Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture

Michael W cabbage Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 521 81321 2 60 [pound sterling]

Ogni dipintore dipinge se: each painter paints himself--and what of the sculptor? Michael Cole's remarkable fresh book asks us to apply the renaissance common-place about painting to the practice of plastic art as exemplified by Benvenuto Cellini in the sixteenth hundred The self fashioning mapped by means of Cole occurs less through the incorporation of Cellini's be in possession of Likeness in his work than from one side the sculptor's technical processes--modeling, casting, carving, and in like manner on--that in Cole's words 'realize not alone the material, but also the artist'. This approach differs markedly from discussions that have direct the eyeed upon Cellini's extensive writings as the greatest in quantity vital source of information upon his life available. Pope-Hennessy's classic monograph, for example, describes the body s the artist wrote as 'our greatest in quantity important source for knowledge of Cellini's work'. (1)

The novel study by literary scholar Margaret Gallucci attends to Cenini's plain and poetry as rhetorical performances [i]or[/i] part of to the other which he crafted a transgressive persona, 'shap[ing] words a great deal of in the same spirit as he mold gold or bronze' (2) Other new efforts have explicitly sought to tease apart the artist from the writer, seeking to examine 'die Verschmelzung sowie die Spannung zwischen der historischen Gestalt de Kunstler im Zusammenhang mit seinem Werk und dem fiktiven "Cellini" der Autobiographie'. (3) Cole's volume instead fuses the making of statuary with the artist's own acts of self-disclosure.

The works of art resulting from the sculptor's processe cabbage argues, are 'self-referential' because they 'seek to demonstrate the artistry inherent in the various acts they show and to relate that artistry to Cellini's own' The statuarys function in this way because cabbage presents Cellini as a natural philosopher intent upon the transformation of matter: molten ore to cast and zinc seawater to salt, blood to coral. flat the obdurate material of marble was described in his Treatise upon Sculpture as compounds of earth and water, 'reduc to stone by dint of means of the sun's rays'. Seen in this light, transformations from single material to another are the bring under rule as well as the process of facture, of Cellini's art.

The discussion of Cellini's Perseus, already" rehearsed in a justly lauded essay in Art Bulletin, is a prime example of of the like kind a self-referential Work. (4) cabbage returns to a previously lowering term, the due gorgoni di Medusa, that appears in an inventory of pieces of the remembrancer cast after the main figure. A more detailed inventory and a contemplate of period usage of the bound allow Cole to identify them not as extra Gorgons' heads (as Eugene Plon lacking the next to the first inventory, had in 1883) on the contrary as the two extrusions of life-current streaming or hanging from Medusa's sundered head. The ambiguity between streaming and hanging is the crucial point: as cabbage demonstrates with reference to the Ovidian story of Perseus' retake of Andromeda as well as Pliny's description of gorgonian corals, Medusa's liquid life-current was understood to colour the shrub-like corals, which solidified sole when cut. The sculpture's pronounced framing of the blood/corals, which cabbage likens to a colossal goldsmith's setting of precious stones, in move round references the casting of alloy of copper itself. In Cole's words, the 'medium becomes vivid: In its featured preciousness, and in its aptness to form, the vital current cure coral is as functional a token of and zinc as any Cellini could have offered'

The opening chapter upon the Saltcellar for Francis t matches the richness of Cole's discussion of the Perseus. (5) The sum of two units intertwined figures, identified by Cellini as Terra and Mare form 'an allegorical picture of a seashore, the interpenetration of sum of two units geological bodies'. Drawing together body s by Aristotle, Giorgius Agricola, Pliny, and Ovid, cabbage reads the iconography of the Saltcellar to be the making of salt: Neptune unbridles the waters, showed by the sea horses behind him, with his trident strikes the Earth, and she uncloses to allow an inflow of sea water. Salt extracted by the agency of allowing saltwater to penetrate land was typically bring togethered into a small boat, shallow enough to navigate the saltbed. The utensil on the Saltcellar designed to contain the condiment mimics this small boat in seeming to carry the salt away from the land.

cabbage further suggests that the making of salt bears directly upon the goldsmith's work of composing and recomposing metal. Various sixteenth hundred writers understood salt to be interchangeable with metal: the single could be used to generate the other. The transformations of materials continue in the enamel or coloured glass, covering abundant of the base of the Saltcellar, for glass was seen as a composite of earth and water, and salt as a primary constituent of glass. As cabbage summarises, Cellini crafted his Saltcellar using 'a collection of siblings (metal, glass, salt), a family of materials related [i]or[/i] part of to the other common parentage'.