. (“Erat autem post suam resurrectionem quasi medius inter crassum corpus illud quod habebat antequam pateretur, et subtile quo anima induta conspicitur postquam prius corpus deposuit. Unde cum essent simul discipuli ejus et Thomas venit Jesus, januis clausis, et stetit in medio et dixit: Pax vobis; et Thomae: ‘Infer digitum tuum huc, etc.” Origenis, Libros Octo Contra Celsum in Origenis, Opera Omnia in vol. 11 of Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 161 vols. [Paris, 1857–66], Book 2, chapter 62, p. 894. Origen’s Contra Celsum was first published in Venice in 1481, but knowledge of his ideas circulated well before this date in Florence (Edgar Wind, “The revival of Origen,” in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, ed. Dorothy Miner [Princeton, 1954], 412–24). 120 See, for instance, the following illustrations in Schunk-Heller, Die Darstellung des ungläubigen

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Thomas, Figures 13, 18, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 68, 69, and 78. 121 Erik Thunø, Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome (Rome, 2002), pp. 110–11, and Figure 113. On the tradition of including a closed door in the scene of Doubting Thomas, see the discussion in Benay, “The pursuit of truth,” pp. 36–41. 122 On sportelli and the resurrected Christ, see Van Ausdall, “The Corpus Verum,” p. 47; and on the tabernacle door commissioned from Verrocchio, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 125 and Figures 158 and 159, who attributes it to the artist’s workshop. The example by Verrocchio or his workshop was added to a preexisting tabernacle by Luca della Robbia. The bronze door shows the resurrected Christ holding the cross and shedding blood from his hand into a chalice. The emphasis on Christ as door is emphasized in this example by the lunette by Luca della Robbia earlier, which shows the dead Christ held by angels, one of whom touches the side wound, and Christ’s arms overlapping the frame, gesturing downward toward the bronze door below showing the resurrected Christ. 123 John 10:9. 124 Van Ausdall, “The Corpus Verum,” p. 41ff and further bibliography provided in n. 26. 125  Butterfield, “Verrocchio’s Christ and St Thomas,” p. 232. 126  Covi recognized that one of Verrocchio’s probable sources, a mosaic he could have seen in Venice (the connection is implied by the unusual inclusion of the words quoted at the beginning of the inscription on Thomas’ robe), emphasizes Christ’s connection to doors, though Covi did not acknowledge how Verrocchio presents his Christ as a door. Dario A. Covi, “Verrocchio and Venice, 1469,” Art Bulletin 65 (1983), 253–73, pp. 258–60. 127 I am grateful to Ilaria Andreoli for drawing my attention to this image. 128 Hebrews 10:19–20. 129 Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), p. 101. See Holmes, Miraculous Images, p. 200. 130 “Et ut breviter dicam, omnes species visibilis et invisibilis creaturae, omnesque allegoriae, sive in factis, sive in dictis, per omnem sanctam utriusque Testamenti Scripturam, velamina paterni radii sunt, et ipse radius secundum

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carnem suam suimet secundum Deitatum maximum velamen est nobisque connaturale” Joannis Scoti, Expositiones super ierarchiam caelestem S. Dionysii, in Opera Omnia, in vol. 122 of Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques–Paul Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1841– 902), 125–266, p. 136. (“And to speak briefly, every kind of creature, visible and invisible, every allegory, whether in word or deed, in the whole of sacred scripture, in each of the testaments, is a veil over the father’s radiance, and that radiance itself, whether in the form of the flesh which veils its own very great Godhead, is within our own nature.”) 131 Schunk-Heller, Die Darstellung des ungläubigen Thomas in der italienischen Kunst, Figures 13, 32, 33, 35, and 78. 132 “Così la neve al sol si disigilla.” Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto 33, line 64 in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi (London, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 374–75. This has been discussed by Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 220. 133  Furthermore, in the story told in Luke (24:36–41) – which does not focus on Thomas specifically but considers a group of disciples – Christ calls his followers to handle his body and see his true nature (“for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see me to have”). 134  Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, ed., Opere di Benvenuto Cellini (Turin, 1980), p. 522, trans. Michael W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, UK, 2002), p. 50. 135 “[Q]uod manus in illis fenestris fornacis ardentissimi amoris iesu(. . .) posuerat.” Ubertino da Casale, Arbor vitae crucifixae (1305), 358aC, trans. Alexander Murray, Doubting Thomas in Medieval Exegesis and Art (Rome, 2006), p. 56. 136 Bonaventure, Holiness of Life, p. 63. (“[S] ed totaliter per ostium lateris ingredere usque ad cor ipsius Iesu, ibique ardentissimo Crucifixi amore in Christum transformata.” Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae, p. 314). 137 However, it did not feature in discussions of the resurrection of Christ (but it was his resurrection that served as the promise for all the saved). 138 “Si nullo prorsus modo voluerit artifex habere deturpatum statuam quam tanto studio elegantiaque elaboravit, rursum plane inducet in animum, ut conflatam illam, qualis antea erat, reficiat. Quod si fundere denuo, atque ab integro restituere et instaurare non placeat: sed medicans tantum et corrigens, ita uti se habet,

relinquat; necesse est, ut igne candefacta atque arte fabrili retractata effigies, non jam eadem conservetur, sed commutata ac subdistracta appareat” S. P. N. Methodii, Ex Libro De resurrectione, in Opera Omnia, vol. 18 of Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. Jacques– Paul Migne, 161 vols. (Paris, 1857–66), bk. 3, ch. 6, col. 271. 139 “Sed quemadmodum si statua cuiuslibet solubilis metalli aut igne liquesceret aut contereretur in puluerem aut confunderetur in massam, et eam uellet artifex rursus ex illius materiae quantitate reparare, nihil interesset ad eius integritatem quae particula materiae cui membro statuae redderetur, dum tamen totum ex quo constituta fuerat restituta resumeret, ita deus, mirabiliter atque ineffabiliter artifex, de toto quo caro nostra constiterat, ea, mirabili et ineffabili celeritate restituet” Saint Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion, ed. E. Evans, ch. 89, in Aurelii Augustini Opera, ed. Michael P. J. van den Hout et al. (Turnhout, 1969), pt. 13, vol. 2, CCL 46, p. 97. Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce,” p. 101. 140 “Ipsa igitur terrena materies, quae discedente anima fit cadaver, non ita in resurrectione reparabitur, ut ea quae dilabuntur et in alias atque alias rerum species vertuntur, quamvis ad corpus redeant unde dilapsa sunt, ad easdem quoque corporis partes ubi fuerunt, redire necesse sit. Alioquin, si capillus redit quod tam crebra tonsura detraxit; si unguibus quod toties dempsit exsectio, immoderata et indecens cogitantibus resurrectionem carnis, et ideo non credentibus, occurrit informitas . . . Sed quemadmodum si statua cuiuslibet solubilis metalli igne liquesceret, vel contereretur in pulverem, vel confunderetur in massam, et eam vellet artifex rursum ex illius materia et quantitate reparare, nihil interesset ad eius integritatem quae particula materiae cui membro statuae redderetur, dum tamen totum ex quo constituta fuerat, restituta resumeret; ita Deus, mirabiliter atque ineffabiliter artifex, de toto quo caro nostra exstiterat, eam mirabili celeritate restituet; nec aliquid attinebit ad eius redintegrationem,utrum capilli ad capillos redeant et ungues ad ungues, an quidquid eorum perierat, mutetur in carnem, et in partes alias corporis revocetur; curante Artificis providentia ne quid indecens fiat” Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, ed. Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 2 vols. (Rome, 1971–81),

NOTES TO PAGES 146–147

vol. 2 (3rd edn.), Dist. 44, ch. 2, p. 518. On the use of the statue analogy, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), pp. 99 and 123. 141  Charles T. Davis, “The early collection of books of S. Croce in Florence,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107, no. 5 (Oct. 15, 1963): 399–414, p. 399. The metaphor of the reforged sculpture continued to be used through the twelfth century when Scholastics debated whether reforging a statue changed it fundamentally and thus whether a resurrected body was the same as an earthly body. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, p. 134. See, for instance, Cod. Vat. Lat. 10754, in Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibes: Eine problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung der frühscholastischen Sentenzen- und Summenliteratur von Anselm von Laon bis Wilhelm von Auxerre, ed. Richard Heinzmann, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters: Texte und Untersuchungen 40.3 (Münster, 1965), p. 210, lines 52–59: “Nullum ergo tunc erit membrum corporis mei quod sit modo, et ita aliud corpus habebo. Quod falsum esse constat, Iob attestur: quem visurus sum ego ipse et non alius, id est in eadem carnis substantia, non alienata. Unde idem: et in carne mea videbo deum salvatorem meum (Iob 19,26). Dicamus ergo cum Iob et Augustino, quod idem erit corpus quia ex eadem materia constabitur et forte accidentale est illi materiae esse manum vel caput. Non ergo nimium emungamus, ne forte sanguinem eliciamus. Melius est enim esse simplicem catholicum quam disertum haereticum.” 142  Thomas Aquinas, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 44, art. I, quaestiuncula 2, obj. 4, and quaestiuncula 3, Opera omnia (Parma 1852– 73), ed. Vernon J. Bourke, 25 vols (New York, 1948), vol. 7, 1072–75, referred to by Bynum, Resurrection of the body, p. 239. 143 Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1972; rev. 2000), vol. 2, p. 15. This account has been discussed by Brigitte Buettner, “From bones to stones – Reflections on jeweled reliquaries,” in Reliquiare im Mittelalter, eds. Bruno Reudenbach and Gia Toussaint (Berlin, 2005), 43–59, p. 43. A vernacular telling of the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp was included in a fifteenth-century Venetian manuscript. (Jacques

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Dalarun and Lino Leonardi, eds., Biblioteca Agiografica Italiana [BAI]. Repetorio di testi e manoscritti, secoli XIII–XV, 2 vols. [Florence, 2003], vol. 2 p. 601). 144 “E dopo otto dì, erano anche i discepoli suoi dentro e Tomaso con loro. E Gesù venne, stando le porte chiuse, e stette in mezzo e disse: Pace sia a voi.” Il Diatessaron Toscano in Il Diatessaron il volgare italiano, 179: 26, p. 364. “E dopo gli otto giorni un’altra volta erano gli discepoli suoi rinchiusi in casa, e Tomaso era con loro. Ed essendo le porte serrate, venne Iesù, e stette in mezzo di loro, e disse: pace sia a voi” (Negroni, La Bibbia Volgare, vol. 9: Nuovo Testamento, John 20:26, p. 585). 145 “Erat autem post suam resurrectionem quasi medius inter crassum corpus illud quod habebat antequam pateretur” Origenis, Libros Octo Contra Celsum in Origenis, Opera Omnia in Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne, vol. 11, Book 2, chapter 62, p. 894. This has been discussed by Benay, “The pursuit of truth,” p. 23. 146 Origen, Contra celsum, ed. Chadwick, Book 2, chapter 60, p. 112. (“quibusdam circum sepulcra apparere mortuorum umbras et imagines. Igitur ex aliqua re subjecta imagines illae exsistunt. Res autem haec subjecta anima est, quae in corpore splendido, ut Graeci loquuntur, et simili luminis substitit.” Origenis, Libros Octo Contra Celsum in Origenis, Opera Omnia in Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne, vol. 11, Book 2, chapter 60, p. 891). 147 Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, p. 693. 148 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. Robert D. Hicks, 2 vols. (London, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 480–81, bk. 5, ch. 33. This has been discussed by Amy R. Bloch, “Donatello’s Chellini Madonna, Light, and Vision,” in Renaissance Theories of Vision, eds. John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman (Farnham, Surrey, 2010), 63–88, pp. 79–80. Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers was widely known in Florence after its translation into Latin by Ambrogio Traversari in the 1430s and into the vernacular, also during the fifteenth century, as is evident from the many copies of it in extant fifteenth-century manuscripts, and from its presence among the books owned by the fifteenth-century physician Giovanni Chellini. Charles Bernhard Schmitt, “The rediscovery of ancient skepticism in modern times,” in Reappraisals in Renaissance Thought, ed. Charles Bernhard Schmitt (London, 1989), 225–51,

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pp. 233 and 247, n 50; and Bloch, “Donatello’s Chellini Madonna,” pp. 79–80. 149  The humanist Niccolo Niccoli and the physician Giovanni Chellini, for instance, owned copies (Ullman and Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence, p. 73; and Bloch, “Donatello’s Chellini Madonna,” p. 67). 150 Aristotle, The Physics, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, 2 vols. (London, 1929), vol. 1, pp. 129–31. This has been discussed by Bloch, “Donatello’s Chellini Madonna,” p. 80. 151  Several scholars, following Fabriczy, have claimed that Verrocchio had made a life-size model of Saint Thomas that was purchased by the Università dei Mercanti in 1482 to be placed on public display in the Palazzo della Mercanzia. However, Dario Covi has explained how this idea was based on a misunderstanding of the term “bozza” used in the document apparently recording the sale. Although one of the meanings of “bozza” is model, the term was used more generally (and more commonly) for an unfinished work, and the document probably refers to this rather than to a lost model. (For sources for this discussion, see n. 62, pp. 270–271 in Chapter 1.) Nevertheless, Vasari does say explicitly that Verrocchio made models for the Christ and Saint Thomas, and the artist must have made models, given that the sculpture was made from bronze.Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 362. 152 Christina Neilson, “Rediscovered photographs of two terracotta modelli by Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 154, no. 1316 (November, 2012): 762–67. 153  Butterfield, “The Christ and St. Thomas of Andrea del Verrocchio,” p. 74. 154 Günter Passavant, Verrocchio. Sculptures, Paintings and Drawings, trans. Katherine Watson (London, 1969), pp. 59–60. For the most important studies on the drapery studies see my chapter 1, n. 45, p. 269 earlier. 155 Vasari describes this practice in the construction of models for marble sculpturing. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. Gerald Baldwin Brown, trans. Louise S. Maclehouse (New York, 1960), pp. 148–51. 156 Lavin, “Bozzetti and Modelli,” p. 97. For specific cases, see Gary M. Radke, “Benedetto da Maiano and the use of full scale preparatory

models in the Quattrocento,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Giofreddi (Florence, 1992), 217–24, p. 219; and Hannelore Glasser, Artist’s Contracts of the Early Renaissance, Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1965, Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts (New York, 1977), p. 118. 157 Cadogan has pointed out that the procedure of making clay models and draping them in fabric was a procedure long used in bronze casting. Cadogan, “Linen drapery studies by Verrocchio,” pp. 40–41, n. 34. 158 On the importance of light for Verrocchio’s sculpture, see Kathleen Weil Garris Brandt, “Leonardo e la scultura,” Lettura vinciana 38 (April 18, 1998): 9–39, p. 15. 159 “Nelle tenebre o luce non s’inpaccia perché la natura per sè li genera nelle sue sculture” (“He [the sculptor] is not concerned with darkness or light because nature itself generates them in his sculptures” Leonardo da Vinci, trans. in Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone, ch. 36, lines 72–73, pp. 260–61). I am grateful to Michael W. Cole for this point. 160  Massimo Leoni, “Casting techniques in Verrochio’s workshop when the Christ and St Thomas was made,” in Verrocchio’s Christ and St Thomas. A Masterpiece of Sculpture from Renaissance Florence, ed. Loretta Dolcini, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 5, 1992–April 17, 1993 (New York, 1992), 83–100, pp. 89–90. 161 Donatello employed the skillet maker Rosso Padellaio to cast the bronze basin for the Fontana Maggiore and the tinker Andrea Calderai to cast the bronzes for the altar in the Santo in Padua (Leoni, “Casting techniques in Verrocchio’s workshop,” p. 87). According to Flaten, the fifteenth-century medalist Niccolò Fiorentino probably had the medals produced in his workshops cast in a “remote facility.” An inventory of 1515 made of his estate and workshop after the artist’s death lists materials for making bronzes but does not refer to a foundry or a furnace. Flaten notes also that Fiorentino does not provide any indication as to the existence of such a facility in either of his tax returns of 1480 or 1498, and Flaten suggests therefore that he had the medals cast elsewhere, perhaps at the workshop of his older cousins Antonio and Zanobi di Cola Spinelli, both goldsmiths, who inherited

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the family’s goldsmith’s workshop in Florence in 1458 (Arne R. Flaten, “Portrait medals and assembly-line art in late Quattrocento Florence,” in The Art Market in Italy (15th-17th Centuries). Il Mercato dell’arte in Italia [secc. xv–xvii], eds. Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew, and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco [Modena, 2003], 127–39, pp. 129 and 133). Flaten (“Portrait medals and assembly-line art in late Quattrocento Florence,” p. 133) has pointed out that Maso di Bartolomeo’s Libro di Ricordi includes references to casting works in bronze for other artists in the mid-Quattrocento. Bertoldo di Giovanni’s medal commemorating the Pazzi conspiracy was cast by another artist, Guacialoti, and Bertoldo’s Belerephon Taming Pegasus (Vienna) was cast by his assistant, Adriano Fiorentino, a medalist (Flaten, “Portrait medals and assembly-line art in late Quattrocento Florence;” and Luke Syson, “Bertoldo di Giovanni, republican court artist,” in Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance city, eds. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 96–133, p. 108. See Wilhelm von Bode, Bertoldo und Lorenzo dei Medici: Die Kunstpolitik des Lorenzo il Magnifico im Spiegel der Werke seines Lieblingkünstlers Bertoldo di Giovanni (Frieburg im Breisgau, 1925), pp. 88–91; James David Draper, Bertoldo di Giovanni: Sculptor of the Medici Household, (Columbia, MO, 1992), pp. 176–85, cat. 18). Antonio Lombardo subcontracted bell casters to pour his bronzes (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, p. 45. See Bertrand Jestaz, La Chapelle Zen à San Marc de Venise: D’Antonio à Tullio Lombardo [Stuttgart, 1986], pp. 58–60). Jacopo Sansovino relied on experts when he began making bronzes in Venice. (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, p. 45; see Bruce Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, 2 vols. [New Haven, CT, 1991], vol. 1, p. 145). Tribolo had his ten-foot-high satyr cast by Zanobi Portigiani (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, p. 45. See James Holderbaum, “Notes on Triboli I: A documented bronze by Tribolo,” Burlington Magazine 99 (1957): 336–43, 369–72). Ludovico Sforza sent for founders in Florence when Leonardo was preparing his equestrian monument (about which Michelangelo later taunted him) (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, p. 45; see the documents in Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie rituardanti la vita

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e le opera di Leonardo da Vinci [Milan, 1919]). Michelangelo turned to the assistance of an expert for casting his Julius II in Bologna in 1507, though the result was a failure (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, p. 45; see Paola Barocchi, ed., Scritti del Arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols. [Milan, 1973], vol. 1, pp. 391– 92). Giovanni Francesco Rustici employed the same founder as Michelangelo (Bernardino, a cannon maker from Milan), though with success, for his figures for the Florentine Baptistery (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, p. 45; see Gaetano Milanesi, “Documenti riguardanti le statue di marmo e di bronzo fatte per le porte di San Giovanni di Firenze da Andrea del Monte San Savino e da G. F. Rustici,” in Gaetano Milanesi, Sulla storia dell’arte Toscana: Scritti varii [Siena, 1873], pp. 247–61). In his Autobiography, Cellini implies that the use of foundrymen to cast sculptures in bronze was not uncommon, and he lamented their ineptness: “Often founders are called on to help make [bronze] figures, but disasters occur because they do not have enough experience, or use enough care, and they cause our hard work to be lost.” (“[M]aestri d’artiglierie il più delle volte sono chiamati da quelli che fanno le figure, e venendo alcuni casi terribili che promette l’arte, quei tali maestri d’artiglierie non avendo cotai sperienzie, e scarsi di diligenzie, sono causa che le dette fatiche si perdono.” Benvenuto Cellini, Opere, ed. Bruno Maier [Milan, 1968], pp. 808–09). Scalini has argued that Alberti did not discuss bronze casting in his De statua (whereas he does discuss modeling), because it was usually carried out by specialist founders (Mario Scalini, “Original Settings of Nonreligious Bronzes in the Renaissance,” in Large Bronzes in the Renaissance, ed. Peta Motture, vol. 64 of Studies in the History of Art [2003], 31–55, p. 31). And Cole has noted that sculptors who were also casters were often goldsmiths (Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, pp. 45–46). 162 Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura (1504), eds. André Chastel and Robert Klein (Geneva, 1969), pp. 218–19. It would appear that Donatello had his bronzes cast by specialist calderai. On this see Bruno Bearzi, “La tecnica fusoria di Donatello,” in Donatello e il suo tempo. Atti dell’ VIII convegno internazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1966 (Florence, 1968), 97–106, pp. 97–106.

