Freestanding Sculpture Research Articles

Sharada Man Shrestha: The Artist Who Transforms Junks and Scraps into Aesthetic Objects

Contemporary Nepali artist Sharada Man Shrestha uses scraps, junks, leftovers and found objects in his sculptures, paintings and installations. He transforms junks and leftovers into beautiful and fine aesthetic objects. The scraps and junks in mess distract the pedestrians but his artworks provide aesthetic pleasure to the viewers. Use of such materials in art contributes to manage the junks and scraps, recycle the used things, save the resources, reduce the environmental pollution, create cultural identity of the artist and the nation and earn livelihood for the artist. Shrestha has created both figurative and abstract artworks using scraps like used bottles, tires, pipes, grinding wheels and thrown away motorcycle parts. He has created high relief, low relief and freestanding sculptures. Due to the presence of physical material in the works rather than the creation of illusion through colors and light, the creative works provide a sense of connectedness to the earth. This article explores the principles behind the use of junks and interprets the artworks of Sharada Man Shrestha and shows how junks get transformed into the aesthetic objects. Since the thesis statement is supported through the interpretation of artworks, it is qualitative research.

Measuring Abstraction Levels of Sculptural Objects

Abstract Freestanding sculpture can be scored for abstraction using order scales such as the three-rank ‘realistic,’ ‘mixed,’ and ‘abstract.’ Subjective but invaluable, the ranks support ordering but not arithmetic. Numeric limitations can be addressed via information-theoretic metrics that measure collective uncertainty about a sculpture; to this end 60 participants view 25 images of sculpture via an internet questionnaire. They (i) score each depicted object and (ii) type a caption stating what impression the object evokes. Captions for the image are simplified to their English simple subject, sorted into classification categories and counted. A metric converts an image’s categories and counts into viewers’ uncertainty. The investigation examines four-rank and five-rank scales plus metrics CC (category count), H (entropy) and EC ≡ 2H (equalized category count). Medians of scores or uncertainties reduce variability as appropriate. Comparisons of scores vs uncertainties show the two generally correlate well. Results also highlight inherent design tradeoffs. Scale/metric pairings affect both ranks (which should be statistically distinct) and rank/uncertainty correlations. Two good combinations are [four-rank; median CC] and [five-rank; median EC]. Metric CC is easy to compute and correlates slightly better than EC, although the latter supports five evenly separated ranks. Shifting focus to image scatterplots, the pair [four-rank median score; CC] yields a very strong correlation. Once uncertainties are linked to ranks to ‘calibrate’ them, one gets a quantitative sense of the rank order scale. The augmented framework offers the speed and ease of scoring along with valid numeric estimates of uncertainty unavailable from ranks alone.

Scientific investigation on the provenance of marble of free-standing sculptures from the archaeological museum of Kavala/northern Greece

Scientific investigation on the provenance of marble of free-standing sculptures from the archaeological museum of Kavala/northern Greece

Implications of Rock Art Aesthetics in Olmec Sculpture

AbstractThe development of freestanding stone sculpture by the Olmec people of Mesoamerica's Gulf lowlands has long been considered one of the defining artistic achievements of the Formative period. However, by the Middle Formative period the production of freestanding sculpture was often eclipsed by the contemporaneous creation of rock art outside the Gulf lowlands. In this article I argue that Gulf Olmec sculptors and audiences occasionally co-opted the aesthetic and ritual treatments of rock art at topographic shrines to construct and reinforce the sacred geographies of primary site cores. In so doing, Olmec elites converted the ideological power of the wild and the animate earth into a form of political capital.

Reflection of the Mystical Element through the Form of Sape’ Using Metal in Modern Sculpture

The work of art construes the state of the pontoon during the semester to be adjusted by the Sape. He created Sape's current state after awaking from his rest in the vessel. As a result, the arrangement and standing model were created, as well as the Sape' theme. Porpion and engkerabang blossom themes enhance Pua Kumbu. Aims of the study: So that the guidelines and goals are met, they must be stated. They are incorporating a mystical element into Sape's instrument through free-standing sculptures. Create a sculpture using plate metal and a plasma cut machine—a series of free-standing sculptures reflecting mystical elements. Keywords: Forms, Mystical, Sculpture, Sape’ eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2021. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v6iSI5.2938