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163 Bearzi, “La tecnica fusoria di Donatello,” pp. 101–02. 164 Luca Boschetto, “Ghiberti e i tre compare. Un nuovo documento sulla fusione dei telai della seconda porta del Battistero,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 53, no. 1 (2009): 145–49. 165 Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, p. 221. 166  “[F]attone i modelli e le forme, le gettò.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 362. 167 “[R]acconcio che ebbe il primo modello, lo gettò di bronzo, ma non finì già del tutto; perchè essendo riscaldato e raffreddato nel gettarlo, si morì in pochi giorni in quella città [Venezia].” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 368. (Reducing the first model that he (Verrocchio) had, he cast it in bronze, but he did not finish all of it, because he overheated and caught a chill during the casting, and he died a few days later in that city [Venice]). 168 A courier bound for Venice was instructed to find Verrocchio in Treviso in 1469, where the artist was acquiring copper sheets for the palla. (AOF, VIII.I.49 [Quaderno di cassa, January, 1468/69–June, 1469], fol. 12 left side, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 312, doc.VI.34.f). 169 Richard E. Stone (“A new interpretation of the casting of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes,” in Small Bronzes in the Renaissance, ed. Debra Pincus, vol. 62 of Studies in the History of Art (2001), 54–69, pp. 55–56) argued that the Christ and Saint Thomas was cast directly, whereas Massimo Leoni (“La tecnica fonderia ai tempi del Verrocchio,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi [Florence, 1992], 157–61, pp. 159–60; and “Casting technique in Verrocchio’s workshop,” pp. 89–90) argued it was cast indirectly. The basis for these different opinions lies in the interpretations of the evidence of the sculptures themselves, specifically the presence of core material on the statues’ reverses, the varying thickness of the bronze walls of the sculptures, and the lack of similitude between the fronts and reverses of the sculptures. For technical studies of the sculptures, see also the essays published in OPD restauro 3 (1991) reporting on the sculpture’s recent restoration and those by Giorgio Bonsanti, Loretta

Dolcini, and Edgar Lein in Die ChristusThomas-Gruppe von Andrea del Verrocchio, eds. Herbert Beck, Maraike Bückling and Edgar Lein (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). There were different advantages for casting directly or indirectly. In the indirect method copies of the original model were made (called “intermodels”) and only the copies were destroyed in the casting; the original model was preserved, which was advantageous as bronze casting was a risky enterprise and a lot could go wrong. With the direct method, if the casting is a failure, the artist must begin again, making a new model. On the other hand, the direct casting method was preferable for conveying surface details and required less cold work, because in indirect casting, an intermediate mold was required, and the use of this mold tended to lead to a diminished surface quality for bronze (Jane L. Bassett, The Craftsman Revealed: Adriaen de Vries, Sculptor in Bronze [Los Angeles, CA, 2008], p. 264). 170 This connection between sculptor and Thomas is made explicitly in a late medieval Norwegian crucifix onto which the artist wrote “Thomas” along Christ’s arm (Martin Blindheim, Painted Wooden Sculpture in Norway c. 1100–1250 [Oslo, 1998], pp. 41 and 80, cat. 61). On this, see my forthcoming study: Living Devotion: Animating Late Medieval and Early Modern Statues. For a useful discussion of making bronze sculptures and the senses involved (especially the avoidance of touch), see Ittai Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK, 2016), pp. 44–54. 171 Theophilus Presbyter, De diversis artibus, Book III, trans. and ed. Charles Reginald Dodwell (London, 1961), chapter, 30, p. 102.This has been discussed by Weinryb, The Bronze Object, p. 52. 172 For another argument about how in the sculpture Thomas stands for Verrocchio, see Andreas Beyer, “Verus oculus oder die Konversion des Andrea del Verrocchio,” in Die Christ-Thomas Gruppe von Andrea del Verrocchio, eds. Herbert Beck, Maraike Bückling and Edgar Lein (Frankfurt, 1996), 103–19. 173 Alison Wright, “‘Touch the truth?’ Desiderio da Settignano, Renaissance relief, and the body of Christ,” Sculpture Journal 21, no. 1 (2012): 7–25. 174  On the theoretical framework and broader anthropological context of this attitude see

NOTES TO PAGES 150–153

Daniel Miller (“Materiality: An introduction,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller [Durham, 2005], p. 1 and the contents of this volume), who has explored how most of the world’s religions (ancient through modern) express the conviction that the material world is mere illusion– that which lies behind the material world is the truth – and yet, “paradoxically, material culture has been of considerable consequence as the means of expressing this conviction.” And for a similar interpretation of Jan Van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele (c. 1434–36, Groeningemuseum, Bruges) – though with a different conclusion

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about the role of artifice – see Bret Rothstein, “Vision and devotion in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele,” Word and Image 15, no. 3 (1999): 262–76. 175 Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet. The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park, PA, 1994), pp. 52–53. 176 Nikolaos Mesaries, Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople, ed. and trans. Glanville Downey, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 47 (1957): 855– 918, p. 888. This has been discussed by Land, Viewer as Poet, pp. 51–52. 1434-1536

4: THE SCULPTURED IMAGINATION 1 Bernard Berenson was the first to attribute the drawing to Verrocchio, in 1938 (Bernard Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1938), vol. 1, pp. 48, n. 2, and 59; vol. 2, p. 359, no. 2782A; and vol. 3, figure. 127). All later scholars have accepted this opinion. For a summary of attributions, see Carmen C. Bambach in Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 22–March 30, 2003 (New Haven, CT, 2003), pp. 242–45, cat. 1. 2 According to Claire Van Cleave, black chalk used in the fifteenth century was a naturally occurring shale made from carbon and clay, cut down to a convenient size to be fitted in a holder. Claire Van Cleave, “Tradition and Innovation in the Early History of Black Chalk Drawing.” In Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper, Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 4, Florence, 1992 (Bologna, 1994), 231–44, p. 232. 3 On the sculptural tonal range achieved by Verrocchio in his drawings and Renaissance understandings of the potential of black chalk, see my chapter 1, n. 27, p. 267 earlier. 4 Van Cleave has argued that the retouching in ink was done as an afterthought to the original drawing and may even be by another artist (Van Cleave, “Tradition and Innovation,” p. 234, n. 12). I agree with Van Cleave: I think it is possible that the hatching may have been done in Verrocchio’s workshop because it supplements the stumping. There are also areas that

look as though brown wash has been applied, but these have so little connection to what is depicted, they are probably more likely to be areas of discoloration (this is also supported when one views the drawing from the reverse). On the drawing’s technique, see also Bambach, Drawing and Painting, pp. 259–62; and Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 242–45. 5 The hatching in ink was executed from right to left, whereas the hatching in black chalk was done left to right. Bambach has noted that the delicate reworking with short, left-handed parallel hatching in brush and gray wash, which unifies the tonal structure of the shadows on the woman’s temple and cheek in the Christ Church drawing, may be the hand of the young Leonardo at work. Bambach, Drawing and Painting, pp. 260–61. 6 The pricking is very finely done and goes over all areas of the drawing, including the hair, veil, plaits, clothing, and her face and neck (including every fold in her neck), though not including the apex of the veil at the top of the drawing. As Johannes Nathan recognized, though, there are significant deviations between the actual drawing and the pricking, including the hair, drapery, contour of the forehead, the tip of the nose, and the mouth (“The Working Methods of Leonardo da Vinci and Their Relation to Previous Artistic Practice” [Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1995], p. 123). Although Nathan (“Working Methods of Leonardo da Vinci,” pp. 138–39), who examined the drawing before it

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was removed from its support, claimed that the pricks did not perforate the paper, Bambach (Leonardo da Vinci, p. 244) has argued that they did and that the holes contain charcoal dust. 7 Van Cleave (“Tradition and Innovation,” p. 234) proposes that it probably served as a cartoon for the Virgin in a painting. 8 This has been noted by Nathan, “Working Methods of Leonardo da Vinci,” p. 123. On charcoal dust in the holes see n. 6, pp. 321–322 earlier in this chapter. 9 A similar attention to surface, and with the same intention as an independent work of art, can be recognized in Leonardo’s silverpoint drawing Bust of a Warrior (c. 1475–80, British Museum, London), which Hugo Chapman has plausibly proposed was inspired by a relief sculpture by Verrocchio (Hugo Chapman, “Introduction,” and Hugo Chapman, “Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Warrior,” in Hugo Chapman and Marzia Faietti, Fra Angelico to Leonardo. Italian Renaissance Drawings, exh. cat., The British Museum, April 22–July 25, 2010 [London, 2010], pp. 66 and 204–05, cat. 50). 10 Elizabeth Cropper, ed., Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 4, Florence, 1992 (Bologna, 1994), p. ix. 11 On technical developments in drawing, with a consideration of their theoretical significance, see Bambach, Drawing and Painting. 12 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, 1550, rev. 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878), vol. 3, p. 364. 13 A memorandum of 1335, for instance, by the Trevisan notary and banker Oliviero Forzetta expresses his desire to acquire books of drawings by the Venetian painter Angelo di Tedaldo and his sons while in Venice (Luciano Gargan, “Oliviero Forzetta e la nascita del collezionismo nel Veneto,” in La pittura nel Veneto: il Trecento, ed. Mauro Lucco, 2 vols. [Milan, 1992], vol. 2, 503–16, pp. 509–11). On this and other examples from the Quattrocento, see Chapman, “Introduction,” in Chapman and Faietti, Fra Angelico to Leonardo, p. 22. 14 Chapman, “Introduction,” in Chapman and Faietti, Fra Angelico to Leonardo, p. 23. 15 Verrocchio created areas that resemble shimmering light in a drawing of a head of an angel (Uffizi [130E]) by employing the same technique of leaving part of the paper bare. Ilaria

Rossi, “Head of an Angel,” in Chapman and Faietti, Fra Angelico to Leonardo, p. 186, cat. 41. 16 This has been noted by Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 245. 17 Alexander Nagel, “Leonardo’s Sfumato,” Res 24 (1993): 7–20. 18 The outline is more loosely defined than it appears (it seems more exaggerated because of the ink outline around the chin and the pricking around the face and hair), though it is not sfumato. 19 See, for instance, Bambach, Drawing and Painting, p. 261. 20 Claire Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone. A Critical Interpretation (Leiden, 1992), p. 137. On the relationship between painting and sculpture in Leonardo’s oeuvre, see Kathleen Weil Garris Brandt, “Leonardo e la scultura,” Lettura vinciana 38 (April 18, 1998): 9–39, and on relief sculpture specifically, see pp. 26–36. 21 Van Cleave, “Tradition and Innovation,” p. 234. 22 Karen-edis Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno (Cambridge, UK, 2000), p. 145. 23 Bambach, Drawing and Painting, p. 377 n. 62. On fifteenth-century theories of disegno, see Luigi Grassi, Il disegno italiano, Il Trecento e Quattrocento (Venice, 1961), pp. x–xiii; and Andreina Griseri, “Il disegno,” Storia dell’arte italiana 9, no. 1 (1980): 187–226. 24 “[S]ai che ttaverra, pratichando il disengniare di penna / che tti fara sperto, praticho e chapacie di molto disengno entro / la testa tua.” Cennino Cennini, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte. A new English Translation and Commentary with Italian Transcription, ed. and trans. Lara Broecke (London, 2015), ch. 13, p. 34, 25 “[L]a prima misura che pigli adisegniare piglia luna de / lle tre che a il viso chenn a in tutto tre cioe latesta il viso e l mento co / llaboccha e pigliando una diqueste te ghuida di tutta lafighura de / chasamenti dall una fighura allaltra ede perfetta tuo ghuida aoper / ando il tuo intelletto disaper ghuidar lepredette figure e misure e questo / sifa perchelastoria o ffighura sara alta che cho mano non potrai agiu / gniere per misuralla conviene che conintelletto ti ghuidi e trover / rai laverita ghuidandoti per questo modo.” ([A]s the first measurement which you choose for your drawing, choose one of the three which the face has, which has a total of three, that is: the forehead, the face

NOTES TO PAGES 156–157

and the chin and mouth together. And once you have chosen one of these it is your guide for the whole figure, for the buildings, from one figure to another and it is a perfect guide when using your judgement to understand how to guide the figures and measurements mentioned above. And you do this because the scene or figure will be high up so that you will not be able to reach with your hand to measure it; you need to use your judgement as your guide and you will get it right if you guide yourself in this way.” Cennino, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte, ch. 30, p. 50. 26 “Perchè il disegno, padre delle tre arti nostre, Architettura, Scultura e Pittura, procedendo dall’intelletto, cava di molte cose un giudizio universale; simile a una forma ovvero idea di tutte le cose della natura, la quale è singolarissima nelle sue misure; di qui è che non solo nei corpi umani e degli animali, ma nelle piante ancora, e nelle fabriche e sculture e pitture, conosce la proporzione che ha il tutto con le parti, e che hanno le parti fra loro e col tutto insieme. E perchè da questa cognizione nasce un certo concetto e giudizio, che si forma nella mente quella tal cosa che poi espresso con le mani si chiama disegno; si può conchiudere che esso disegno altro non sia che una apparente espressione e dichiarazione del concetto che si ha nell’animo, e di quello che altri si è nella mente immaginato e fabbricato nell’idea.” Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 168–69, trans. and discussed in Robert Williams, Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge, UK, 1997), p. 33. 27 Hills has argued that “[f]or Alberti the line is not constituted on the basis of resemblance to things seen in the world, rather it is a sign belonging to the surface on which it is inscribed by the artist. When the artist sees a line it is the line that he has just drawn. Thus the line belongs to the performance of delineating with the hand what has been conceived by the mind – Alberti’s text makes this clear. The line is conceptual before it is phenomenal; it becomes subject to the judgement of sense only when it is inscribed” (Paul Hills, “Ray, Line, Vision and Trace,” Word and Image 6 (1990): 217–25, p. 217). 28 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, UK, 1988),

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pp. 7–32, 201, 202, 251, 281, and 314. The definition of lineamenta, in particular, has sparked much scholarly debate. Alberti uses the term in the context of the practice of architecture, which he divides into lineamenta and structura. Bartoli translated lineamenta as disegno (to imply “drawing” as well as “design”); Martin translated it as lineamens and once as platteform; Leoni as “design”; Theuer as risse; Panofksy as “form”; Krautheimer as “plan” or “definitions,” but in the context of De re aedifactoria he translated it as “schematic outlines,” rather than “drawings” or “designs.” See Susan Lang, “De Lineamentis: L. B. Alberti’s Use of a Technical Term,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 331–35, p. 331 n. 8. Alberti used the term in his Preface to De Re Aedifactoria where he notes that “the building is a form of body, which like any other consists of lineaments and matter, the one the product of thought, the other of Nature; the one requiring the mind and the power of reason, the other dependent on preparation and selection.” Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, p. 5. S. Lang claimed that for Alberti lineamenta signified both ground plan and design, “in which all the ideas of the architect are incorporated” (Lang, “De Lineamentis: L. B. Alberti’s Use of a Technical Term,” p. 335). Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, on the other hand, preferred to translate it as “lines,” “linear characteristics,” and “design,” because ground plan was too close to their translation of the term finitio (Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, pp. 422–23). 29 Van Eck has pointed out that in translating lineamenta as “lines” and “linear characteristics,” “it obscures the mental nature of lineamenta in favour of its materialisation in the form of lines, etc.” Therefore, she has proposed the term “design.” Caroline van Eck, “Architecture, Language and Rhetoric in Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria,” in Architecture and Language. Constructing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000c. 1650, eds. Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 72-81, p. 186, n. 28. 30 Van Eck, “Architecture, Language and Rhetoric,” pp. 74 and 76. On Alberti’s use of the term, see also Gerhard Wolf, “The Body and Antiquity in Alberti’s Art Theoretical Writings,” in Antiquity and Its Interpreters, eds.

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Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 174–90. 31 Heinrich Ludwig, Lionardo da Vinci: Das Buch von der Malerei nach dem Codex Vaticanus (Urbinas) 1270, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1882), 133, trans. in Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting: Codex urbinas latinus 1270, ed. A. Philip McMahon, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1959), vol. 1, p. 61, no. 102. 32 On the relationship between representation and thing in Renaissance culture, see Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1987). 33 “‘Chi può parlar colla boce di Geta/ Se non è il Geta? Or questo come fue?/ So io ben però che loica non vieta/ Che con simile boce parlin due./ Et anche è cosa assai ben consueta/ Ch’ un medesimo nome è posto a due.’ . . . ’La boce e’ fatti chiaro Geta il fanno . . . Dunche siàn fatti due ch’eravam’ uno? Questo non può caper nel capo mio . . . Udendo me mi fa chiaro di dua.’” Costantino Arlia, ed., Geta e Birria. Novella (Bologna, 1879), pp. 37–38. 34 As Alison Elliott has noted with regard to the version by Vitalis of Blois, the subject of the satire is clearly Peter Abélard with his emphasis on dialectic and “universals.” Elliot notes, for example, that Paris was known as the “Athens of the North” (and thus Amphitryon and Geta’s trip to Athens may be an allusion to Paris). Alison G. Elliott, “Geta by Vitalis of Blois,” Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Allegorica) 3, no. 2 (Winter, 1978): 9–61, p. 10. She also notes that Geta’s concern about his name echoes Abélard’s discussion of universals and the issue of names. Elliott, “Geta by Vitalis of Blois,” pp. 10–11. Abélard derived his ideas about universals from the writings of the Greek commentator Porphyry. 35 Elliott, “Geta by Vitalis of Blois,” pp. 10–11. 36 Porphyry translated and quoted by Anders Plitz, The World of Medieval Learning (Oxford, 1981), p. 58. 37 “Il Geta è pazzo . . . con suo gran sapere.” Arlia, Geta e Birria, p. 64, canto 179. 38 Elliott, “Geta by Vitalis of Blois,” p. 11. 39 Vannoccio Biringuccio, The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth Century Treatise on Metals and Metallurgy, trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New York, 1959; repr., 1990), p. 211. 40 Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, pp. 210–11. 41 Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, p. 210. 42 “Canpana si fa di nuovo, grande, de’ dare adì 20 di lugl[i]o lire due, dati a 4 fachini per menar

màntachi ad Andrea del Verrochio per alleghar metallo; portoron i detti; fu libre 600.” AOF, VIII.I.58, Quaderno di cassa, July–December, 1473), fol. 15 left side, transcribed by Dario A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio. Life and Work (Florence, 2005), p. 331, doc. VI.39. It is not known whether Verrocchio was responsible for casting the bell. 43 Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, p. 219. 44 AOF, VIII.I.54 (Quaderno di Cassa, July– December, 1471), fol. 12 left side, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 352, doc. vi.53.b. 45 Biringuccio warns of the potential for failure (Pirotechnia, p. 214). 46 Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, pp. 295–96. 47 Benedetto Varchi claims that Michelangelo made his own tools, and other sculptors must have done this too, as Vincenzo Borghini claims, and as Francesco da Sangallo and Cellini appear to have said also. Suzanne Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan. Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence, 1996), vol. 1, p. 196. 48 For marble sculptors’ tools, see Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. Gerald Baldwin Brown, trans. Louise S. Maclehouse (New York, 1960), pp. 48–49; and Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, vol. 1, p. 189ff (with further bibliography). 49 Vasari recommends polishing with a pumice stone, Tripoli earth, and straw made into bunches.Vasari, Vasari on Technique, pp. 152–53. 50 On the use of the drill in Renaissance sculpture, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, “Il trapano e la pietra: note sull’uso del trapano nella lavorazione del marmo fra Medioevo e Rinascimento,” Critica d’arte 63 (June, 2000): 31–44. 51 “Scitum quidem est quod fertur de Donatelli abaco. Is quum rogaretur a M. Balbo nobili uiro inspiciundi sui abaci copiam faceret, respondit postridie mane domum ad se ueniret, idque se quam lubentissime facturum. Ille ubi uenit, prandioque susceptus est, ‘Praeter hunc quem hic uides,’ inquit Donatellus, ‘nullus est mihi Balbe alius abacus, nisi quem soli mihi contueri licet, quem nullis impedimentis, nulla sarcina mecum ipse semper porto. Si tamen uidere quid cupias, afferte huc pusiones cum stilo papyrum. Illic et depromptam abaco quancunque historiam dimirabere, siue Palliatos siue Togatos, siue et Nudos spectare

NOTES TO PAGES 161–162

libuerit.’” Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura (1504), eds. André Chastel and Robert Klein (Geneva, 1969), pp. 64–65. (“It is well known what is told of Donatello’s abacus. When he was asked by a certain nobleman, M. Balbus, whether he would give him the opportunity of inspecting his abacus, he replied that he should come on the following morning to his home and he would most willingly show it to him. When he came and was entertained at a meal, Donatello said, ‘Besides the person you see, I possess no other abacus, Balbus; apart from the visible person belonging to me alone which I myself always carry with me without any bags or baggage. But if you would like to see something, the boys must bring me paper and stylus; thereupon indeed you will admire whatever account is produced by the abacus, whether you will have wished to see them in cloaks or togas or even naked’.”) 52 David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), p. 365. 53 Charles Dempsey, review of Michelangelo and the Language of Art, by David Summers, Burlington Magazine 125 (1983): 624–27, p. 624; Elizabeth Cropper, review of Michelangelo and the Language of Art, by David Summers, Art Bulletin 65, no. 1 (March, 1983): 157–62. 54 On tacit knowledge of artisans, see the work of Pamela H. Smith, including: “Giving Voice to the Hands: The Articulation of Material Literacy in the Sixteenth Century,” in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur (Pittsburgh, PA, 2001), pp. 74–93; The Body of the Artisan. Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL, 2004); and “Making and Knowing in a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention between the Late Renaissance and Early Industrialization, eds. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 20–37. In the rare case that an artist was also a theorist, their observations and experience of working with materials contributed to their theoretical ideas. One such example is Lorenzo Ghiberti’s theories about light, which came from his experience as a jeweler. As John Gage has pointed out, in the fifteenth century, gems were “cut en cabochon, round or oblong, with a smooth and rounded surface. When they were treated in this way, the colored light did not seem to be received and refracted in flashes, but to glow as if generated from within, as Ghiberti suggested

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in his example of light-giving bodies.” John Gage, “Ghiberti’s Third Commentary and Its Background,” Apollo 95 (1972): 364–69, p. 365. 55 Philippe Morel “La théâtricalisation de l’alchimie de la nature. Les grottes artificielles et la culture scientifique à Florence à la fin du XVIe siècle,” Symboles de la Renaissance 3 (1990): 154–83, pp. 160–66; and Philippe Morel, Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIe siècle. Théâtre et alchimie de la nature (Paris, 1998), p. 22. Aristotle’s Meteorology, known as the Metaura in Italian, was translated into the vernacular in the fourteenth century and had wide circulation. Eugenio Refini “‘Aristotile in parlare materno’:Vernacular Readings of the Ethics in the Quattrocento,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (2013), 311–41, p. 313– 14. For a critical edition of the text, see Rita Librandi, La Metaura d’Aristotile:Volgarizzamento fiorentino anonimo del XIV secolo (Naples, 1995). 56 Rabbi Joshua bar Hanania, rabbinical Midrash of Leviticus Rabbah 22, 27, quoted in Fabio Barry, “Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Art Bulletin 139, no. 4 (December, 2007): 627–57, p. 630. 57 Eric J. Holmyard and Desmond C. Mendeville, eds., Avicennae de Congelatione et Conglutinatione Lapidum, Being Sections of the Kitab al-Shifa (Paris, 1927), p. 46; Ferdinand Dussaussay De Mély and Charles Émile Ruelle, Les lapidaires de l’antiquité et du Moyen Âge, 3 vols. (Paris, 1896–1902), vol. 3, p. xxxiv. 58 “Segnor, tu sai che per algente freddo/ l’acqua diventa cristallina petra.” Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal. Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose (Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp. 284–85, lines 25–26. For a detailed discussion of Dante’s knowledge of the creation and qualities of stones, see Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal, pp. 34–45. 59 Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture: Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, Known as Filarete, trans. John R. Spencer, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 31–32; bk 3, fols. 17v–18r, referred to by Barry, “Walking on Water,” p. 631. 60 “[P]orto la tua figura./ In cor par ch’eo vi porti,/ pinta como parete, .  .  . Avendo gran disio,/ dipinsi una figura,/ bella, voi simigliante” Giacomo da Lentini, “Maravigliosamente,” in Le Rime della Scuola Siciliana, ed. Bruno Panvini, 2 vols. (Florence, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 7–8. For Lorenzo’s Raccolta Aragona, see Prosatori volgari del Quattrocento. La letteratura italiana: Storia e

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testi, vol. xiv, ed. Claudio Varese (Milan, 1955), pp. 985–90. 61 Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal, especially, p. 48. 62 “[L]a mente mia ch’è più dura che petra/ in tener forte imagine di petra.” (Mind harder than stone to hold fast an image of stone.) “[M] i fa sembiante pur come una donna/ che fosse fatta d’una bella petra/ per man di quei che me’ intagliasse in petra.” Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal, pp. 278–79, lines 12–13; and pp. 284–85, lines 10–12. 63 Salomone Morpurgo, I manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze: manoscritti italiani (Rome, 1893), vol. 1, index, p. 706. 64 Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, pp. 176–79. This has been noted by Charles Dempsey, The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 66. 65 “l’idolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro” (an idol carved in living laurel). Petrarch, Sonnet 30, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA, 1976), pp. 88 and 89. On this sonnet, see Robert M. Durling, “Petrarch’s ‘Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro’,” Modern Language Notes 86 (1971): 1–20; and John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1975): 34–40. 66 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Comento de’ miei sonetti, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Florence, 1991), p. 225; Lorenzo de’ Medici, The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici The Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets, trans. James Wyatt Cook (Binghamton, NY, 1995), p. 139.The poem has been discussed by Adrian W. B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics and Public Art in FifteenthCentury Florence (New Haven, CT, 2002), p. 134. There are forty-one sonnets with accompanying commentaries in the Comento. They were composed between 1474 and 1492, the year of Lorenzo’s death. Sonnets I–IV and VII–IX date from 1474 to 1475 and 1477, X dates from 1478 to 1479, and the rest date from 1480 to 1483. The commentaries were initiated in 1473, continued in the 1480s until 1492. Tiziano Zanato, “Sulla datazione del Comento,” in Lorenzo de’ Medici, Comento de’ miei sonetti, pp, 123–29. 67 Although Lorenzo probably composed his poem after Verrocchio had made his drawing, nevertheless the transformation of a woman into a natural material was one that would have been familiar to readers of the ancients,

as well as the vernacular (including classics translated into the vernacular, such as Ovid). Lorenzo’s Ambra is variously dated from c. 1485 to 1491–92 – and thus probably postdates Verrocchio’s drawing (On the dating, see Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ambra [Descriptio Hiemis], ed. Rossella Bessi [Florence, 1986]; Charles Dempsey, “Lorenzo De’ Medici’s Ambra,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig High Smyth, eds. Andrew Morrogh, Fiorella Superbi Giofreddi, Piero Morselli and Eve Borsook, 2 vols [Florence, 1985], vol. 2, 177–90, esp. pp. 185–86; Charles Dempsey,“La data dell ‘Ambra’ [Descriptio Hiemis] di Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Interpres 10 [1990]: 265–69; and Rossella Bessi, “Ancora sulla data dell’Ambra Laurenziana,” Interpres 11 [1991]: 345–47). I am not implying, therefore, that Verrocchio was inspired to make his drawing by Lorenzo’s poem (which postdates it by several years), but rather that the artist’s interest in evoking a sensuous response in his viewer was one shared by others in Renaissance Florence and expressed elsewhere and in other media. 68 “[I]l colpo de’ vostr’occhi,/ Donna, sentiste a le mie parti interne/ dritto passare.” Petrarch’s sonnet 87 in the Rime sparse (Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, pp. 190–91). It was described this way too by Pietro Bembo (“who does not immediately know how to make his beloved into an archer, pretending her eyes strike wounds with the keenest arrows” [Bembo, Gli Asolani, ed. cit. II.8, p. 395f]) and Politian (“Quickly, Cupid, hidden in those beautiful eyes, adjusts the notch of his arrow to his bow string, then he draws back with his powerful arm so that the two ends of the bow meet; his left hand is touched by the point of fiery gold, his right breast by the string: the arrow does not begin to hiss through the air before Julio has felt it inside his heart” [Politian, Stanze, I.40, quoted and discussed in Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love. Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton, NJ, 1992), pp. 149 and 153]). For the topos of the “arrow of love” in poetry, see Dana E. Stewart, The Arrow of Love. Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisburg, PA, 2003). For a useful discussion of the phenomenon as it pertains to Renaissance art, see Adrian Randolph, Touching Objects. Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (New Haven, CT, 2014),

NOTES TO PAGES 162–163

pp. 124–37. An early fifteenth-century manuscript of Dante’s Paradiso in Padua depicts Beatrice sending forth a torrent of sparks from her eyes towards Dante, who turns away and staggers, as if to fall from their force. This has been discussed by Barbara Newman, “Love’s Arrows: Christ as Cupid in Late Medieval Art and Devotion,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, eds. Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 263–83, p. 282 and Figure 13. On the physiological explanation of this phenomenon and its discussion in medical literature, see Donald Beecher, “The Lover’s Body: The Somatogenesis of Love in Renaissance Medical Treatises,” Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réform 24 (1988): 1–11, p. 8ff 69 “Talia in me utinam multiplicity vulnera a planta pedis usque ad verticem, ut non sit in me sanitas. Mala enim sanitas, ubi vulnera vacant quae Christi pius infligit aspectus.” Gilbert of Hoyland, Sermones in Canticum Salomonis 30.2, Patrologiae Cursus Completus . . . Series Latina, ed. Jacques–Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–55 and 1862–65) (henceforth PL), vol. 184, 156B, trans. Newman, “Love’s Arrows,” p. 271. On the popularity of Gilbert’s sermons in Florence, see Martha L. Dutton, “The Medici Connection: Gilbert of Hoyland’s Sermons on the Song of Songs in Renaissance Italy,” Citêaux: Commentarii cistercienses 52, nos. 1–2 (2001): 93–119, pp. 114–15. 70 Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), ch. 9: 3, p. 156 (“Sagittaveras tu cor nostrum charitate tua, et gestabamus verba tua transfixa visceribus.” S. Aurelii Augustine [Saint Augustine of Hippo], Confessionum, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini [Saint Augustine of Hippo], Opera Omnia in PL, Book 9, chapter 2, 3, p. 764.) 71 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ, 1993), vol. 2, p. 117. Augustine’s Confessions was also contained in the collection at the S. Croce library (Curzio Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce in Firenze,” Rivista delle biblioteche e degli archivi 8 (1897): 16–31, 99–113, 129–47, p. 101). For more examples in devotional literature, see Newman, “Love’s Arrows.” 72 “In gran dilettanza era,/ madonna, in quello giorno/ quando vi formai in cera/ le belleze d’intorno.” Giacomo da Lentini, “Madonna

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mia a voi mando,” in Panvini, Le Rime della Scuola Siciliana, vol. 1, p. 31, verse 6, lines 41–4. 73 See Introduction, p. ? and ns. 116 and 117. 74 “[Q]uesta donna gentile a me venire/ e aprirmi il petto, e dentro poi scrivesse/ là in mezzo ‘l core, posto a sofferire, il suo bel nome di littere d’oro/ in modo ch’indi non potesse uscire.” Giovanni Boccaccio, “Amorosa Visione,” in Tutte le opere, trans. Robert Hollander,Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel (Hanover, NH, 1986), 45.1–15. This has been discussed by Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 135. On the process as outlined in poetry, see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald R. Martinez, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 69 (Minneapolis, MN, 1993), p. 70ff. Boccaccio uses the word “scrivesse” – write – but writing with a stylus as a form of carving on the heart had a long history to which Boccaccio was referring, for which, see Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, IL, 2000), and on Boccaccio specifically, pp. 77–78. 75 Medici, Comento, pp. 208–09; Medici, Autobiography, pp. 119–21. This poem has been discussed in Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 132. The conceit of the bella mano also features in the poetry of Giusto de’ Conti, which was published in 1472 and again in 1474 (Randolph, Touching Objects, p. 53). 76 This has been noted by Randolph, Touching Objects, p. 53. 77 Medici, Comento, p. 211. This has been discussed by James Hall, “Lorenzo Ghiberti and Michelangelo in Search of the Feeling Hand,” in Sculpture and Touch, ed. Peter Dent (Surrey, 2014), 197–210, pp. 198–99. See also Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 132. 78 This has been discussed by Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), p. 95. 79 Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, p. 70ff. On the banner, see Cornelis de Fabriczy, “Andrea Verrocchio ai servizi de’ Medici,” Archivio storico dell’arte 2d. ser., vol. 1 (1895): 163–76 (the banner is listed in the inventory published on p. 167, no. 10); Giovanni Poggi, “La giostra medicea del 1475 e la ‘Pallade’ del Botticelli,” L’arte (1902): 71–77; David Alan Brown and Charles Seymour, Jnr., “Further Observations on a Project for a Standard by Verrocchio and Leonardo,” Master Drawings 12, no. 2 (Summer, 1974): 127–33; and David Alan

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Brown, “Verrocchio and Leonardo: Studies for the Giostra,” in Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper, Villa Spelman Colloquia, vol. 4 (Florence, 1992; Bologna, 1994), 99–109. 80 Petrarch, Sonnet 129, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. Durling, p. 264. Later Petrarch in the same sonnet wrote that he had seen her “in the clear water, upon the green grass, . . . in the trunk of a birch tree, and in the white clouds.” Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, p. 124. 81 “[M]odelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief ” Pliny, Natural History, trans. Harris Rackham, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1938–62), vol. 9, Book XXXV. XLIII, pp. 370–73. I am grateful to one of my anonymous readers for making this connection. 82 “Artes eorum, qui ex corporibus a natura procreates effigies et simulacra suum in opus promere aggrediuntur, ortas hinc fuisse arbitror. Nam ex trunco glebave et huiusmodi mutis corporibus fortassis aliquando intuebantur lineamenta nonulla, quibus paululum immutatis persimile quidpiam veris naturae vultibus redderetur. Coepere id igitur animo advertentes atque adnotantes adhibita diligentia tentare conarique possentne illic adiungere adimereve atque perfinire quod ad veram simulacra speciem comprehendendam absolvendamque deesse videretur.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, trans. and ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), p. 8. See Horst W. Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” in Horst W. Janson, 16 Studies (New York, 1973), 53–74, p. 55. 83 Medici, Comento, p. 210; Medici, Autobiography, p. 121. This has been discussed by Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 132. 84 Medici, Comento, p. 211; Medici, Autobiography, p. 123. This has been discussed by Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 132. 85 Medici, Comento, p. 310; Medici, Autobiography, p. 241. This has been discussed by Dempsey, Portrayal of Love, p. 146.

86 On the idea of love being born in the imaginativa, see Robert Klein, “Spirito Peregrino,” in Form and Meaning. Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier (New York, 1979), 62–85, p. 77; and Dempsey, Portrayal of Love, esp. pp. 146–49. 87 Agamben, Stanzas. On the close connection between Renaissance poets and natural philosophers on spirits, see Klein “Spirito Peregrino.” 88 The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, ed. and trans. Lowry Nelson, vol. 18, series A, Garland Library of Medieval Literature (New York, 1986), p 43. This has been discussed by Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, pp. 43–45 and 95. Cavalcanti’s poems were copied in Florentine zibaldoni, see Morpurgo, I manoscritti, vol. 1, index, p. 691. 89 Agamben, Stanzas, esp. pp. 70–121; Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, pp. 87–96. Cavalcanti also writes of a lady whose spirits entered his eye but could not reach the second ventricle of his brain where she would have been “depicted on the imagination.” This has been discussed by Klein, “Spirito Peregrino,” p. 77. On spiritelli, see also Francesco Flamini, “Ricerche intorno all’elemento filosofico nei poeti del ‘dolce stil novo,’” Il giornale Dantesco 18, nos. 5–6 (1910): 162–85. 90 Dempsey, Portrayal of Love, pp. 114–39. 91 Lucrezia was also the subject of a painted portrait on wood by Verrocchio that belonged to Lorenzo that is now lost and recorded in the inventory made by his brother Tommaso. Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1), fol.43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28. 92 Dempsey, Portrayal of Love, pp. 131–32. 93 Medici, Comento, p. 219; Medici, Autobiography, p. 133. This has been discussed by Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 133. 94 Medici, Comento, p. 222; Medici, Autobiography, p. 135. This has been discussed by Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 133. 95 Medici, Comento, p. 225; Medici, Autobiography, p. 139. This has been discussed by Randolph, Engaging Symbols, p. 134. 96 Medici, Comento, p. 219; Medici, Autobiography, p. 139. This has been discussed by Dempsey, Portrayal of Love, pp. 146–47.

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5: MATERIAL MEDITATIONS IN VERROCCHIO’S BARGELLO CRUCIFIX 1 Franco Sacchetti, novella 83, in Il trecentonovelle, ed. Antonio Lanza (Milan, 1993), pp. 166–72. The tale has been discussed in relation to Renaissance crucifixes by Paul Barolsky in his “In Praise of Folly,” Source 20, no. 2 (Winter, 2001): 8–12. The story was well known during the Renaissance and repeated in many European fabliaux, see, for instance, the version in Rosanna Brusegan, ed., Fabliaux. Racconti francesi medievali (Turin, 1980), pp. 296–301. For other examples, see Reinhold Köhler, Kleinere Schriften, ed. Johannes Bolte, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1898–1900), vol. 2, pp. 469–70. 2 “[E]gli [Verrocchio] lavorò .  .  . Crucifissi di legno.” Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, 1550, rev. 1568, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878), vol. 3, p. 375. 3 Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “An Unpublished Crucifix by Andrea del Verrocchio,” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1101 (December, 1994): 808– 15, esp. 809–10; Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “Il crocifisso ligneo del Verrocchio: letture,” Artista (1995): 30–53; and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, “Il crocifisso ligneo di Andrea del Verrocchio: ritrovamento e restauro,” OPD. Restauro 7 (1995): 11–32, 97–101. Butterfield (The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven, CT, 1997), pp. 90 and 216–17, cat. 14) accepted the attribution to Verrocchio, whereas Dario A. Covi (Andrea del Verrocchio: Life and Work (Florence, 2005), pp. 260–61, no. 4) expressed reservations on the basis of the physical suffering of Christ, which, he argued was not typical of the artist. 4 Lisa Pesciolini Venerosi, the conservator who restored the crucifix, noted that the two lowest of these ropes were placed in specially prepared grooves, incised to receive the ropes; she was unable to verify if this was the case for the highest one also. I thank Dott.ssa Pesciolini Venerosi for sharing this information with me. 5 For examples of slightly later armor that employ this technique, see the examples discussed in Stuart W. Pyhrr and José-A. Godoy, Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance. Filippo Negroli and His Contemporaries, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, October 8, 1998–January 17, 1999 (New York, 1998).