Doing It His Way: Ademola Olugebefola's Long and Varied Career in the Arts

Doing It His Way:Ademola Olugebefola's Long and Varied Career in the Arts Nathaniel G. Nesmith (bio) Ademola Olugebefola (Bedwick Lyola Thomas) is an educator, activist, and multitalented artist. His versatility encompasses graphic design, illustrations, theater set designs, woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, serigraphs, oils, ink, charcoal and pencil drawing, free-standing sculptures, and murals, among other artistic forms. His works have been featured nationally and internationally in numerous exhibitions, galleries, museums, and universities. During the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he was politically active and became one of the founders of the Weusi Artist Collective. He later became a cofounder of the Dwyer Cultural Center in Harlem. Early in his career he was a musician, but ultimately he focused on the visual arts and has had a long career as a theater designer, where he collaborated with prominent Black directors, producers, and playwrights. His journey as a visual artist continues to this day. I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Ademola Olugebefola at his office in the Dwyer Cultural Center in Manhattan, July 1, 2020. ________ NGN: How did your training to be a visual artist begin? ADEMOLA OLUGEBEFOLA When I was eight or nine years old, we were living in Brooklyn on Grant Avenue—we had just immigrated from the US Virgin Islands—and, as I recall, I asked my mother, Golda, to draw me a horse. She did it effortlessly, and that began my journey. From there I took art classes in high school and junior high school, where I used to draw political cartoons. Then I developed an interest in fashion because my mother and my aunt made their own clothes, so I went to the High School of Fashion Industries. And, of course, there you had to be able to draw. After that, my teaching came out of the Weusi Artist Collective and Academy and the association with other artists, in particular Otto Neals. The Weusi was the gathering of artists from the New York area; we formed Nyumba Ya Sanaa Academy of African Arts and Studies. But after my mother did that horse, I drew horses for the next fifteen years. That was my initial training, and then there is a certain amount of natural affinity I had for drawing. [End Page 131] NGN: I understand that you were also a musician, and your involvement with music began in high school. You sang, played drums, and played the acoustic bass. How did this come about for you? AO: I grew up in Amsterdam Houses in Brooklyn, which is where a lot of Caribbean people landed in the 1940s, after World War II. There was always music in my house; my mother loved music; my father loved music. As I was growing up, rock-and-roll, rhythm and blues were very prominent. My singing in those days was part of the doo-wop—singing on the corner, singing in the hallway with my friends. I loved music, there was nothing more wonderful than when you hit a note and you heard that harmony; that was my high. Then I had a girlfriend, the mother of my oldest daughter, who was a jazz aficionado. When I listened to Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" and heard Paul Chambers, the world changed for me. I just loved his rhythm, his sense of melody, which really got me wanting to play the bass. Some of my colleagues and friends of that period formed a group—I'm going back to the mid-1950s now. One of the things that was very influential at that time, with all of us, was that I could look out my window from our apartment and see the Phipps Houses, where Thelonious Monk lived. I used to play with his cousin, ran track and played basketball with his nephew and niece. Thelonious Monk was a real impetus for us all to get into music. After we formed the quartet, I bought myself a bass and started teaching myself. Then later I studied bass with Attila Zoller and developed to a point where my group played professional gigs. That went on for a number of years. I would play...

The building at 18 Resavska street in Belgrade

The building at 18 Resavska Street is an important and representative work of architecture among the relatively few surviving residential buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century in Belgrade. Despite the lack of direct documentary evidence for the date of construction and the authorship of the design, it has been dated to a period between 1883 and the beginning of the 20th century, and attributed to the renowned architect Jovan Ilkic. With its developed spatial plan and high status interior and exterior it ranks among more important designs representing all stylistic features of the architecture of academicism of the late 19th and early 20th century. The concept of the street facade relies on the tenets of Italian High Renaissance and Mannerist architecture, with a special emphasis on the use of architectural ornament and freestanding sculpture.