6 This is especially apparent in the face, which bears substantial evidence of manipulation with the artist’s hands (My thanks to Lisa Pesciolini Venerosi for this information; see also Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini, “L’intervento di restauro,” OPD restauro 7 [1995]: 26–32, p. 30). A similar technique was employed by some other fifteenth-century Florentine sculptors too. For examples, see Ida Giannelli, “Il restauro del Cristo Ligneo attribuito a Michelozzo di Bartolommeo nella chiesa di San Niccolò Oltrano,” in Legno e Restauro. Ricerche e restauri su architetture e manufatti lignei, ed. Gennaro Tampone (Florence, 1989), 276– 78; and Peter Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others. Construction Techniques in Early Renaissance Wooden Sculptures,” Polychrome Sculpture. Artistic Tradition and Construction Techniques, ed. Kate Seymour, ICOM-CC Interim Meeting, Working Group Sculpture, Polychromy, and Architectural Decoration, Glasgow, April 13–14, 2012 http:// www.icom-cc.org/ul/cms/fck-uploaded/ documents/Polychrome%20Sculpture%20 Papers%202010-2013/POLYCHROME%20 SCULPTURE%20Vol%202%20Glasgow.pdf, 15–23, pp. 20–21. 7 Venerosi Pesciolini, “L’intervento di restauro,” p. 30. 8 Several ostensibly wooden sculptures from mid-fifteenth-century Florence were made by modeling stucco over, rather than by carving into, the wood (though Brunelleschi’s and Donatello’s crucifixes, in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, respectively, were made exclusively by carving). On this see Giannelli, “Il restauro del Cristo Ligneo attribuito a Michelozzo”; and Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others,” pp. 20–21. For examples of wooden sculptures made with other materials, see, for instance, see Umberto Baldini and Paolo Dal Poggetto, eds., Firenze restaura. Il laboratio nel suo quarantennio (Florence, 1972), pp. 61–64 (on Donatello’s Mary Magdalen); Deborah Strom, “Studies in Quattrocento Tuscan Wooden Sculpture” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979); Clara Baracchini, ed., Scultura Lignea. Lucca 1200– 1425, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi and Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi,

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Lucca, December 16, 1995–June 30, 1996, 2 vols. (Florence, 1995); Massimo Vezzosi, ed., Quattro crocifissi lignei restaurati, exh. cat., Chiesa Propositurale di Santa Croce, Greve in Chianti, 1998 (Florence, 1998); Giancarlo Gentilini, ed., Proposta per Michelangelo Giovane. Un Crocifisso in legno di tiglio, exh. cat., Museo Horne, Florence, May 8–September 4, 2004 (Turin, 2004); Giovan Battista Fidanza, “Intaglio e plastica: considerazioni formali e tecniche su alcune statue della bottega di Nero Alberti” and Simone Mancini and Lucia Fabbro, “In margine al restauro di alcune sculture lignee della bottega di Nero Alberti,” in Sculture “da vestire.” Nero Alberti da Sansepolcro e la produzione di manichini lignei in una bottega del Cinquecento, ed. Cristina Galassi, exh. cat., Museo di Santa Croce, Umbertide, June 11–November 6, 2005 (Perugia, 2005), 109–14 and 125–40; Laura Sperenza, ed., La Scultura Lignea Policroma. Ricerche e modelli operative di restauro (Florence, 2007); and Raffaele Casciaro, “Indagini su materiali e sulle tecniche: I Primi Riscontri,” in Rinascimento scolpito: Maestri del legno tra Marche e Umbria, ed. Raffaele Casciaro, exh. cat., convento di San Domenico, Camerino, May 5– November 5, 2006 (Milan, 2006), 243–49; and Agnès Cascio and Juliette Lévy, “Technical study and restoration of La Belle Florentine,” in Desiderio da Settignano. Sculptor of Renaissance Florence, ed. Marc Bormand, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, and Nicholas Penny, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 26, 2006–January 22, 2007, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, February 22–June 3, 2007, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, July 1–October 8, 2007 (Milan, 2007), 158–59. 9 On crucifixes with movable arms and eyes, and provisions for blood, see Gesine Taubert and Johannes Taubert, “Mittelalterliche Kruzifixe mit schwenkbaren Armen. Ein Beitrag zur Verwendung von Bildwerken in der Liturgie,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 23 (1969): 79–121; Ulla Haastrup, “Medieval Props in the Liturgical Drama,” Hafnia. Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art 11 (1987): 133–70, esp. p. 146; and Johannes Taubert, Farbige Skulpturen: Bedeutung, Fassung, Restaurierung (Munich, 1978), especially pp. 38–50. On the late fifteenth-century crucifix attributed to an unknown German artist (Figure 131), see Stefano De Carolis, “Scultore Tedesco (Johannes Teutonichus o Paolo Alemanno), Crocifisso

(ultimo terzo del XV secolo),” in I crocifissi lignei Riminesi. Redenti dalla sua carne e dal suo sangue, eds. Stefano De Carolis, Learco Guerra, and Rosanna Menghi (Rimini, 2012), 16–19, with further bibliography. 10 For another crucifix that features cork, see the example attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo in San Lorenzo, Florence (though it is made entirely from cork with additions in stucco, whereas Verrocchio uses cork solely for the head and shoulders). On Pollaiuolo’s crucifix, see Umberto Baldini and Barbara Schleicher, “Antonio del Pollajolo Crocifisso,” in Metodo e Scienza, operatività e ricerca nel restauro (Florence, 1982), 50–53. The crucifix attributed to Pollaiuolo uses wooden pins, though the restoration report does not provide further details about these or how they were used (apart from stating they served as attachments) (Baldini and Schleicher, “Antonio del Pollajolo Crocifisso,” p. 53). 11 Carlo Lalli, Pietro Moioli, Maria Rizzi, et al., “Il Crocifisso di Donatello nella Basilica di Santa Croce a Firenze. Osservazioni dopo il restauro,” OPD Restauro 18 (2006): 13–39; Peter Stiberc, “Donatellos Kruzifix in Santa Croce. Untersuchung und Restaurierung im Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florenz,” Restauro 6 (September, 2006): 386–94; and Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others.” On the loincloth on Brunelleschi’s crucifix, see my chapter 1, p. 61 and n. 161, p. 12 This has been noted by Paolozzi Strozzi, “An Unpublished Crucifix,” p. 810. 13 Verrocchio spent time in Antonio Dei’s workshop sometime before 1457, which was on via Vacchereccia near the Ponte Vecchio. Before that, Verrocchio probably trained in the bottega of Francesco di Luca Verrocchio, who had workshops on via Vacchereccia and via Calimala. See n. 62, p. 254 in my introduction. 14 Renee Watkins, “Il Burchiello (1404–1448): Poverty, Politics and Poetry,” Italian Quarterly 54 (1970): 21–87, pp. 23–24; and Alan K. Smith, “Burchiello,” in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul Grendler, 6 vols. (New York, 1999), vol. 1, p. 315. 15 Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 451r. On this drawing, see Dalli Regoli, Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, p. 81. The poems on drawings by artists associated with Verrocchio include the sheets that originally made up the

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so-called Verrocchio sketchbook, now scattered throughout various collections in Europe. On the sketchbook, see my chapter 1, p. 54 and ns. 117–127, pp. 277–278 earlier. 16 “Al mondo non fuma[i] piu bella chosa/ Al mondo no fumaj piu bel chosa.” On the inscription and Verrocchio’s probable authorship, see my introduction, p. 26 and p. 260, n. 134. 17 Domenico De Robertis, “Una proposta per Burchiello,” Rinascimento 8 (1968): 3–119, pp. 11–13. 18 “Prezemoli, tartufi e pancaciuoli/ e anguille da Legnaia e da San Salvi,/ lasagna de’ tedeschi, uomini calvi,/ e rape e pastinache e fusaiuoli” Burchiello, I Sonetti del Burchiello, ed. Michelangelo Zaccarello (Turin, 2004), sonnet CLXI, p. 226. 19 De Robertis, “Una proposta per Burchiello,” pp. 18–19. 20 Paolozzi Strozzi, “An unpublished crucifix,” p. 809 and figure 16. 21 Ludovica Sebregondi, Tre confraternite fiorentine. Santa Maria della Pietà, detta ‘Buca’ di San Girolamo, San Filippo Benizi, San Francesco Poverino (Florence, 1991), p. 13. 22 Sebregondi, Tre confraternite fiorentine, pp. 4, 12–13, 16, 189–91. 23 Sebregondi, Tre confraternite fiorentine, p. 4. 24 Paolozzi Strozzi, “An Unpublished Crucifix,” pp. 811–12; and Paolozzi Strozzi, “Il crocificisso ligneo di Andrea del Verrocchio: ritrovamento e restauro,” p. 17. 25 Archivio della Compagnia di San Girolamo, Florence, Capitoli, 1413/14, 31v–32r, referred to by Sebregondi, Tre confraternite fiorentine, p. 12. This might explain the use of cork for the Bargello crucifix.Vasari suggests that the material was employed to make a figure lighter, for use in processions, in his discussion of the unusual use of cork in a crucifix, sometimes attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo, from the church of San Basilio, belonging to the Compagnia dello Santo Spirito, and today in San Lorenzo, Florence (“Nella chiesa degli Ermini (Armeni) [San Basilio il Crocifisso], al canto della Macine a Firenze, fece un Crucifisso da portare a processione, grande quanto il vivo; e perché fusse più leggiero, lo fece di sughero”). Vasari, quoted in Baldini and Schleicher, “Antonio del Pollajolo Crocifisso,” p. 50.Vasari attributed this crucifix to “Simone,” a pupil of Donatello, but Margrit Lisner tentatively attributed it to Antonio Pollaiuolo, a proposal

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accepted by Alison Wright in her recent monograph. Margrit Lisner, “Ein Kruzifixus des Antonio del Pollaiuolo in San Lorenzo in Florenz,” Pantheon 25, no. 5 (1967): 319–28; Margrit Lisner, Holzkruzifixe in Florenz und in der Toskana von der Zeit um 1300 bis zum frühen Cinquecento (Munich, 1970), pp. 74–75; and Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, CT, 2005), p. 90. In Verrocchio’s case, however, the cork was used solely for the head and shoulders of the figure, suggesting that it was employed for reasons other than lightness. Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini proposed that Verrocchio may have used cork to protect the wood underneath; or as a support for the figure’s hair made a pastiglia; or, more probably, to create a more homogeneous surface than would be possible with wood for modeling over. Venerosi Pesciolini, “L’intervento di restauro,” p. 30. 26 John Henderson, “Penitence and the Laity in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in Christianity and the Renaissance. Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, eds. John Henderson and Timothy Verdon (New York, 1990), 229–49, pp. 235–36. 27 Henderson, “Penitence and the Laity,” p. 242. 28 I am grateful to Lisa Pesciolini Venerosi for these observations. See also Venerosi Pesciolini, “L’intervento di restauro,” p. 28. On the other hand, the rough execution of the soles of Christ’s feet suggests they were not designed to be seen. 29 Gesine Taubert and Johannes Taubert (in their classic study “Mittelalterliche Kruzifixe mit schwenkbaren Armen,” pp. 81–82, 85) include a number of Tuscan examples of crucifixes with movable arms. 30 Horst W. Janson (The Sculpture of Donatello, 2 vols. [Princeton, 1957; 1963], vol. 1, p. 9) noted that Donatello’s Crucifix in Santa Croce featured arms hinged at the shoulders, permitting the figure to be removed from the cross and placed on a bier or taken to a tomb on Good Friday, a theory supported by the recent conservation of the sculpture (Lalli, Moioli, Rizzi, et al., “Il Crocifisso di Donatello nella Basilica di Santa Croce”). Donatello’s Christ features a hollow area in the chest that can house the hinged components of the armpits when the arms are lowered (Stiberc, “Donatello, Brunelleschi and the Others,” p. 17).

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31 The text is a processional for Good Friday evening service at Santa Maria del Fiore and dates from the late fifteenth century. Federico Ghisi, “Un processionale inedito per la Settimana Santa nell’opera del Duomo di Firenze,” Rivista Musicale Italiana 55 (October– December, 1953): 362–69, p. 363. This has been discussed by Solange Corbin, La Deposition Liturgique du Christ au Vendredi Saint. Sa place dans l’histoire des rites et due theater religieux (Paris, 1960), pp. 15–16. A sixteenth-century record indicates the same practice continued in Florence into that century. John Paoletti, “Wooden Sculpture as Sacral Presence,” Artibus et historiae 13, no. 26 (1992): 85–100, p. 97, n. 6 with further details. 32 Taubert, “Mittelalterliche Kruzifixe mit schwenkbaren Armen,” pp. 90–91. 33 Luca Dominici, Cronache di Ser Luca Dominici (Pistoia, 1933), p. 164, trans. Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven, CT, 2013), p. 170. 34 On the dimensions of Tuscan crucifixes and their implications for use, see the examples discussed by Lisner, Holzkruzifixe in Florenz, pp. 54–110; and Kamil Kopania, Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages (Warszawa, 2010), pp. 166 and 169. 35 Many sculptures with movable parts were designed for use in ritual re-enactments of sacred events in Renaissance Italy, for which, see: Claudio Bernardi, “Deposizioni e Annunciazioni,” in Il teatro delle statue. Gruppi lignei di Depozione e Annunciazione tra XII e XIII secolo, ed. Francesca Flores d’Arcais (Milan, 2005), 69–85, p. 83; Claudio Bernardi, “La funzione della deposizione di Cristo il venerdi santo nella chiesa francescana di S. Angelo a Milano (secolo XVII),” Medioevo e Rinascimento n.s. 6, no. 3 (1992): 235–49; and Paoletti, “Wooden Sculpture,” pp. 93–94. The classic study of liturgical plays is Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1933); and for Florence, the work of Nerida Newbigin, including Feste d’Oltrano: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Florence, 1996). On art and liturgy, see also Neil C. Brooks, The Sepulchre of Christ in Art and Liturgy, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 7:2 (Urbana, 1921). Ordos from the convents of Benedictine nuns of Barking, Essex, and the Benedictine

Abbey of Pruefening near Regensburg mention crucifixes with movable parts being used in liturgical plays of the Deposition (Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, vol. 1, p. 164). A tenth-century record from the Basilica of Saint Peter’s mentions a crucifix being processed through the church on Good Friday (Continuation of Annales Alamannici, 921, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz (Hannover, 1826), vol. 1, p. 56, cited in Jean-Marie Sansterre, “Attitudes occidentales à l’égard des miracles d’images dans la haut Moyen Âge,” Annales. Histoire. Social Sciences 53, no. 6 (1998): 1219–41, p. 1230). Sometimes polychromed wooden crucifixes were employed as part of pilgrimages. A crucifix of c. 1330, attributed to a follower of Giovanni Pisano and today in the church of SS. Crocifissi dei Bianchi in Lucca, was used by the confraternity known as the “Bianchi” in their annual procession from Lucca to Florence. The crucifix was mentioned and illustrated in the fourteenth-century Lucchese chronicle of Giovanni Sercambi. Max Seidel, “Crocifisso,” in Scultura Lignea. Lucca 1200– 1425, ed. Clara Baracchini, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi and Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi, Lucca, , December 16, 1995–June 30, 1996, 2 vols. (Florence, 1995), vol. 1, 99–104, cat. 23, p. 99. And on some occasions, a figure with movable limbs could be used for both liturgical dramas and pilgrimage processions, though this appears to have been unusual. See, for instance, the case of a miraculous Crucifix from Como (today on the main altar of the SS. Crocifisso Sanctuary in Como). Ilaria Tameni, “Il teatro della Pietà. Devozione, arte e rappresentazione della deposizione di Cristo in area padana (secc. XIV–XVI),” (thesis, facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università Cattolica di Brescia, 1997–98), pp. 111–213; Ilaria Tameni, “The Piety’s Theatre: Mobile Crucifixes in Holy Friday’s Deposition,” text of lecture at XI Colloque Societé Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval–Elx, du 9 au 14 d’août 2004, http://parnaseo.uv.es/Ars/ webelx/Pon%C3%A8ncies%20pdf/Tameni. pdf, pp. 4–5. Often wooden sculptural figures and groups were not visible in churches except on feast days, emphasizing the importance of their role in sacred performances. Lorenzo Carletti and Cristiano Giometti, “Medieval Wood Sculpture and Its Setting in

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Architecture: Studies in Some Churches in and around Pisa,” Architectural History 46 (2003): 37–56, p. 40. The figures from the Deposition in the Duomo in Tivoli were taken in procession “every Friday in March” by a confraternity that sung verses from the Passion of Christ and the Miserere. Carletti and Giometti, “Medieval Wood Sculpture,” p. 54, n. 17. See Giovanni Carlo Crocchiante, L’istoria delle chiese della città di Tivoli (Rome, 1726), p. 42. For instance, a crucifix attributed to Giuliano or Benedetto da Maiano in the Museo d’Arte Sacra, San Gimignano, is recorded in a document of 1474 as being kept “for Good Friday in the sacristy.” Other documents indicate that this crucifix was displayed on the wooden pulpit during Advent and Lent and was used in a procession through the church on Good Friday. This has been noted by Ilaria Bischi Ruspoli and Michele Maccherini, “Giuliano o Benedetto da Maiano. Crocifisso (1474 circa),” in Benedetto da Maiano a San Gimignano. La riscoperta di un crocifisso dimenticato, ed. Michele Maccherini, exh. cat., Galleria d’Arte Moderna R. de Grada, San Gimignano, March 21–June 21, 2009 (San Gimignano, 2009), 105–09, 106– 07. See Enrico Castaldi, Ricordi da vecchie carte sangimignanesi per le nozze Castaldi-Fratiglioni (Poggibonsi, 1909), 39–50. One play, printed in Florence in the 1490s, mentions a “Christ crucified” (“el crocifosso che parla”) as one of the characters. The actor playing the role was required to speak but it is not clear from the stage directions whether a real actor dressed up as Christ crucified or spoke as if the voice of a sculpture. For the play, see Nerida Newbigin, “Dieci sacre rappresentazioni inedite fra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Letteratura italiana antica 10 (2009): 21–397, pp. 74–97 (for the list of characters, see p. 74; for the speech of “Christ Crucified,” see pp. 77–78). It is not known if the printed play is the same as that recorded as having been performed in Florence in 1477. Nerida Newbigin, “Imposing Presence: The Celebration of Corpus Domini in FifteenthCentury Florence,” in Performance, Drama and Spectacle in the Medieval City: Essays in Honour of Alan Hindley, eds. Catherine Emerson, Mario Longtin, and Adrian P. Tudor (Louvain, 2010), 87–109, pp. 105–06. 36 David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989), p. 286.

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37 Tameni, “Il teatro della Pietà,” tesi, pp. 111–213; Tameni, “The Piety’s Theatre,” p. 3. A document of 1257 mentions that the role of Christ was played by a young man in a staged performance during Holy Week in Siena (Carletti and Giometti, “Medieval Wood Sculpture, p. 54, n. 19. See Alessandro d’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano: libri tre con due appendici sulla rappresentazione drammatica nel contado toscano e sul teatro mantovano nel sec. XVI, 3 vols. [Rome, 1891; repr. 1966], vol. 1, p. 90).These records contradict the claim made by Claudio Bernardi that the role of Christ was not played by a living actor because it would be indecorous and because wooden statues were objects of devotion (Bernardi, “Deposizioni e Annunciazioni,” p. 84). 38 Bernardi, “Deposizioni e Annunciazioni,” p. 82. See Mario Sensi, “Fraternite disciplinate e sacre rappresentazioni a Foligno nel secolo XV,” Bollettino della Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria 71 (1974): 193–94. 39 My thanks to Lisa Pesciolini Venerosi for this point. 40 On the crucifix, which still stands in Santa Maria Novella, and the confraternity, see Riccardo Gatteschi, Baccio da Montelupo. Scultore e architetto del Cinquecento (Florence, 1993), pp. 57–59. 41 Paoletti, “Wooden Sculpture,” p. 88. 42 For example, a play recorded in a thirteenth-century processionale from the Cathedral of Cividale, on which see Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages. Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, NY, 1990), p. 86; and Laura Jacobus, “‘Flete mecum’: the representation of the Lamentation in Italian Romanesque art and drama,” Word and Image 12, no. 1 (January– March, 1996): 110–26. Jacobus (p. 118) has pointed out that although the Planctus was performed in Latin, its audience was probably lay men and women, implied by the opening lines that address both men and women. Whereas Jacobus proposes that the gestures of the actors was designed to amplify the meaning of the words (pp. 118–19) – inaccessible except to those who knew Latin – I would suggest instead that the gestures “told” the story, one that was well known to its audience. 43 Belting, Image and Its Public, pp. 161–64. 44 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK, 1991),

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pp. 63; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), p. 45. 45 Piovano Arlotto, Motti e facezie del Piovano Arlotto, ed. Gianfranco Folena (Milan, 1953), pp. 81–82. 46 Cesare Guasti, Miscellanea Pratese di cose inedite o rare antiche e moderne (Prato, 1861; repr. 1982), no. 3, p. 6; and Dionisio Pacetti, “La tradizione dei tratatti spirituali di Ugo Panziera,” Studi francescani 64 (1967): 30–77, pp. 34–35, 48–49, 50, and 57–63. 47 Enrichetta Valenziani and Emidio Cerulli, Indice Generale degli Incunaboli delle Biblioteche d’Italia, 6 vols. (Rome, 1943–81), vol. 4, p. 189, ns. 7185 and 7186. 48 Bernardino da Siena, Opera Omnia, ed. Pacifico Perantoni, 9 vols. (Quaracchi, 1950–65), vol. 5, p. 457; vol. 7, p. 589; vol. 8, p. 350. 49 “La mentale azione è chiamata da molti meditazione e contemplazione. Alcuna differenzia è dalla mentale azione alla meditazione; grandissima differenzia è dalla mentale azione alla meditazione; grandissima differenzia è dalla mentale azione alla contemplazione. La perfetta mentale azione è la via d’andare alla perfetta meditazione e contemplazione, quando ha le circunstanzie che alla sua perfezione si richiede, coll’esercizio della imaginazione, il quale dee essere si forte che continuamente reverberi il suo oggetto ne’ corporali sentimenti, a ciò sufficienti secondo i pensieri di quello tempo. Quando la mente è, per prolisso intervallo di tempo, in Cristo esercitata, Cristo nella imaginativa portando, Cristo non si lascia della corporale virtú attiva della mente spogliare. Nel primo tempo nel quale la mente comincia colle infrascritte circunstanzie di Cristo a pensare, Cristo pare nella mente e nella imaginativa scritto. Nel secondo pare disegnato. Nel terzo pare disegnato e ombrato. Nel quarto pare colorato e incarnato. Nel quinto pare incarnato e rilevato. Tanto ha la mentale virtú attiva di perfezione, quanto può colla corporale virtú attiva regnare. Questo stato della mentale virtú attiva, colla corporale virtuosa azione, merita, per divina giustizia, il dono della meditazione e della contemplazione.” Ugo Panziera, “Della mentale azione,” from his Trattato della Perfezione, published in Mistici del Duecento e del Trecento, ed. Arrigo Levasti (Milan, 1935), p. 273. This passage has been discussed by David

Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), p. 116. 50 The Lessigrafia della Crusca gives the following example: “Levato col pensiero sopra tutte le cose terrene” (Francesco da Buti, Comento sopra la Divina Commedia [1395]), http://www .lessicografia.it, consulted October 31, 2016. On levato as “raised up,” see Lars R. Jones, “Visio Divina? Donor Figures and Representations of Imagistic Devotion: The Copy of the ‘Virgin of Bagnolo’ in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed.Victor M. Schmidt, vol. 61 of Studies in the History of Art (2002): 30–55, p. 44. In my interpretation of Panziera’s treatise, I am indebted to the work of Lars R. Jones (apart from the article just mentioned, see also his “Visio Divina, Exegesis, and Beholder-Image Relationships in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Indications from Donor Figure Representations” [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999]). 51 For other examples, see Herbert Kessler, “Medieval Art as Argument,” in Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia, 2000), 53–63; and Mary Carruthers, “Moving Images in the Mind’s Eye,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, eds. Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger (Princeton, 2006), 287–305, p. 292–94. Elizabeth Bailey (“Raising the Mind to God: The Sensual Journey of Giovanni Morelli [1371–444] via Devotional Images,” Speculum 84, no. 4 [October, 2009]: 984–1008, p. 996) has argued that Morelli’s famous account of praying after the death of son was analogous to that of Panziera’s system (that Morelli looked at physical images and then drew and painted mental pictures in his mind based on what he saw and texts that he read). 52 Lina Bolzoni, The Web of Images. Vernacular Preaching from its Origins to St Bernardino da Siena, trans. Carole Preston and Lisa Chien (Aldershot, 2004), p. 26. 53 Bolzoni, Web of Images, p. 85. See also Ottavia Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore: alle origini del potere delle immagini (Bari, 2011), pp. 77–79. On the presence of Cavalca’s Trattato in Florentine zibaldoni, see Salomone Morpurgo, I manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze: manoscritti italiani (Rome, 1893), index, p. 691; and Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the

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Florentine Renaissance:The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, CT, 2000), p. 429, n. 174. 54 One could also point to a passage in the Colloquio spirituale, written c. 1391, in which the author, the Dominican prior Simone da Cascina, calls his readers’ attention to the various meanings of the “pallium of pure white wool” that was worn by priests on important occasions. Bolzoni, Web of Images, p. 54. 55 Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, NJ, 1951), pp. 105–06; Sixten Ringbom, “Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions. Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 73 (March, 1969): 159–70; Miklós Boskovits, “Immagine e preghiera nel tardo medioevo: osservazioni preliminary,” Art Cristiana 76 (1988), 93–104, reprinted in Miklós Boskovits, Immagini da meditare. Ricerche su dipinti di tema religoso nei secoli XII–XV (Milan, 1994), 73–106; Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions,” Viator 20 (1989): 161– 204; Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York, 2002); Chiara Frugoni, “Female Mystics, Visions, and Iconography,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, eds. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chicago, IL, 1996), 130–64; Jacqueline E. Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious Imagination” in Looking Beyond. Visions. Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 203–40; and Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality. An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011). 56 On how works of art were made to resemble the visions such objects inspired, see Frugoni, “Female Mystics,” pp. 133–34; Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore, pp. 98–113; and Megan Holmes, Miraculous Image, pp. 183–202. 57 Henk Van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300–1500, trans. Michael Hoyle, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, November 26, 1994–February 26, 1995 (Princeton, NJ, 1994), p. 61. 58 Katherine L. Jansen, “Miraculous Crucifixes in Late Medieval Italy,” in Signs, Wonders, Miracles. Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, eds. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge, VA, 2005), 203–27, pp. 220–22;

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and Claudia D’Alberto, “Il crocifisso parlante di Santa Brigida di Svezia nella Basilica di San Paolo fuori le mura e i crocifissi replicati, copiati e riprodotti a Roma al tempo del Papato avignonese,” Studi Medievali e Moderni 1–2 (2011): 229–55. Richa records that there was a legend about a wooden crucifix in Orsanmichele that was much venerated by Florentines because many believed it had spoken to Antoninus when he was a youth (Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, 10 vols. (Florence, 1754–62), vol. 1, p. 25). 59 Christiane Klapish-Zuber, “Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,” in her Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, IL, 1985), 310–29, p. 326. 60 Margherita of Cortona prayed before an image, believed to be the carved and painted crucifix today in the church of Santa Margherita in Cortona. The sculpture’s authorship is unknown, but it is generally believed to be a work not of Italian origin dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Anna Maria Maetzke, ed., Arte nell’Aretino, seconda mostra di restauri dal 1975 al 1979 (Florence, 1979), pp. 21–26, Figures 21–31; Joanna Cannon and André Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park, PA, 1999), p. 5, see Figures 3, 5 and 6. 61 Trans. Carolyn Muessig, “Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle Ages,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance. Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (Ashgate, 2008), 129–42, p. 132. Julian of Norwich experienced the Passion of Christ while gazing upon a crucifix that her attendant priest held up for her (Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, pp. 135 and 137). 62 Raimondo da Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Wilmington, DE, 1980), p. 185. 63 Catherine of Siena, letter 62 to the nuns of San Gagio and Monte San Savino (Fonti per la storia d’Italia: Epistolario di Caterina da Siena, ed. Eugenio Dupre-Theiseder (Rome, 1940), p. 261; Saint Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. Suzanne Noffke, 3 vols. (Binghampton, NY, 1988), vol. 1, p. 198, quoted in Jill Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory: St. Francis and the Affective Image,” Art History 24, no. 1 (February, 2001): 1–16, p. 11).

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NOTES TO PAGES 180–182

64 “[L]’affetto suo ardentissimo sì lo ce ’ncorporao/ lo cor li stemperao como cera a segello:/ empremettece quello ov’era trasformato.” Jacopone da Todi, Laudi, trattato e detti, ed. Franca Ageno (Florence, 1953), pp. 248–49. This has been discussed in Gregory F. LaNave, “Bonaventure,” in The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity, eds. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge, UK, 2011), 159–73, p. 170; and Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, p. 139. 65 Jung, “Tactile and the Visionary,” p. 223. 66 Chiara Frugoni, “Domine, in conspectu tuo omne desiderium meum: Visioni e immagini in Chiara da Montefalco” in S. Chiara da Montefalco e il suo tempo: atti del quarto Convegno di studi storici ecclestiastici organizzato dall’Archidiocesi di Spoleto, Spoleto 28–30 dicembre 1981, eds. Claudio Leonardi and Enrico Menestò (Florence, 1985), 155–75, pp. 172–73. 67 Enrico Menestò, “The Apostolic Canonization Proceedings of Clare of Montefalco, 1318– 1319,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, eds. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. Margaret J. Schneider (Chicago, IL, 1996), 104–29, p. 105. 68 François Quiviger, “Relief is in the Mind: Observations on Renaissance Low Relief Sculpture,” in Depth of Field. Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy, eds. Donal Cooper and Mariko Leino (Bern, 2007), 169–89, p. 178. 69 It should be noted that any assumption of a divide between lay and clerical devotional, and between popular and elite, is problematic. As Bornstein, among others, has highlighted, “[c]hanges in liturgical practice, the proliferation and transformation of lay confraternities, and the response to popular preachers all disclose a high culture that was substantially open to low culture, and in which the circulation of religious ideas and cultural models among different cultural groups was anything but unidirectional.” Daniel Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy (New York, 1993), p. 6. 70 Lorenzo Cèndali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Majano (San Casciano [Val di Pesa], 1926), p. 184; and Morpurgo, I manoscritti, index, p. 695. 71 On this, see, for instance, Klapish-Zuber,“Holy Dolls”; and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Touching Objects. Intimate Experiences of Italian FifteenthCentury Art (New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 204–37.

72 Morpurgo, I manoscritti, index, p. 704; and ASF, Notariale Antecosimiano 15591, 237v and 238r (an inventory made in 1435 of the possessions of the painter Stefano di Lorenzo). I am very grateful to Luca Boschetto for showing me this document in the State Archives in Florence. 73 Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, NJ, 1961), pp. 38–39, cited and discussed by Quiviger, “Relief Is in the Mind,” p. 177. 74 Sant’Antonino, Opera a ben vivere di sant’Antonino dell’ordine dei predicatori Arcivescovo di Firenze, scritta a Dianora Tornabuoni ne’ Soderini, ed. Lodovico Ferretti (Florence, 1923), parte III, cap. XI, p. 149, translated and discussed in relation to images by Pia Palladino, “33. Christ Crowned with Thorns,” in Lawrence Kanter and Pia Palladino, Fra Angelico, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 26, 2005–January 29, 2006 (New Haven, CT, 2005), p. 174. On the popularity of the Opera a ben vivere, see Raoul Morçay, Saint Antonin, fondateur du couvent de Saint-Marc, archeveque de Florence, 1389–1459 (Tours, 1914), pp. 189–93; and Sant’Antonino, Opera a ben vivere di S. Antonino, ed. Lodovico Ferretti (Florence, 1923). On the relationship between Antoninus’ text and devotional images and practices, see Miklós Boskovits, “Arte e Formazione Religiosa: Il Caso del Beato Angelico,” first published in L’Uomo di fronto all’arte. Valori estetici e valori etico-religiosi (Milan, 1986), 153– 64, republished in Miklós Boskovits, Immagini da meditare. Ricerche su dipinti di tema religoso nei secoli XII–XV (Milan, 1994), 369–95, p. 386. 75 Bailey, “Raising the Mind to God,” p. 1001. 76 Bornstein, Bianchi, pp. 44–45. 77 Dominici, Cronache, vol. 1, p. 98, trans. Bornstein, Bianchi, p. 152. This has also been discussed by Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 201. Other cases are discussed in Bornstein, Bianchi, pp. 151–53. 78 Bornstein, Bianchi, p. 151. 79 Bernard’s works were well known in the vernacular and contained in a number of Florentine commonplace books (Morpurgo, I manoscritti, index, p. 688). His sermons on the Song of Songs were contained in the library at Santa Croce (Curzio Mazzi, “L’inventario quattrocentistico della Biblioteca di S. Croce in Firenze,” Rivista delle biblioteche e degli archivi 8 (1897): 16–31, 99–113, 129–47, p. 104).

NOTES TO PAGES 182–186

80 Gordon Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 2002), p. 46. 81 “Obtulit carnem sapientibus carnem, per quam discerent sapere et spiritum.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 6, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, 8 vols., eds. Jean Leclercq, Charles Hugh Talbot, and Henri Rochais (Rome, 1957–80), vol. 1, Sermon 6, I:3, p. 27. 82 Ronald F. E. Weissman, “Sacred Eloquence. Humanist Preaching and Lay Piety in Renaissance Florence,” in Christianity and the Renaissance. Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, eds. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse, NY, 1990), 250–71, p. 264. 83 Weissman, “Sacred Eloquence,” p. 262. 84 “[C]onsiderato che dal capo a’ piedi in lui ciaschuna parte patì. Imperochè il sanctissimo suo capo da pungenti spine, i lucentissimo ochi da obscurante benda, la melliflua boccha da amarissimo fiele, la resplendente faccia da sanguigno sudore, le debile spalle del gravissimo peso della croce, il sacratissimo pecto dalla acuta lancia, le innocente mani et gli immaculati piedi da spuntati chiovi et finalmente tutto il suo pretioso corpo da asprissime battiture” Olga Zorzi Pugliese, “Two Sermons by Giovanni Nesi and the Language of Spirituality in Late Fifteenth-Century Florence,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 42, no. 3 (1980): 641–56, p. 648; trans. Henderson, “Penitence and the Laity in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” p. 242. 85 “Io mi pento di cor, ché scorso sono/ nel peccato carnal; però con una/ disciplina mie’ fianchi spesso sprono,/ onde, versando, ’l sangue si rauna/ dintorno a mie ginocchia poste ’n terra,/ e con molte mie lagrime s’aduna. Da me, che son vil vermo, si diserra/ contra Dio e contra ’l prossimo superbia,/ la qual meritamente mi sottera” (Antonio Lanza, ed., Lirici toscani del ’400 [Rome, 1973], p. 387, lines 61–69; trans. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 49). 86 Richard C. Trexler, Church and Community 1200–1600: Studies in the History of Florence and New Spain (Rome, 1987), pp. 50–51; and his Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), pp. 68–69. 87 On agency, see the story told by Arlotto Piovano of a fresco depicting a saint that seems

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to respond to the threat posed by a priest who wants to destroy it. Folena, ed. Motti, pp. 40f (Facezia, cxxviii). The story is discussed by Richard C. Trexler, “The Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image,” Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972): 7–41, p. 28. On miraculous images in Renaissance Italy, see Holmes, Miraculous Image; and Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, Spectacular Miracles. Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 2013). 88 Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory,” p. 5. See Daniel Arasse, “Entre Dévotion et Culture: Fonctions de l’Image Religieuse au XVe Siècle,” in Faire Croire; Modalités de la diffusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle;Table ronde, Rome, 22–23 juin, 1979, Collection de l’école Francaise de Rome, 51 (Rome, 1981), 132–46. 89 Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory,” esp. pp. 6–7. 90 Klaus Krüger, “Authenticity and Fiction: On the Pictorial Construction of Inner Presence in Early Modern Italy,” in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Reindert Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion, and Todd M. Richardson (Turnhout, 2007), 37–69, p. 42. 91 For an interesting interpretation of sculptured relief panels that seem to bridge the divide between two worlds, see Jones,“Visio Divina?,” pp. 44–45. 92 Ugo Panziera, Trattato della Perfezione, in Mistici del Duecento e del Trecento, ed. Levasti, pp. 273–83. 93 Holmes, Miraculous Image, p. 201. The documentary source for this tale is not known. It is mentioned in Paoletti (“Wooden Sculpture,” 92), who cites Enrico Castelnuovo, but he does not provide the original citation. Apparently, it occurred in Switzerland. 94 “Qual di pennel fu maestro o di stile/ che ritraesse l’ombre e’ tratti ch’ivi/ mirar farieno uno ingegno sottile? Morti li morti e i vivi parean vivi” Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto 12, lines 64–67 in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 124–25. 95 “Ergo quae corporum simulacra pictor viva apparere voluerit, in his efficient et Omnia membra suos motus exequantur.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), p. 76.