The ideal of architecture as sculpted mass during the interwar period

British architecture of the period from 1910 to 1940 is often presented as providing an important platform for the commissioning and display of avant-garde British sculpture. Sculpture historian Benedict Read has written that in this period, architectural sculpture was the only safe venue for the work of more radical sculptors such as Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein.1 Penelope Curtis has pointed out that the direct-carving movement emerged from architectural sculpture.2 The architects of the buildings to which these sculptures were applied are generally portrayed as discerning connoisseurs, who provided space for avant-garde art against a neutral architectural background.3 However, this narrative misrepresents what actually occurred. As sculptors sought to redefine the relationship of freestanding sculpture to built form through the direct-carving movement and explorations of cubist ideas about the relationship of masses, many British architects adapted their design practices to explore these emerging ideas about form at a larger scale. Architects such as Charles Holden, Giles Gilbert Scott and Edwin Lutyens engaged with the sculptors' ideas directly in their own work, searching for ways that their buildings could be better bearers of sculptural form.Critics of the era, including Charles Marriott, C. H. Reilly, Roger Fry and William Lethaby, trumpeted that architecture was a three-dimensional art, just like sculpture. With the rise of language about form in the early twentieth century, they stressed that both sculptors and architects sought to compose pleasing mass in space and had much to learn from each other. Although they occasionally made reference to psychology and the social role of art, this was primarily an argument about aesthetics. For these critics, the best architecture was monumental and sculptural in both conception and form. The formal similarities between the work of sculptors and architects during this period are clear (figs. 1-2), but the implication has been that such formal relationships were mere responses to fashion.4 The reality is that there was intellectual interaction as well, a joint desire to develop an adjacent concept of architectural modernity.Charles Marriott explained the new relationship between architecture and sculpture in Modern English Architecture (1924). He applied Clive Bell's ideas of significant form directly to architecture, declaring that architecture had much to learn from Cubism and Post-Impressionism: 'The art of architecture,' he explained, 'is the creation of significant form in three dimensions.'5 Architecture should be designed three-dimensionally, rather than simply projected up from a two-dimensional plan. Building, like sculpture, was a matter of seeking the significant form in sympathy with materials. Truth to materials, Marriott explained, was an architectural, as well as a sculptural, concern.Marriot claimed that since architecture was a three-dimensional art, architects who failed to fully explore that three-dimensionality as a formal characteristic were failing to produce fully realized buildings. In Marriot's schema, architecture was a sort of higher form of sculpture - to the basic requirement of meeting functional needs was added the requirement of creating three-dimensional art on a monumental scale. Sculpture existed in inherent relation to architecture, serving to support the aesthetic and symbolic needs of its wider environment. Marriot felt that sculpture that was meant to stand on a pedestal as an object of independent contemplation, sculpture that did not respond to the formal and material characteristics of its surroundings, failed to achieve the essential requirement of all art to intensify the spirit of place.6 Instead, architects and sculptors should work together to create a coherently sculpted whole. This idea was related to Arts and Crafts ideas about the union of the arts, but it involved a concern with formal sculpting of masses that broke with existing traditions. …