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This has been discussed by Fredrika Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 89. 96 “Ergo quaedam circa magnitudinem membrorum ratio tenenda est, in qua sane commensuratione iuvat in animantibus pingendis primum ossa ingenio subterlocare, nam haec, quod minime inflectantur, semper certam aliquam sedem occupant. Tum oportet nervos et musculos suis locis inhaerere, denique extremum carne et cute ossa et musculos vestitos reddere.  .  .sed veluti in vestiendo prius nudum subsignare oportet quem postea vestibus obambiendo involuamus, sic in nudo pingendo prius ossa et musculi dispondendi sunt” Alberti, On Painting, p. 75. 97 Katherine Park and Eckhard Kessler, “Psychology: The Concept of Psychology,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles Bernhard Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 453–63, p. 455. 98 Martin Kemp, “Il concetto dell’anima in Leonardo’s Early Skull Studies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 115–34, p. 125. 99 See Chapter 2, ns. 184–88. 100 “Cosimo de’ Medici . . . fatto porre un bellissimo Marsia di marmo bianco, impiccato a un tronco per dovere essere scorticato: perchè volendo Lorenzo suo nipote, al quale era venuto alle mani un torso con la testa d’un altro Marsia, antichissimo, e molto più bello che l’altro, e di pietro rossa, accompagnarlo col primo; non poteva ciò fare, essendo imperfettisimo. Onde datolo a finire ed acconciare ad Andrea, egli fece le gambe, le cosce e le braccia che mancavano a questa figura, di pezzi di marmo rosso, tanto bene, che Lorenzo ne rimase sodisfattissimo, e la fece porre dirimpetto all’altra, dall’altra banda della porta. Il quale torso antico, fatto per un Marsia scorticato, fu con tanta avvertenza e giudizio lavorato, che alcune vene bianche e sottili, che erano nella pietra rossa, vennero intagliate dall’artefice in luogo appunto che paiono alcuni piccoli nerbicini che nelle figure naturali, quando sono scorticate, si veggiono. Il che doveva far parere quell’opera, quando aveva il suo primiero pulimento, cosa vivissima” (VasariMilanesi, vol. 3, pp. 366–67). Vasari’s claim that Verrocchio produced a statue of Marsyas for the Medici is supported by the second item

listed in Tommaso’s inventory of goods made for the Medici, which reads: “lo gnudo rosso” (Florence, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, ms. 60 [Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1], fol.43r, transcribed by Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28). This was pointed out by Francesco Caglioti, “Due restauratori per le antichità dei primi medici: Mino da Fiesole, Andrea del Verrocchio e il ‘Marsia rosso’ degli Uffizi. I,” Prospettiva 72 (1993): 17–42, p. 23. 101 “[O]nde si vede in ogni casa di Firenze, sopra i cammini, usci, fenestre, cornicioni, infiniti di detti ritratti, tanto ben fatti e naturali, che paiano vivi.”Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 172. 102 Cennino Cennini, Cennino Cennino’s Il libro dell’arte. A new English translation and commentary with Italian transcription, trans. and ed. Lara Broeke (London, 2015), chs. 236–42, pp. 250–58. Julius von Schlosser pointed to Brunelleschi’s death mask, made in 1446; the death mask of Dante, which may be authentic; and examples from medieval France. Julius von Schlosser, “Geschichte der Portraitbildnerei in Wachs: ein Versuch,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 29 (1910/11): 171–258, p. 236. 103 Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, ms. 60 (Miscellanee Manoscritte, vol. 1), fol. 43r, transcribed in Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio, p. 287, doc.VI.28. 104 Vasari’s description of the voti of Lorenzo de’ Medici in his life of Verrocchio did not appear in the 1550 edition of the Vite. Alison Luchs has suggested that Vasari added the description after obtaining new information from the Benintendi family. (Alison Luchs, “Lorenzo from Life? Renaissance Portrait Busts of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Sculpture Journal 4 [2000]: 6–23, p. 21 n. 25). According to the Dizionario biografico degli Italiano, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti, 45 vols. (Rome, 1960), vol. 8, p. 540, Orsino Benintendi entered Verrocchio’s workshop in 1440. 105 Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetori nelle redazioni del 1550 del 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and annotated by Paola Barocchi, 7 vols. (Florence, 1966–87), vol. 8, pp. 373–74 (only in 1568), trans. Luchs, “Lorenzo from Life?,” pp. 11–12 and n. 25, p. 21. Although these wax effigies no longer survive, replicas of some examples may exist in terracotta. A terracotta bust of Lorenzo il Magnifico, one of three surviving busts associated with the wax voti Lorenzo had made after the Pazzi conspiracy,

NOTES TO PAGES 188–191

may have been made from the wax voto placed in the Chiarito church in 1478 that was dressed in Lorenzo’s clothing. This has been suggested by Luchs, “Lorenzo from Life?” p. 18. Another terracotta bust of Lorenzo, sometimes attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo, may have been made from a life mask, as the wax voti may have been too. The Ashmolean bust is the only one of the group of surviving busts of Lorenzo in terracotta to have been made from a life or death mask (the proportions of the other busts indicate that they could not have been made from a mask). Warren argued it was made from a life mask, rather than a death mask, because it bears none of the stubble evident in the surviving death mask in the Museo degli Argenti in Florence (Jeremy Warren, “A Terracotta Bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Oxford,” The Sculpture Journal 2 [1998]: 1–12, pp. 5–6). 106 Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 15th–18th Centuries, 2 vols. (Florence, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 27–28 and n. 47. 107 Hugo van der Velden, “Medici Votive Images and the Scope and Limits of Likeness,” in The Image of the Individual. Portraits in the Renaissance, eds. Luke Syson and Nicholas Mann (London, 1998), 126–37, p. 133. 108 Contemporary documents record the purchase of pigments and of cloaks and mantles to dress boti. See the documents transcribed in Gino Masi,“La ceroplastica in Firenze nei secoli XV– XVI e la famiglia Benintendi.” Rivista d’arte 9 (1916): 124–42, pp. 134–42; and Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Florence, 1568), ed. Gerald Baldwin Brown, trans. Louise S. Maclehouse (New York, 1960), pp. 148–49. 109 Cennini, Cennino Cennino’s Il libro dell’arte, chs. 21 and 160–62, pp. 42, 190–93. See Pamela H. Smith,“Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, eds. Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago, IL, 2010), 29–49, esp. pp. 35–43. 110 Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 363–65. 111 Christian Bec, Les livres des Florentines (14131608) (Florence, 1984), p. 28; Morpurgo, I manoscritti, index, p. 706. 112 See, for instance, Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi

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episcopi Parisiensis, ed. Pierre Mandonnet, 3 vols. (Paris, 1929–33), vol. 1, p. 267ff. For an overview of the subject, see Marta Fattori and Massimo Luigi Bianchi, eds., Spiritus. IV Colloquio Internazionale del Lessico Intelletualle Europeo, Atti (Rome, 1984). See also: Robert Klein, “Spirito Peregrino,” in Form and Meaning. Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier (New York, 1979), 62–85; Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001). 113 Dempsey, Renaissance Putto, p. 41. 114 Dempsey, Renaissance Putto, ch. 1. 115 On the tomb, see Ida Cardellini, Desiderio da Settignano (Milan, 1962), pp. 45 and 160 with further bibliography. 116 Charles Seymour, Jr., The Sculpture of Verrocchio (London, 1971), p. 114. 117 Dempsey (Renaissance Putto, p. 12) reads the spiritelli on Jacopo della Quercia’s tomb of Ilaria del Carretto as celebrating Ilaria‘s life. 118 Michael Wayne Cole, “Cellini’s Blood,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 215–35; Jacobs, The Living Image. 119 Cole, “Cellini’s Blood.” 120 Alessandro Bagnoli,“Lando di Pietro, Crocifisso,” in Scultura Dipinta. Maestri di legname e pittori a Siena 1250–1450, ed. Alessandro Angelini et al., exh. cat., Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, July 16–December 31, 1987 (Florence, 1987), 66–67, cat. 12, trans. Catherine King, “Effigies: Human and Divine,” in Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280–1400, ed. Diana Norman, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1995), vol. 2, 105–28, p. 125. 121 “[e] soffiò Iddio nella faccia sua lo spirito della vita, e fatto è uomo in anima vivente.” Carlo Negroni, ed., La Bibbia Volgare secondo la rara edizione del I Ottobre MCCCCLXXI, vol. 1: Genesi, Esodo e Levitico (Bologna, 1882), Genesis 2:7, p. 29. 122 Enzo Carli (Scultura Lignea Senese [Milan, 1951], p. 27) records that this note had been inserted behind one of Christ’s knees. This has been discussed by Donal Cooper, “Projecting Presence:The Monumental Cross in the Italian Church Interior” in Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, eds. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shephard (Aldershot, 2005), 47–69, p. 48. 123 “[C]ogli occhi della mente, più che con quelli del corpo, considerate la faccia sua. Prima, alla corona delle spine, fittegliele in testa, insino

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NOTES TO PAGES 191–194

al celabro; . . . poi lo naso, pieno di mocci e di lacrime e di sangue; la bocca, piena di fiele e di bava e di sangue.” Sant Antonino [Antonino Pierozzi], Opera a ben vivere di Santo Antonino messa ora a luce con altri suoi ammaestramentie un giunta di antiche orazioni toscane da Francesco Palermo, ed. Francesco Palermo (Florence, 1858), p. 169. 124 This has been discussed, for instance, by Randolph, Touching Objects, pp. 205–13. 125 Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 520. 126 For excellent discussions of Fra Angelico’s practice within the context of contemporary theoretical and spiritual debates, see William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT, 1993); Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL, and London, 1995); and Alexander Nagel, Review of Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, by Georges DidiHuberman; and Fra Angelico at San Marco, by William Hood, Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (September, 1996): 559–65. 127 I thank Michael W. Cole for making this connection. 128 On this, see Christina Neilson, “Carving Life: The Meaning of Wood in Renaissance Sculpture,’ in The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, eds. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester, 2015), 223–39. 129 On this, see François Quiviger, “Imagining and Composing Stories in the Renaissance,” in Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art, eds. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger, Warburg Institute Colloquia 6 (London, 2000), 45–57, p. 48. 130 “Filii philosophorum intelligite quod regi mus mercurium secundum exemplum Christi. Colligite quod quatuor passiones fuerunt in exemplo Christo et quatuor in mercurio. Et hoc breuiter exponamus. Hoc notatur quod sicut in passione Christi in corona cerebrum perforatum sic in mercurio ipsum extrahentem.Tertia passio fuit crux Christi ubi pependit et anima penam recepit. Etiam in mercurio per decoctionem rubescat, et denotat illa rubedo corpus Christi faciem suam et corpus fuscum et tenebrosum quod denotat mortem. Quarta passio cum dixit: ‘Consummatum est’, ‘Sitio!’ que fuit in ligna et signat mortem inclinato capite. Sic de mercurio qui inbibitur et exiccatur et designat mortem.” Antoine Calvet,

“Le Tractatus parabolicus du pseudo-Arnaud de Villeneuve,” Chrysopoeia 5 (1992–96): 145–71, p. 166. This has been discussed by William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions. Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago, IL, 2004), p. 90. 131 Chiara Crisciani, “Hermeticism and Alchemy: The Case of Ludovico Lazzarelli,” Early Science and Medicine 5, no. 2 (2000): 145–59, pp. 150–51. 132 Ladislao Reti, “Parting of Gold and Silver with Nitric Acid in a Page of the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci,” Isis 56, no. 3 (Autumn, 1965): 307–19; and Newman, Promethean Ambitions, pp. 120–24. On the links between alchemy and art, see also Cole, “Cellini’s Blood;” Frits Scholten, “Bronze, The Mythology of a Metal,” in Bronze. The Power of Life and Death, eds. Martina Droth, Frits Scholten, and Michael Cole, exh. cat., Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, September 13, 2005– January 7, 2006 (Leeds, 2005), 20–35; and Smith, “Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards.” 133 On change in the Eucharist, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, eds. Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 208–40, p. 229. 134 Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond,” p. 210. 135 Aden Kumler, Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (New Haven, CT, 2011), esp. pp. 156–59; and Aden Kumler, “The ‘Genealogy of Jean le Blanc’: Accounting for the Materiality of the Medieval Eucharist,” in The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, eds. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester, 2015), 119–40. 136 This has been convincingly argued by Alison Wright, “Tabernacle and Sacrament in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany,” in Carvings, Casts & Collectors. The Art of Renaissance Sculpture, eds. Peta Motture, Emma Jones, and Dimitrios Zikos (London, 2013), 42–57, p. 44. 137 Rab Hatfield, “The Compagnia de’ Magi,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 107–61, pp. 132–33. 138 Bornstein, Bianchi, p. 32. 139 Hatfield, “Compagnia de’ Magi”; Marvin B. Becker, “Aspects of Lay Piety in Early Renaissance Florence” in The Pursuit of

NOTES TO PAGES 194–195

Holiness, eds. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden, 1974), 177–99, pp. 190–95; Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Lay Religious Traditions and Florentine Platonism,” in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), 99–122; Weissman, “Sacred Eloquence,” pp. 250–71. 140 Bornstein, Bianchi, p. 29. 141 Hatfield, “Compagnia de’ Magi,” p. 123. 142 Bornstein, Bianchi, p. 35; and Roberta Manetti and Giancarlo Savino, “I libri dei Disciplinati di Santa Maria della Scala di Siena,” Bolletino Senese di Storia Patria 97 (1990): 122–92, pp. 158–59. On lay artisans as readers and participants in lay devotion through copying and reading devotional texts, see Sabrina Corbellini and Margriet Hoogvliet, “Artisans and Religious Reading in Late Medieval Italy and Northern France (ca. 1400–ca. 1520),” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 3 (Fall, 2013): 521–44. 143 Hatfield, “Compagnia de’ Magi,” pp. 129–35; Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness. Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 633–50. 144 Becker, “Aspects of Lay Piety,” p. 190. 145 Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 182–83. On the comparison between saints’ bodies and stones, see Brigitte Buettner, “From Bones to Stones – Reflections on Jeweled Reliquaries,” in

341

Reliquiare im Mittelalter, eds. Bruno Reudenbach and Gia Toussaint (Berlin, 2005), 43–59. 146 Ovid’s Metamorphoses was first translated into the vernacular in the first half of the Trecento by Arrigo Simintendi da Prato. (Bodo Guthmüller, “Die volgarizzamenti,” in Die Literatur bis zur Renaissance, vol. 1 of Die italienische Literatur im Zeitalter Dantes und am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Renaissance, ed. August Buck, 2 vols. [Heidelberg, 1989], p. 212). See, for instance, the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Dante’s Inferno and on Petrarch’s Rime sparse (Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh. Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism [New Haven, CT, 1986], pp. 137–70 and 206–15). 147 Ovid’s Heroides was translated into the vernacular in 1325 by Filippo Ceffi, a Florentine and contemporary of Dante (Massimo Zaggia and Matteo Ceriana, I Manoscritti illustrate delle “Eroidi” ovidiane volgarizzate [Pisa, 1996], p. 1). On Verrocchio’s possession of these books, see earlier, introduction, pp. 25–26 and 258, ns. 116 and 117. 148 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC, 2010). 149 See Neilson, “Carving Life.” 150 Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 247–51. 151 Poggio Bracciolini, Facezie, ed. Marcello Ciccuto (Milan, 1983), pp. 129–30.

INDEX

Abélard, Peter, 324n34 acanthus leaves motif, on Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Pier de’Medici, 111–112 Acciaiuoli, Donato, 29 Adelard of Bath, 130–132 Aesop’s Fables, 29 Agamben, Giorgio, 165 Agnes of Montepulciano, 180 Agnolo di Polo, 52 Alberti, Francesco d’Altobianco degli, 29 Alberti, Leon Battista, 25–26, 100 on anatomy, 186 on animation, 186, 337n95, 338n96 antiquity, study of, 97–98, 291n46 Della famiglia (On the Family), 100, 296n120 Della Pittura by, 186, 328n82 De Re Aedificatoria by, 157 De Statua by, 49, 319n161 on disegno, 157 Musca by, 25, 258n120 On the Family by, 100, 296n120 on porphyry, 95, 293n80 painting by, 248n32 porphyry carving by, 66 on sculpture, 49, 164 sculpture by, 248n32 vernacular literary culture and, 28–29, 174 Albertus Magnus, 110–111 Albizzi, Maso de Luca degli, tomb of, 86–91 alchemy, 193, 300–301n183, 340n132 Aldobrandino da Siena, 134 Trattato dei cinque sensi dell’uomo by, 134, 311n86 Allegreti, Antonio, 108 Ames-Lewis, Francis, 97, 263n172 Ammirato, Scipione, 8, 290n33 anatomy Renaissance artists and, 186–187 Verrocchio’s interest in, 187 animation, theories of, 186–191

animation,Verrocchio’s interest in, 188–191 Anonimo Magliabechiano, 21, 248n32, 283n188 Antonio di Benedetto, 277n116, 285n200 Antoninus of Florence, 107, 133–134, 176, 180–181, 191 Antonio Dei, 16–17, 175, 330n13 aperture design, in Florentine tombs, 86, 88 Apollonio di Giovanni, 67, 262n158 aporia, Gospel representation of Thomas and, 135–136 Aquinas, Thomas, 107, 133 casting metaphor of resurrection, by, 146 on Saint Thomas, 135 Summa Theologiae by, 133, 312n98 Aragona, Giovanni d’, 100 Arasse, Daniel, 182–183 Archimedes, 246n16 arcosolium tomb, style of, 87 Aristotle, 100–101, 103–104, 132–133, 147, 190 De Anima by, 132–133 on marble, 161 Meteorology, 161, 325n55 Nichomachean Ethics, 100–101 Physics, 147 Arnald of Villanova, 193 Arnolfo di Cambio, use of glass paste for Madonna by, 67–68 Arte dei Medici e Speziali, 21, 24, 257n93 Arte di Calimala, 16–17, 40, 120 artisanal epistemology, 34, 158–161, 263n174 artisanal literacy, 161 artistic experimentation perception and cognition in, 158–161 in Renaissance Florence, 56–73 Astesanus of Asti, 107, 299n171 Summa de casibus by, 107 Augustine (Saint), 131, 135, 146, 259n125, 307n54, 316n139 on the arrow of love, 162–163 Confessions by, 162, 327n70, 327n71 Enchiridion by, 146

343

344

INDEX

Augustine (Saint) (cont.) on touch, 131, 134–135, 162, 311–312n90, 312n96, 327n70 authority, ducal tombs as assertion of, 102–117 avello tomb, style of, 86–91 Avery, Charles, 71 Avogadro, Giovanni, 99 Baccio da Montelupo, 178 Bacon, Roger, 131–132 Opus majus by, 132, 307–308n59, 308n60, 308n61 Baldovinetti, Alesso, 56–57 Bambach, Carmen C., 156–157 Banco, Nanni di, 35, 66 Barberino, Andrea da, 25–26 Guerrino il Meschino by, 25, 258n122 Barberino, Luigi da, 105 Barbo, Cardinal Pietro, 96–97, 176, 294n88 Barbo, Marco (Bishop), 159–161 Barolsky, Paul, 138 Basso, Bernardino, 52 Bearzi, Bruno, 148 Becchi, Gentile de’, 80 Belcari, Feo, 176 Bellincioni, Bernardo, 116 Bellini, Jacopo, 154 Benintendi, Orsino, 53, 187–188, 278n127 Bennett, Jill, 182–183 Bernardino of Siena, 107, 141–142, 179, 299n173, 315n118 Bernard of Clairvaux, 133, 182 Bertoldo di Giovanni, 27, 285n201, 319n161 Biagio d’Antonio, 22, 53, 274n94 Bigordi, Giovanbattista, 278n127 Billi, Antonio, 106 Biringuccio,Vannoccio, 158–159 Bischeri family, 55, 278–279n132 black chalk, 44 sources of, 321n2 Verrocchio’s use of, 44, 50, 152–155, 163–164, 267n27, 271n68, 321n5 Blessed Andrea Gallerani, 180 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 28, 163, 195, 259n126 Amorosa visione by, 163, 327n74 Decameron by, 25, 163, 182, 195, 258n116, 259n124 Esposizioni sopra la Comedia by, 259n129 Geta and Birria, attributed to, 263n167 Bonaventure [Saint], 133–134, 138, 143, 145, 309n77, 309n78, 309n79, 312n91, 316n136

Borghini, Don Vincenzio, 46, 266n24, 324n47 Bornstein, Daniel, 194, 336n69 bottega vernacular culture at, 28–29, 174–176 of Verrocchio, 51–56, 196 botteghe vernacular culture in, 28–29, 174–176 Botticelli, Sandro, 6, 24, 53, 268n36, 274n91, 279n135, 280n147 Botticini, Francesco, 53, 261–262n155, , 274n93, 279n135 Bracciolini, Poggio, 130–131 Brigid of Sweden, 180 bronze casting and Verrocchio, 18–21, 35–37, 39, 108–110, 159, 264n3, 320n167, 324n42 in Christ and Saint Thomas (Verrocchio), 35–37, 118–119, 122–123, 147–151 in Florentine tombs, 88 foundry sources for, 318–319n161 and metaphor of resurrection, 145–147 technological innovation and collaboration on, 71–73, 285–286n201, 320n170 works by Verrocchio in, see Verrocchio, Andrea del, bronze, works of, by Brown, David Alan, 21–22 Brunelleschi, Filippo Crucifix by, 60, 172, 266n16, 329n8 design for Florentine Duomo, 1–2, 63, 245n1 humanist influence on, 131, 260n139 Medici palace construction and, 106 Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo by, 26–27, 260n136 San Lorenzo, Old Sacristy, 80, 289n12, 289n13 San Lorenzo parish church designed by, 78–80 technological innovation, experimentation by, 60–61, 63, 282n168 vernacular literary culture and sonnets by, 26–27, 29, 34, 260n135, 260n136, 260n139, 260–261n140, 262n158, 263n167 Bruni, Leonardo, 28–29, 74 Buca di San Girolamo, 176–178 Buggiano (Andrea di Lazzaro Calvalcanti), 82 Buonaccorso di Montemagno, 29, 101 Treatise on nobility by, 101 Buonaiuto, Andrea di, 129 Buoninsegni, Domenico, 112 Buono, Marco del, 67 Buonomini of San Martino, 176–177