아르카익기 대형 독립상의 성립과 명문

아르카익기 대형 독립상의 성립과 명문

Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory Michael Yonan Christiane Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011). Pp. 270. $99.95. Ignaz Günther is a sculptor well known in his native Germany, but entirely unfamiliar outside of it. His elegant rococo compositions grace the interiors of several important Bavarian ecclesiastical spaces, and a few have found their way to American and British museums. In general, though, his name remains little known; therefore, Christiane Hertel’s book is a most welcome addition to the critical literature on eighteenth-century art. Incredibly, this is the first English-language study on Bavarian rococo art of any kind since Karsten Harries’s The Bavarian Rococo Church, published nearly three decades ago. Hertel’s book is no introductory monograph, however. It is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and intricately argued investigation of Günther’s work which posits commonalities between religious art and the widespread retheorization of sculpture that took place in late eighteenth-century philosophy. As such, it is a novel and surprising text quite without parallel in the critical literature. Hertel’s intent is less historical or biographical than it is theoretical, and her book contributes as much to the study of eighteenth-century art theory as it does to that of art itself. She employs a comparative method that alternates works by Günther with lengthy explorations of diverse texts, including works by such prominent thinkers as Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder, as well as more obscure personages like the historian Lorenz Westenrieder (1748–1829). Hertel is particularly interested in passages concerned with self-reflective perception and sensory experience, since she sees in Günther’s sculptures a visual and material examination of these processes. Her overarching point is that Günther theorized self-reflectivity, interiority, and sensation in his art, making sculptures that fulfilled devotional expectations while also silently critiquing or confusing those expectations. Commentators have long characterized Günther’s sculptures as psychologically expressive, but according to Hertel that expressiveness is the result of a palpable self-awareness on Günther’s part. She relates this self-awareness to the Protestant critique of idolatry, to sculpture’s ritual functions in Catholic religious culture, and to the spiritual meaning accorded to sculpture in eighteenth-century German aesthetics. After a brief biographical overview, Hertel introduces the Pygmalion theme in order to examine an unusual etching on the subject by Günther. This image, [End Page 457] Hertel claims, complicates notions of high and low art through its odd iconography, and she sees the Pygmalion story as both a model for sculptural practice generally and a theorization of religious sculpture especially—a fascinating suggestion. Then comes a chapter on Günther’s relationship to late eighteenth-century Bavarian religious culture. Here Hertel interprets Günther through wide-ranging comparanda, including the baroque devotional machina, the theatrical tableau vivant, and Andrea Pozzo’s writings on perspective, connections that Hertel forges associatively and nonlinearly. Hertel uses this moment to build on and partially rethink Harries’s observations on the rococo church as theatrum sacrum. Chapter three examines Günther’s angels, their locations in churches, and the effects they have on viewers and worshippers. Hertel concentrates on the multiple commissions Günther produced for the Augustinian church at Diessen, which she sees as partially subversive and potentially unruly through subtle distinctions in gender, age, pose, and position. Chapter five discusses Günther’s Kerkerheiland, a small freestanding sculpture of the flagellated Christ made in imitation of the sculpture that inspired the Wieskirche, one of Bavaria’s most celebrated ecclesiastical spaces. Hertel engages in a close visual analysis of this work to claim that it unites popular piety and institutionally sanctioned Counter-Reformational reform. The next chapter turns to the sculptural groups Günther made for the Church of Saints Peter and Paul at Weyarn, unusual objects that were intended for procession as well as for stationary display. She relates these works to the idea of sculptural vivification, for which she adopts the term Zusammensicht, or synthetic sight, an...

Representing Medea on Roman Sarcophagi: Contemplating a Paradox

It is one thing to find Medea compelling, another to make her art, let alone funerary art. This article faces this complexity head on by examining Medea's visual identity within a sepulchral context. It interrogates her presence on Roman sarcophagi of the mid to late second century CE. The corpus is not insubstantial—nine intact relief panels plus further fragmentary pieces offer ample testament to Medea's presence in the funerary context. Beyond this sphere, Medea's emotionally charged legacy needs no introduction, and her characterisation—outsider, avenger, semi-divine sorceress, victim and murderer—is fleshed out by her capacity to fascinate and repel. Modern scholarship fans the flames, as she remains a popular subject for scholars of Latin and Greek literature, mythology and gender studies.In contrast, Medea's visual sphere of interest has attracted less in-depth attention. Recent studies have acknowledged the implications of her presence on pots and in freestanding sculpture, and most notably, wall painting is beginning to receive careful treatment. Yet art-historians have been more reluctant to confront Medea within the enclosed and predisposed funerary context. Traditional approaches to mythological sarcophagi more generally have favoured consolado as the dominant mode of commemoration, in which empathy and pothos are paramount and protagonists like Adonis and Endymion seen as positive exempla worthy of analogy and assimilation. The deceased is elevated by association with these figures (an association which is often underlined by the use of a portrait head) and the bereaved reassured by the implied interaction of mundane and heroic, mortal and divine. In this way, desire becomes a gloss for grief and loss is translated as yearning.

Unfinished Business: Re-viewing Medea in Roman Painting

This chapter examines the Medea of Roman painting. In some senses, this constitutes a crazy editorial decision: gems and sculpture, sarcophagi in particular, are a crucial part of the visual culture that pulls and pushes against text and theatre. But in other senses, a two-dimensional focus offers peculiar challenges that situate Medea firmly within the domestic sphere, in cubicula and peristyles; and yet also beyond this sphere. Unlike freestanding sculpture, which actively intervenes in the viewer's space, painting affords access to a parallel universe. Its figures are not cold to the touch like Pygmalion's statue. They are intangible, exciting different desires from those elicited by stone, desires which invite viewers to leave their world behind them; or at least to pause and take stock. In these ways, painting provides a commentary on everyday life—closer to performances on stage than to installation.Ancient writers, Ovid included, recognised this analogy between painting and theatre. In defending his work against charges of immorality, the exiled poet cites the genre of the mime, asking whether it is the stage that makes its adulterous content permissible and reminding Augustus that his poems had often ‘detained his eyes’, accompanied by dancing. He continues:scilicet in domibus nostris ut prisca uirorumartificis fulgent corpora picta manu,sic quae concubitus uarios uenerisque figurasexprimat, est aliquo parua tabella loco,utque sedet uultu fassus Telamonius iram,inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet,sic madidos siccat digitis Venus uda capillos,et modo maternis tecta uidetur aquis.