INDEX

Burchiello, 26–29, 33, 102, 175–176, 261n151 Butterfield, Andrew, x, 15, 37, 122, 138, 247n21, 247n23, 247n27, 255n71, 257n107, 265n8, 270–271n62, 289n10, 289n14, 290n28, 290n31, 291n46, 291n47, 291n49, 293n66, 293n78, 300n177, 304n18, 304n22, 305n25, 308n22, 315n122 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 193–195 Cadogan, Jean, 69 Caglioti, Francesco, 80, 257n106, 310n186, 338n100 Calandri, Pier Maria, 3 carta lucida technique, 47 cartolai, 29, 33, 53 cartolaio,Verrocchio as, 33 Catherine of Siena [Saint], 180 Cavalca, Domenico, 179–180, 334n53 Trattato della pazienza by, 179–180 Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 102 Cavalcanti, Guido, 165 Cellini, Benvenuto, 111, 116, 149, 190, 271n62, 283n188, 300n183, 319n161, 324n47 Cennini, Cennino, 47, 153, 187 Libro dell’arte by, 156, 267n27, 322n24, 322–323n25 Cento novelle, 25, 258n116 chapbooks, see zibaldoni Cherico, Francesco d’Antonio del, 33 Christ, body of, Eucharistic transformation of, 193–195 mystical experiences with, 179–182 Verrocchio’s interpretation of, 149–151, 169–176 Chrysoloras, Manuel, 116 Ciai, Giovanni, 182–183 Cioni, Michele de Francesco, 16 Cioni, Simone di Michele di Francesco, 45–46 Cioni, Tommaso di Michele di Francesco, 22–23, 53, 122, 187, 255n69, 255n72, 257n106, 288n5, 289n14, 328n91, 338n100 Civitali, Matteo, 67, 193–194 Ciborium for the Host by, 193–194 Clare of Montefalco, 180 Clark, Kenneth, 34 cognition perception and, 156–158 through artistic practice, 158–161 Cole, Andrew, 251n46 Cole, Michael, 10

Colleoni, Bartolomeo, 24 Colonna, Francesco, 95 commonplace books, see zibaldoni Compagnia dei Magi, 94, 194 Compagnia di Gesù, 178 Compagnia di San Luca, 21, 53, 257n93, 275n98, 283n188, 284n190 confraternities, crucifixes for, 176–178, 193–195 Conrad of Offida, 180 consumption, in Renaissance Italy, 101–102 copper,Verrocchio’s palla made from, 2–5, 246n13, 320n168 Corti, Gino, 97–99 Coscia, Baldassare, 88 Costa, Lorenzo, 152 Covi, Dario, 14–16, 25–26 Credi, Lorenzo di, 52–54, 122, 247–248n27, 271–272n69, 264n3, 267n30, 273n84, 274n92, 276n105, 276n110, 277n111, 277n113 cristo vivo concept, 168–169, 172–174 in vernacular literature, 168–169, 195 Cropper, Elizabeth, 152–154, 159–161 Crucifixes Florentine confraternities possession of, 176–178, 193–195 limewood, 265–266n16 mixed materials in production of, 329–330n8, 330n10, 331n26 moveable parts on, 177–178, 331n30 processions, use in, 128, 176 ritual use of, 128, 177, 194, 332–333n35 touch and, 128–129, 181–182, 306n43 Culex, 25 d’Andrea, Giuliano, 55 Dante, 144–145 on animation, 186 artists’ ownership of books by, 259n124, 259n125, 259n126 Classical Antiquity, ideas from, 26, 259n129 Divina Commedia, 26, 28, 144–145, 186, 292n54, 327n68, 341n146 on marble, 161 oral readings of, 28 Purgatorio by, 186, 337n94 Rime petrose by, 161–162 on transformation of matter, 161–162 Vita nuova by, 165 on women, love and poetry, 165 Dati, Leonardo, 28–29, 175 death masks, 72–73, 187–188, 338–339n105

345

346

INDEX

Dei, Benedetto, 21, 48 Memorie Istoriche by, 21, 48 della Robbia, Andrea, 177 della Robbia, Luca, 1, 88, 90, 147, 176 books owned by, 26, 259n126 Buca di San Girolamo, member of the, 176–177 Christ and Saint Thomas, model for, 121, 147, 256n77, 303n16 Crucifix by, 177–178 humanist contact with, 131 Mercanzia commission and, 121–122 sculpture by, 67, 119–120, 283n189 Stemma for Mercanzia at Orsanmichele by, 120, 303n7 tabernacle by, with bronze relief by Verrocchio, 141, 315n122 technological innovations by, 60, 67, 69–70 Del Puppo, Dario, 29 Dempsey, Charles, 165–167, 188–191 Dent, Peter, 71–73 De rerum natura, 103, 108, 131 De Robertis, Domenico, 176 Desiderio da Settignano, 17, 54, 67, 71, 190, 265n9, 285–286n201, 287n213, 291n46 Tabernacle of the Sacrament designed by, 82–83, 91, 150 technological innovation and experimentation by, 67, 71 De statua (Alberti), 50 devotional practices, objects linked to, 128–130, 181–184 touch in, 128–130, 162 diamonds, in Verrocchio’s Medici tomb, 76, 78, 93, 95, 112–114, 293n67, 293n68 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 187–188 Diebold, William, 137–138 Diogenes Laertius, 146–147 disegno, Renaissance theories of, 153 perception and cognition in, 156–158 Dolce stil nuovo poetry, 165 Dolphijn, Rick, 12–14 Domenico, Bartolomeo di Guido, 33–34 Dominici, Luca, 129, 177, 181 Donatello, 5, 55–56 abacus of, 159–161 bronze casting by, 61–63, 66, 148, 281n154, 283n181, 285n201, 319n162 bronzes by, 61–63, 66–67, 70–71 Cavalcanti altarpiece by, 189–190 Chellini Madonna by, 67 Christ and Saint Thomas, commission given to, 121 Crucifix by, 61, 172, 177–178

David by, 18–19 Deposition of Christ by, 56, 59 Horse’s head, attributed to, 66–67 humanist influence on, 34, 130–131 Joshua by, 63 judgment through practice, defense by, 159 Judith and Holofernes by, 61, 66, 70 Mercanzia commission and, 121–122 “non-finito” in works by, 71 painter, 67 Saint Louis of Toulouse by, 35–36, 58, 70, 120 sculpture by, 56–71, 120, 148 spiritelli by, 189–190 technological innovation and experimentation by, 56–71 tomb of Baldassare Coscia by, 88–89 Donati, Lucrezia, 165–166 Verrocchio’s portrait of, 21, 165–166 drawing, see also disegno as defense of sculptured relief, 154–156 developments in Quattrocento of, 152–154 metamorphosis in,Verrocchio’s representation of, 161–163 Verrocchio’s skill in, 42–45, 152, 154–156, 266n24 Dunkerton, Jill, 15, 46 effigies,Verrocchio’s production of, 187–188, 338–339n105 Ekirch, Roger, 130 Epiphanius the Deacon, 143 Eucharist as means to salvation, 142 confraternities taking of, and discussing nature of, 194 nature of change and transformation in, 193–195 Verrocchio’s Crucifix as meditation on nature of Christ in the, 193–194 Eucharistic tabernacles, 141–142, 193 Euclid, 131 extramission theory of vision, 131, 139 falling in love, Renaissance theories of, 162–163, 165 Fiamma, Galvano, 101, 104 Fichard, Johannes, 112, 301n186, 301n188 Ficino, Marsilio, 95–96, 112–113, 194–195 Filarete (Antonio di Piero Averlino), 96–97, 99–100, 103–105, 106–107 on marble, 161 Trattato di architectura by, 95–96

INDEX

Filippino Lippi, 268n36 books owned by, 26, 259n126 workshop of, 279n135 Filippo Lippi, 273n77 Findlen, Paula, 99–100 Finiguerra, Maso, 29, 63 Finiguerra, Stefano (Lo Za), 29 Fiorentino, Niccolò, 166 Fioretti or The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, 180–181 Florence artistic experimentation in, 56–73 oral literary culture in, 28 vernacular culture in, 25–34 Florentine Baptistery, 16, 23, 40, 66, 88, 91, 131, 144, 148 Florentine Duomo Brunelleschi’s design for the cupola of the, 63 Verrocchio’s palla for, 1–5, 52, 245n10 Formigli, Edilberto, 61–63 fornaciaio, 16, 254n60 Forteguerri, Niccolò, 23 Forteguerri cenotaph, 23, 48, 54, 169 Fourth Lateran Council, 143 Fra Angelico, 191 Franceschi, Franco, 28–29 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 71, 154, 282n171, 286–287n213 Francia, Francesco, 7 Fruosino, Bartolomeo di, 1 Fusco, Laurie, 97–99 Galen, 131 Gauricus, Pomponius, 6, 21 De Sculptura by, 21, 48 on Donatello, 148, 159–161 on Leonardo da Vinci as Verrocchio’s pupil, 275n97 on Verrocchio, 6, 21, 49 Gentile da Fabriano, 129 Pilgrims Visiting the Shrine of Saint Nicholas of Bari by, 129 Gentilini, Giancarlo, 70–71 Geta and Birria, 29–33, 128, 157–158, 260n140, 263n167, 324n35 Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato, 33 Ghiberti, Buonaccorso, 245n6 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 69–71, 153, 273n77 and bronze casting skills of, 64–66, 148, 283n181 Christ and Saint Thomas, commission given to, 121

Commentaries by, 132, 134, 285n201 drawings and models for other artists, 285n201 Gates of Paradise by, 144, 148 humanist influence on, 130–132 life casting in workshop of, 300n177 light, manipulation of, on bronze, 314n114 North Doors by, 66, 148 painter, 67, 248n32, 283–284n190 reliquary of Saints Protus, Hyacinth, Nemesius by, 91, 103 Saint John by, 64–66 Saint Matthew by, 64, 286n205 Saint Stephen by, 64–66 sculpture by, 148 tomb of Maso di Luca degli Albizzi, attributed to, 87 on touch, 134 work across media by, 67, 283–284n190 workshop of, 273n77 Ghiberti,Vittorio, 121 Ghirlandaio, Davide, 98 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 6, 24, 53–54, 274n92, 278n127, 280n147 Giacomo da Lentini, 161–162, 325n60, 327n72 Gilbert of Hoyland, 162, 327n69 Giordano da Pisa, 133 Giovanni d’Antonio, 285n200 Giovanni di Bartolomeo, 1 Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, 24 Giovanni Gherardo da Prato, 26, 260n135 Giovio, Paolo, 82, 95, 289n15, 294n85 goldsmithing artists’ experimentations with, 63, 69–71, 116, 285–286n201 Verrocchio’s training and work in, 9, 16–17, 23, 40–42, 49, 51, 91, 113–116, 174–175 Goldthwaite, Richard, 101 Gombrich, Ernst, 97 Gospels, story of Thomas in, 125–126, 135–136, 139, 146 government, Mercanzia’s function in, 122 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 56, 277n112 Gregory the Great (Pope), 135 Grosseteste, Robert, 131, 307n58 Guadgni, Alessandro, 278n132 guilds of Florence, 24–25, 35, 69, 119, 122, 254n60, 257n109, 283n187, 283n189, 284n190, 286n202, 305n26

347

348

INDEX

guilds of Florence (cont.) bankers’, 64 Cloth Merchants’ (Arte di Calimala), 40, 120 painters’, 21, 24, 248n32, 257n93, 283n187, 283n188, 283n189 Guido, Antonio di, 28–29 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 132 hardstones collections of, 95–100, 105–106, 113–115, 294n91, 295n99 meanings of, 95–96, see also porphyry techniques of working with, 116, see also porphyry "house of the dead" tomb type, influence on Florentine tombs, 87 humanists contact with artists, 1, 34, 63, 130–131, 176, 260n139, 263n172 patrons of Verrocchio, 1, 130–131, 176 sermons at confraternity meetings by, 182, 193–195 vernacular culture and, 27–29, 101, 175 Hutcheson, Francis, 106–108 Hyman, Isabelle, 106 incarnation of Christ, as theme in Verrocchio’s works, 186, 193–195 intagliatori, 105–106 Jacopo da Voragine, The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) by, 107–108, 128, 131, 135, 162, 305n32 Jacopone da Todi, 132, 180, 259n126, 309n68, 336n64 John the Scot, 143 Jones, Lars R., 178–180 Kent, Dale, 28–29 knowledge artistic patronage as expression of, 103 senses as source of, 128–135, 156–158 through artistic practice, 158–161 Kress Madonna, 70–71 Kumler, Aden, 193–195 laboring class books owned by, 26 literacy rates of, 25 oral culture of, 28–29 Landino, Cristoforo, 28–29, 175, 194, 259n124 Lando di Pietro, 190–191

Landucci, Luca, 2, 122 Langedijk, Karla, 187–188 Le Murate convent, 102 Leonardo da Vinci, 6–7, 16, 33–34, 193, 268n36 on animation, 186–187 Codex atlanticus by, 134, 311n88 on drawing, 157 drawings by, 153–154, 321n6 Geta and Birria, owner of copy of, 33 hardstone collection of Medici and, 105–106 influence of Verrocchio on, 6–7, 9, 34, 144, 153, 155, 266n24, 322n9 on the palla, 4, 246n15, 246n16 on sculpture, 148, 318n159 sfumato technique and, 43–46, 154–156 on touch and sight, 132, 134 as Verrocchio’s apprentice/associate, 4, 6–7, 9, 34, 44, 46, 52–53, 193, 268n36, 271n68, 275n97, 275n98, 275n99, 321n5 Leoni, Massimo, 35–37 life casting technique, 39, 72, 108, 187–88, 299–300n177 lineamenta, Alberti’s concept of, 157, 323n28, 323n29 linen Flemish paintings on, 48, 270n47 Verrocchio’s paintings on, 46–48, 50, 147–148, 170 literacy, in Florence, 25–27 literature and translation, vernacular, in Florence, 25–27 Lombard, Peter, 146 Sentences by, 146 Lucian, 25–26 Mosca by, 25, 258n118 Lucretius, 131 Magi, Medicis’ association with, 92, 94–95 magnificence artisanship as expression of, 100–102, 104–117, 296n122 attitudes to in Renaissance Florence, 100–108, 296n119, 296n120, 296n122, 297n133, 298n150 Medici family’s conceptions of, 102–117 Maiano brothers, 26, 55, 259n124, 333n35 Maiano, Giuliano da, 181, 277n116, 285n200, 285n201, 333n35 Malatesta, Francesco, 105–106

INDEX

Manetti, Antonio, 27, 63, 260n135, 260n136, 282n169, 282n170 Manetti, Giannozzo, 29 Mantegna, Andrea, 152–154 marble beliefs about, 49, 161 Verrocchio’s use of and allusions to, 9–10, 17, 23, 38–39, 48, 55, 74, 76, 78, 82–84, 93, 96–97, 108, 114, 152, 155–156, 159, 161, 163, 167, 187, 197 Marbode of Rennes, 95 Marsuppini, Carlo, 28–29, 63–64, 189–190 Martini, Simone, 161–162 Masaccio, 67, 283n187 Maso di Bartolomeo, 90 materiality in Bargello Crucifix (Verrocchio), 176–195 as Christian metaphor, 112–113 defense of wealth and, 106–108 of devotional practices, 149–150, 178–193, 320n170, 320n174 mystical encounters and, 180–186 scholarly research on, 10–14, 251n46 transformation of matter and, 161–163, 193–195 materials as metaphors for the Medici, in Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, 92–100 Matthias (King of Hungary), 130–132 media artists’ technological innovation and mixing of, 61–63, 67–73, 248–249n31 Crucifix of Verrocchio and mixing of, 169–176 Verrocchio’s work between and across, 10–16, 48–51, 169–176 Medici, Bernardo d’Alamanno de’, 194 Medici, Cosimo de’, 17–18 attitudes about spending of, 99, 101–102, 104, 296n122 collecting practices of, 97, 187, 294n91 dedication to Saint Thomas, 122 in Florentine government, 122–123 palace, plans to connect to San Lorenzo, 106 patronage at San Lorenzo, 82–84 vernacular poetry, interest in by, 28 Verrocchio’s tomb of, 37–38, 83, 88, 99, 103 Medici, Giovanni de’ collecting practices of, 96, 104, 294n91 death of, 292n65 funeral of, 290n32 vernacular poetry, interest in by, 28

Verrocchio’s tomb for, 10, 23, 38–39, 74–117 Medici, Giovanni di Bicci de’, 80, 82 Medici, Giuliano de’, 18, 21, 23 patron of Verrocchio, 18, 22–23, 76, 92–93, 255n69 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 1–2, 10 Ambra by, 162, 326n67 art patronage and political ambition, 10, 297n136 collections of, 95–100, 105–106, 291n46 colors and symbols used by, 93 Mercanzia, control of, 122–123 poetry of, 161–162, 163–167, 295n105 political upheaval faced by, 85–86 Raccolta Aragona by, 162 as ruler, 85, 92–94, 122–123, 290n36, 290n37, 294n89, 295n100 as sacred personage, 92 San Lorenzo parish church and, 84 Selve d’amore by, 93–94, 99 tomb materials and inscriptions on hardstone vases ordered by, 95–96 vernacular literature and, 27, 94, 162–167, 293n78, 326n87, 326n66, 326n67 Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas and, 122–123, 304n22, 304–305n25 Verrocchio’s David and, 18, 255n69 Verrocchio’s palla and, 1 Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, 23, 74, 76, 84–85, 92– 117, 196, 291n46, 292n65, 293n74 Verrocchio’s work for, 21–23, 74, 76, 84–85, 92–93, 165–166, 187–188, 328n91, 338n100, 338n104, 338–339n105 wax votives of, 187–188 Medici, Lorenzo di Giovanni di Giovanni di Bicci de’, 80, 91, 289n12 Medici, Piero de’, 17–18, 22–23 artistic tastes and collection of, 93, 96–97, 99, 103–105 death and burial of, 85, 95, 103, 290n33, 290n37, 292n65 defense of wealth accumulated by, 106–108 Filarete’s description of scrittoio of, 96, 99, 103, 105, 107 magnificence and, 103, 107 Orsanmichele project and, 119–120 porphyry, punning reference to and use of in commissions of, 93–94, 293n74 as sacred personage, 91–92, 116

349

350

INDEX

Medici, Piero de’ (cont.) San Lorenzo and, 84 Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas and, 120, 304–305n25 Verrocchio’s David and, 18, 255n69 Verrocchio’s tomb for, 23, 38–39, 74–117 Medici, Piero di Lorenzo de’, 93–95, 102–103 Medici family collections, 95–106, 113–114, 268n41, 270n49, 285n200, 294n91, 302n194 colors and symbols used by, 93 Flemish paintings collected by, 48 Golden Age, associated with by, 93 magnificence and, 100–117, 296n112, 296n122, 299n174 Mercanzia, control of by, 122–123 palace of and links to San Lorenzo, 98–99, 106, 116 porphyry, use of in commissions by, 88, 93–94, 96, 111–112, 291n47 political upheaval faced by, 85–86, 102–117 sacred authority claimed by, 92 San Lorenzo, patronage and control of, 78–84, 91, 288n7, 288n8, 289n13, 290n28, 291n47 technological innovation encouraged by, 105–106 usury, see Medici family, wealth and spending, concern about by vernacular literature, interest in by, 28–29, 94, 162–163, 293n78, 305n33, 326n60, 326n66, 326n67 Verrocchio’s work for, 17–18, 74, 254n63 wax votives of, 187–188 wealth and spending, concern about by, 10, 101–102, 107, 116, 196–197, 299n174 wealth transformed into positive by Verrocchio, 74, 102–117, 196–197, 302n198 meditation, crucifixes linked to, 178–180 Meditations on the Life of Christ, 128–130, 135 Megli, Antonio, 29 Canzone alla Vergine by, 29 Mercanzia, see Università della Mercanzia Mesarites, Nikolaos, 150–151 metal materials, artistic production using, 106–108, 145–147, 318–319n161 metamorphosis, theme in Verrocchio’s art, 107–108, 116, 145–151, 152, 161–163 Methodius of Olympus, 146 Michelangelo, 53

Michelozzi, Niccolò, 105 Michelozzo, 55, 88, 106 Balustrade around the tabernacle protecting the miraculous image of the Annunciation by, 88 mixed media, see media Montaigne, Michel de, 2–3 Montecatini, Antonio da, 100–102 Montefeltro, Federico da, 100–102 Monte Giovanni di Miniato, 33 Morelli, Giovanni, 181–184 Ricordi by, 181, 334n51 Moschus, vernacular translation of, 25–26, 258n119 Most, Glenn, 135–136 mystical encounters, objects as source of, 180–186 Naldi, Naldo, 84, 92–93 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 135–136 "Nanni Grosso", 53–54 Natali, Antonio, 46–47 neo-Platonic metaphor, 112–113 Neri di Bicci, 53 Ricordanze of, 52, 273n76, 277n116 Nesi, Giovanni, 182–183, 193–195 Niccoli, Niccolò, 25–26, 130–132 Niccolini, Giustina, 101–102 Novellino, 26 objects, mystical encounters inspired by, 180–181 oil-based painting, by Verrocchio and artists in his workshop, 45–48 oil-based painting, experiments in by fifteenth-century artists, 56, 280n147, 280n150 oral culture in Florence, 28 Orcagna, 26 Origen of Alexandria, 141, 146–147 Contra Celsum by, 146, 315n119, 317n145, 317n146 Orsanmichele, façade decoration of, 35, 119–120 Our Lady of Impruneta (miraculous painting), 183 Ovid, 188–189, 195 Heroides by, 25, 195, 341n147 Metamorphoses by, 188–189, 195, 339n110, 341n146 vernacular translations of, and influence on vernacular literature, 25–26, 188–189, 195

INDEX

Phaethon intaglio, 105 painting devotional practices and mystical experiences and, 184–186 technological innovation and experimentation in, 57, 280n147, 285–286n201 Verrocchio’s work in, 6–7, 9, 15, 17, 21–24, 34, 45–48, 50, 52, 55–56, 73, 147–148, 163, 170, 174, 184–186, 188, 192, 271n68 Palmieri, Matteo, 1–2 Pandolfini, Pier Filippo, 193–195 Panziera da Prato, Ugo (Hugo Panciera), 178–179, 186, 192 Trattati by, 179, 334n49, 334n50 Paolozzi Strozzi, Beatrice, 14–16, 169–176, 176–177 paper,Verrocchio’s paintings on, 46–47 Parte Guelfa, 35, 118–120, 302n4 Pasquino da Montepulciano, 90 Passavant, Günter, 14–16, 50, 147–148 patrons technological innovation for and expectations of, 64, 67–70, 71–73, 104–105 wealth accumulation and spending patterns and, 103–104 Penny, Nicholas, 71–73 perception cognition and, 156–158 through artistic practice, 158–161 Petrarch, 28, 93–95, 161–162, 163–165 Trionfe (Triumphs) by, 25 vernacular translations of, 25–26 Piero da Vinci, 54 Piero della Francesca, 130–132 Pitti, Luca, 95 Planctus Mariae et aliorum (The Lament of Mary and Others), 178 Platina, Bartolomeo, 99, 101–102 De optimo cive by, 99, 102 Pliny, the Elder, 163, 328n81 Polcri, Alessandro, 101–102 Poliziano, Angelo, 105 Orationes by, 105 Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 1–2, 21–22, 40–43, 55 artistic experimentation by, 57 Pollaiuolo, Piero, 21–22 artistic experimentation by, 57, 248n32, 275n102, 280n149, 280n150 David by, 56, 58, 161 Pontano, Giovanni, 104–105 De splendore by, 104–105, 298n148

porphyry in tombs, 87–88 in Verrocchio’s Medici tomb, 93–95, 111–112 Verrocchio’s use of, 37–38, 93–95, 111–112 precious stones, in Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, 113–116, 301n190 printmaking, technological innovation in, 63 Ptolemy, 130–132 Radcliffe, Anthony, 14–16 Razzanti, Piero di Neri, 105 reliquaries,Verrocchio’s evocation of, see Verrocchio, tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, reliquaries, evocation of repoussé (hammering), 4, 5, 40, 266n23, see also Verrocchio, repoussé (hammering) in work of Ricci, Guido di Piero dei, 29 Ricci, Piero dei, 29, 262n157 Riccio, Agostino del, 95 Richard of Middleton, 106–108 Riemenschneider, Tilman, 138–139 Altar of the Holy Blood by, 138 Rinuccini, Alamanno, 193–195 Zibaldone of, 21 Roberts, Sean, 61–63 Rossellino, Antonio, 71–73, 176–177 Rossellino, Bernardo, 67 Rucellai, Giovanni, 18–22, 28–29, 49 Rustici, Giovanni Francesco, 53–54 Sacchetti, Franco, 28, 126–128, 168–169, 195 Trecento novelle by, 28, 168, 195, 258n116, 329n1 sacre rappresentazioni (sacred performances), 177–178, 333n42 crucifixes used in, 193–195 Saltarelli, Jacopo, 54 San Francesco Poverino confraternity, 176–177 Sangallo, Giuliano da, 111–112 Taccuino Senese of, 112 San Lorenzo, parish church of, Medici control of, 74–92, 106 Santa Maria della Pietà confraternity, 176–177 Santi, Giovanni, 21, 48 La vita e le geste di Federico di Montefeltro duca d’Urbino by, 48

351

352

INDEX

Sarto, Andrea del, 26–27 Batracomiomachia, attributed to, 27 Savonarola, Girolamo, 134–135 Scala, Bartolomeo, 182–183 "schiavellatione"(ritual of removing the nails), 177 Schubring, Paul, 121–122 sculpture drawing as defense of, 154–156 metaphor used in vernacular poetry, 163–167 technological innovation and experimentation in, 57–61, 320n170 Verrocchio’s experiments and innovations in, 5–6, 10, 35–42, 49, 78, 88, 108–116, 147–149, 158–159, 169–170, 184–185, 186–188 Second Council of Nicaea, 143–145 seeing crucifixes as tool for spiritual, 178 as knowledge, 128–132, 156–158 as theme in representations of Christ and Saint Thomas, 123–128 as topic in vernacular literature, 130–132 in Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas, 136–142 Seneca, 29, 261–262n155 Serragli, Bartolommeo di Paolo di Giovanni, 95–96 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, 22–23, 28–29, 100–102 sfumato technique, 10 Verrocchio’s use of, 10, 44, 152, 155–156, 164, 197 Shearman, John, 17–18 silver artists’ experimentations with, 69–71 Verrocchio’s work in, 40–43 silverpoint drawing, 44–45, 321n6 Simone Ferrucci, Francesco di, 53–55, 277n113 Smith, Pamela H., 159–161 Song of Songs, 132–134, 182–183 spending, Aristotelian doctrine of glad and generous, 103 spiritelli, 188–191 stiacciato relief, 70–71 Stiberc, Peter, 61 Strozzi, Alessandra, 47–49 Strozzi, Jacopo, 86–91 stumping technique in drawing,Verrocchio’s use of, 153, 155–156, 164, 321n4 stylus,Verrocchio’s work with, 44–45, 48–49

Tabernacle of the Sacrament by Desiderio da Settignano, see Desiderio da Settignano, Tabernacle of the Sacrament Taccola, Mariano, 63 talismans, in Medici tombs, 95–96 Tanturli, Giuliano, 26–27 Tazza Farnese, 98, 105 technological innovation in Renaissance Florence, 56–73 tempera in painting artists’ use of, 56, 58, 280n147 Verrocchio’s use of, 45–46, 170, 174, 247n27, 267n35, 268n39 tenzoni (patterned sonnets), 26–27 terracotta della Robbia’s technique with, 57–61 experimentation in, 56, 60, 64, 69–71 Verrocchio’s work in, 49–52 Theophilus Presbyter, 149 Theophrastus, 161 Thomas (Apostle and Saint) exegesis on, 125, 135, 139–140, 143, 197 as subject in government halls and law courts, 122–123 touch and sight in representations of, 123–128, 134–135 vernacular interpretations of story of, 126–128 Verrocchio’s interpretation of, 118–119, 124–128, 134–145, 147–151 Verrocchio’s sculpture of, 5, 10, 118–119, 122, 124–125, 136–145, 147–151, 317–318n151 Thomas of Celano, 180–181 Torrigiani, Pietro, 53–54 touch and tactility exegetical scholarship concerning, 135–145 in Ideal Head of a Woman, 152, 197 as knowledge, 128–132, 156–158 in Renaissance art and literature, 119–135 in representations of St. Thomas, 123–128, 134–135 in Verrocchio’s Thomas sculpture, 137–138 Tractatus parabolicus (Arnald of Villanova), 193 transformation of materials,Verrocchio’s art as expression of, 161–163, 193–195 transubstantiation, Renaissance artistic expression of, 193–195 Traversari, Ambrogio, 130–132 Tribizond, Georg of, 28–29 Trismegistus, Hermes, 110–111

INDEX

turtle symbol, in Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, see Verrocchio, tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, turtles, significance of, in Ubertino da Casale, 139–142, 145 Uccello, Paolo, 176–177 Università della Mercanzia, 119–120 usury, defense of, 106–108 Valori, Niccolò, 100–102 Vita by, 100–102 van Ausdall, Kristen, 139–142 van der Tuin, Iris, 12–14 van der Velden, Hugo, 187–188 Van Eck, Caroline, 157 Vasari, Giorgio, 2–3 on apprentices and assistants to Verrocchio, 7, 34, 52–55 biography of Verrocchio, 2, 6–9, 33, 248n29 on crucifixes by Brunelleschi and Donatello, 57–61 on crucifixes by Verrocchio, 169 on death masks by Verrocchio, 187 on drawing, 156–157, 323n26 on drawings by Verrocchio, 9, 45–46, 153–154, 266n24 on Fra Angelico, 191 on hardstones, 95 Libro di disegno of, 45 on Mercanzia commission, 121–122 on paintings by Verrocchio, 21, 34, 46, 48 on palla by Verrocchio, 2, 245n9 on Verrocchio as architect, 9, 80, 270n50 on Verrocchio as a painter, 6–7, 21, 34, 47, 256n89, 268n40, 270n50, 274n94 on Verrocchio as bronze caster, 148, 320n166, 320n167 on Verrocchio as goldsmith, 48, 113, 270n50 on Verrocchio as sculptor, 48, 270n50 on Verrocchio moving between media, 9, 56, 249n35 on Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas, 121, 125, 138, 148, 271n62, 305n28, 314n112, 318n151 on Verrocchio’s legacy, 6–9 on Verrocchio’s Marsyas, 23, 112, 187, 257n106 on Verrocchio’s tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, 88, 93, 289n11, 291n50 on wax votives by Verrocchio, 187–188 veil, metaphor of

in Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas, 143, 159 Verino, Ugolino, 18–21, 49, 53–54 De Epigrammi by, 21, 256n83, 270n55 De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae by, 48, 52, 270n54 Vernacci, Leonardo, 104 vernacular literature and culture animation in, 186–191 Bargello Crucifix in context of, 174–176, 186–191 classical literature translated into, 25–29 conflation of lady, love, and poetry in, 161–167 in Florence, 25–34 meditation in, 178–180 metamorphosis as theme in, 10, 161–169 mystical encounters in, 180–181 perception and cognition in, 157–158 performances of, 28–29 touch in, 126–135, 162–163, 180–181 touching and seeing in, 130–134, 162–163 transformation of matter in, 161–162, 193–195 Verrocchio, Andrea del apprentices/assistants/associates of, 4, 6–7, 9, 34, 44, 46, 52–55, 122, 193, 247–248n27, 261–262n155, 264n3, 268n36, 271n68, 271–272n69, 273–274n84, 274n91, 274n92, 274n93, 275n97, 275n98, 275n99, 276n104, 276n105, 276n110, 277n111, 277n113, 321n5 artistic legacy of, 5–9, 196–198, 251n47 attribution issues with work of, 14–16 books owned by, 25, 29, 34, 258n116, 258n118 bottega of, 51–56, 196 bronze, works in, by, 2–3, 9, 16, 18–22, 35, 37–40, 48–50, 55, 74–78, 82, 84, 92–96, 108, 110, 112–113, 118–120, 122–123, 137–138, 142–151, 158–159, 170, 186, 196–197, 255n71, 256n83, 264n3, 291–292n50, 292n54, 304n18, 315n122, 320n169 bronze casting by, 5, 18–21, 35–37, 39, 108–111, 118–119, 123, 145–151, 158–159, 170, 190, 255n71, 264n3, 271n62, 303–304n18, 304n19, 320n167, 320n169, 324n42 career of, 16–25 defense of Medici wealth by, 106–117 imagination as subject in work of, 163–167 inventiveness of, 10, 35–51

353

354

INDEX

Verrocchio, Andrea del (cont.) inventories of possessions of, 55–56 life casting by, 39, 108–111, 300n177 marble work by, 17, 23, 159–161 materials and media used by, 9–16 Mercanzia commission and, 119–123 repoussé (hammering), use of in works by, 3–5, 42, 51 transformation of materials in works of, 161–163, 193–195 vernacular literature, knowledge of by, 25–26, 29–34, 126–130, 174–175, 178–180, 188–190, 195 work between and across media by, 9–14, 48–51, 67–73 works by Baptism of Christ, 6–7, 21, 45–46, 267n33, 268n36, 271n68, 274n91 Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 15, 16, 23, 40–42, 49, 248n28 candelabrum, 18–21 Captain with the Mace, 42 Christ and Saint Thomas, 5, 35–37, 49–50, 54, 58, 118–151, 152, 169, 197 artistic legacy of, 5 Christ as door metaphor, 139–145, 315n122 commission for, 119–123, 304n22 details and iconography of, 135–145 differences in casting of two figures of, 148 drapery study for, 147–148 inventiveness in, 35–37, 49–50 meaning of bronze in, 145–147 niche site for, meaning of, 142–145 pictorial aspects of, 49–50, 118–119, 136–145, 146, 149–151 technological innovation in work on, 35–37 Verrocchio’s craftsmanship as metaphor for Thomas in, 145–151 Colleoni monument, 5–6, 16, 24, 54, 110, 148, 264n3 Crucifix (Bargello) by, 10, 15, 51, 128, 168–195 cork used in production of, 331n25 materiality in, 176–195, 197 as meditation device, 178–197 techniques used in, 169–174, 191–192 transformation of materials in as spiritual metaphor, 193–195 vernacular literature and culture and, 174–176

David, 18, 255n69, 255n71, 256n73, 277n117 drapery studies on linen, 46–48, 50, 147–148 Executioner, 15, 42, 49, 266n21 Forteguerri cenotaph, 23, 48, 54 modello for, 48–49 Francesco Sassetti, bust of, 159 Head of a Woman (silverpoint drawing), 44–45 Ideal Head of a Woman, 10, 152–167 as defense of sculpture, 154–163 as portrait of imagination, 163–167 as representing metamorphosis, 161–163 purpose of, 152–154 sculpture and drawing connected in, 154–156, 162–167 sfumato,Verrocchio’s use of in, 10, 44, 152, 155, 164, 197, 322n18 stumping technique in, 153, 155, 164, 321n4 touch as knowing in, 156–161 touching and seeing as equivalent in, 152, 156–158, 197 Madonna and Child (stucco, Oberlin), attributed to workshop of, 184–186 Madonna and Child (terracotta, Bargello, Florence), 184–186 Madonna and Child with Saints (Budapest), 21, 274n94 Madonna and Child with Two Angels (National Gallery, London), 268n39 Madonna and Standing Christ Child (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), attributed to workshop of, 184–186 Madonna di Piazza (Pistoia altarpiece), 7–8, 23, 175, 247–248n27, 257n102 Marsyas, 23, 112, 187, 257n106, 338n100 mounts of Medici vases, attributed to, 113–114 paintings on linen, 46–48, 50 paintings on paper, 46–47 palla by, 1–5, 21, 35, 51–53, 55, 63, 148, 245n3, 245n10, 246n19, 274– 275n96, 275n98, 279n137, 320n168 Pietà (terracotta, formerly Berlin), 169 Pistoia altarpiece, see Madonna di Piazza Putto with a Dolphin, 22, 277n117 reliquary casket, attributed to, 91 Resurrection (terracotta), 169 Saint Jerome, painting attributed to, 46–47

INDEX

spiritello on Desiderio da Settignano’s Marsuppini tomb, attributed to, 189–190 Sportello with Christ the Redeemer, attributed to workshop of, 141 standards for tournaments, 23 Studies of Infants, 108–110 Tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici, 17–18, 37–38, 82–83, 88, 99, 103, 255n68, 289n14, 291n47 Tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici, 10, 22–23, 38–39, 74–117, 196 arcosolium tomb type, similarities to, 87 artisanship as magnificence expressed in, 100–117 as defense of Medici wealth, 102–117 as oration, 74–92 avello tomb type, similarities to, 86–87 chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian, connections to, 80–83 colors on as reference to the Medici, 93 date of completion of, 84 de rerum natura, metaphors alluding to in, 103, 108–111, 116 diamonds, significance of, on, 93–95, 97 inscriptions on, 78 materials as metaphors for the Medici in, 92–100 materials used in, 87–88, 93–100, 108–113, 196–198 Medici as sacred personages in, 82, 91–92, 116–117 Medici collections of objects, references to in, 93–100, 105–106, 113–114 Medici palace, connections to, 78, 99–100, 106, 113–117 net in, 74, 82, 88–92

porphyry, meanings of, in, 87–88, 93–99, 111–112 reliquaries, evocation of in, 82, 91–92, 99, 196, 289n13 tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici, connections to, 82–83 turtles, significance of, in, 76, 93, 108–111 usury, defense of in, 107–117 Verrocchio as Magus, allusions to in, 108–111 wax votives, 23, 187–188, 338n104, 338–339n105 Woman with a Posy, 159 Youth with the Salver, 42 zibaldoni made in workshop of, 17, 26, 29–34, 55, 157–158, 176, 260n140, 278n128, 307n54 workshop environment of, 14, 54–56 Verrocchio sketchbook, so-called, 54, 285n200 Vespasiano da Bisticci, 28–29 Vespucci, Georgio Antonio, 193–195 Virgil, Georgics, 26 vision, knowledge and, 130–132 Vitalis of Blois, 324n35 volgare culture, 26–27 wealth, artistic production as defense of, 102–117 William of Auxerre, 107, 116 wood sculpture materials incorporated into, 329–330n8 mystical experiences and, 129–130, 180–181 ritual use of, 128–129, 177 technological innovation and experimentation in, 60–61, 281n158 zibaldoni (commonplace books/chapbooks), 25–34 Verrocchio’s production of, see Verrocchio, Andrea del, zibaldoni made in workshop of

355