HELLENISTIC FREESTANDING SCULPTURE FROM THE ATHENIAN AGORA, PART 2: Demeter, Kore, and the Polykles Family

Author(s): Stewart, A | Abstract: This article, the second in a series publishing the Hellenistic free-standing sculpture from the Athenian Agora, collects four fragments of over-life-size female statues and two related heads. Dating to ca. 150 b.c., all but one of the related pieces are attributable to the Polykles family from Thorikos. The fragments are apparently from a cult group of Demeter and Kore, and they broaden our understanding of the technique, style, and iconography of the genre. They also contribute significantly to our knowledge of Hellenistic Athenian sculpture from Athens, illuminating the Athenian portion of the Polykles family's sculptural production, and they compare favorably with other mid-Hellenistic cult statues from elsewhere in Greece. © The American Sc hool of Classical S tudies at Athens.

Creative arts space: New life – free-standing sculpture

Creative arts space: New life – free-standing sculpture

IV Luxury Items

The uneven survival of material evidence from Greek antiquity has tended to guide interest and research towards the diferent forms and functions of sculpture (Chapters II and III) and of vase-painting (Chapters V and VI). They have been preserved in such numbers that, although we have only a fraction of the total output, we can study the ways in which they developed over the centuries against the social, economic, and political background and in the diferent parts of the Greek world. This has encouraged a tendency towards positivism and has had the unfortunate outcome of considering them as the exclusive elements of Greek art, with a concomitant emphasis on the aspects of restraint, simplicity, and so forth that were highlighted by the Neoclassical attitudes to Greek art that emerged in the eighteenth century. This approach has led scholars to demean the more lavish products that, by the very nature of their intrinsic value, have failed to survive in any numbers – gold, silver, ivory, and the like. Recent excavations, particularly those in cemeteries situated in the outlying areas of the Greek world and in the regions bordering on ancient Greece, have brought to light some of those expensive objects that are now missing from the Greek heartlands. Meanwhile, investigations into the more flamboyant aspects of Greek art have shown that buildings and architectural and freestanding sculpture were lavishly coloured. A nineteenth-century drawing by Donaldson shows coloured glass beads set into a column capital of the Erechtheion (Figure 21).

III Architectural Sculpture

The erection of a building – whether temple, treasury, colonnade, or theatre – argues purpose, means, advance planning, and commitment over many years. The number of people involved in any communal project, from sponsors (whether states, individuals, or sanctuary officials) to designers, architects, masons, and sculptors, was enormous. In studying architectural sculpture, we are face to face with originals, usually found in context, with some closely dated on the basis of inscriptions and references in written texts; although the later writers who held free-standing sculpture in such high regard had little to say about architectural compositions. The embellishment was usually added to religious buildings: the temples and treasuries that were erected in local and Panhellenic sanctuaries. The subjects chosen were mainly myths, with themes repeated down the centuries (Battles of the Gods versus the Giants, and Greeks versus Amazons, Centaurs, or Trojans) – they became the default choice, the stock-in-trade, and raise the question of the extent to which there was indeed any specific programmatic intent or local significance behind these mythical encounters. Who chose the subjects? With what purpose? To instruct, to underline social cohesion, to express political identity, to demonstrate superiority? Who were the viewers the designers had in mind? As the brightly coloured sculptures were integral to the building and came to be placed high above the heads of viewers, visitors, and pilgrims, they were obviously intended to take notice of them. Can we know what their reactions were and how deep their understanding was? Euripides in his tragedy Ion (412 BC) presents a chorus of Athenian women on their first visit to Delphi (vv. 184–218). They look up at the sculptures on the outside of the Apollo temple and express wonder and excitement at the figures they can recognize: Herakles, Pegasos, the battle of the Gods and the Giants, and particularly their own patron goddess, Athena. Euripides fits their reactions to their status – they are just glad to identify their favourites, and delight, as it were, at meeting old friends.

TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE PETROGRAPHIC DATABASE OF KHMER STONE MATERIALS-KOH KER STYLE SCULPTURE

A comprehensive quantitative petrographic database of sandstones used by the Khmers for sculptural purposes would be a helpful tool for archaeologists, museum curators and others interested in pursuing research on early stone usage, geological source and provenance. Towards that end, this paper presents quantitative petrographic analysis of stone materials used in the production of some free-standing sculptures and architectural elements in the Koh Ker style of the 10th century from the collections of the National Museum of Cambodia and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These materials are compared to samples from the quarry of Thmâ Anlong near the foothills of the Phnom Kulen, Sieam Reap province. Primary and secondary detrital modes and key grain-size parameters are used to identify three sandstone types. The free-standing sculptures are carved from feldspathic arenite and feldspato-lithic to litho-feldspathic arenite. Finely carved lintels are worked from a quartz arenite, which is significantly richer in quartz grains and of a finer grain size. The geological source of the two other lithotypes will have to await detailed geological survey of the Koh Ker area accompanied by petrographic study of selected samples from documented quarries. The significance and potentiality of quantitative petrographic study of Khmer stone materials are shown in supporting and integrating archaeological investigations in South-East Asia.

Imperial Icon: The Pergamon Altar in Wilhelminian Germany

In August 1882, Jacob Burckhardt traveled to Berlin to see for himself the latest trophy of Imperial German archaeology, the remarkable external frieze of the great altar at Pergamon, parts of which had only recently been laid out for public exhibition. Burckhardt had already obtained photographs of the frieze and had been impressed, but coming face to face with it bowled him over. “This discovery,” he wrote to a Basel friend from his hotel in Berlin, “has shattered the systems of the archaeologists and tumbled an entire pseudo-aesthetics to the ground. . . . Since we have come into possession of these terrifyingly glorious spectacles [‘spectacles’ is the best translation I could find for Burckhardt’s striking ‘Evenements’] everything that has been written about the emotional power of the Laocoon is for the wastebasket. Try to imagine a frieze . . . as of now, well over 200 feet long; 8-foot tall gods locked in struggle with giants and protruding so far out from their background that they practically constitute free-standing sculptures; a scene of biting, battering, chopping, crushing, involving also powerful dogs and lions, and with the snake-like tail-ends of many of the giants forming into heads that bite the gods in the back and leg—all this taking place sans ombre de generosite [relentlessly and unforgivingly]. The artistry and style . . . such as to make Phidias tremble on his throne”1 (fig. 1; for additional illustrations, see

Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence

Donatello's bronze David and Judith and Holofernes should be considered a de facto pair. As recently confirmed, they were the only two modern freestanding sculptures displayed in the outdoor spaces of the Medici Palace from about 1464–66 to 1495. The related discovery of an inscription praising David as a tyrant slayer accords with a similar inscription once on the Judith and Holofernes. This new evidence is combined with a demonstration of how the two sculptures evoke John of Salisbury's writings and the Athenian statues known as the Tyrannicides to establish the Medici as defenders of Florentine liberty.

Le Problème de l’ornement chez Cellini : théorie, iconographie et humanisme

This essay attempts to answer three intimately connected and fundamental questions regarding the art of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71). Is a coherent theory of the arts discernible in his literary and plastic oeuvre? Further, what place is accorded ornament in this theory? And, finally, what philosophical positions are inherent in Cellini’s largely implicit theory of the arts? The Cellinian art theory which emerges from his apparently silent artworks, his seemingly narrative autobiography, and his predominantly empirical treatises provides an alternative to the Vasarian model promulgated in Cinquecento Florence and nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history. Downplaying the role of disegno and of spiritualizing neo-platonism, Cellini insists on an “ornamental” aesthetic that is grounded not so much in the visions and nightmares of a divinely inspired artistic imagination as in the experience and action of a willfol and all-too-human master goldsmith and sculptor. His theory is gendered and hierarchical, imposing male mastery on female matter, setting free-standing sculpture and goldsmithery at the top of a pyramid of the arts with drawing and painting relegated to its base.