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Some years ago, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin noticed that certain Italian works of art had remained in the possession of their makers throughout their lives. They came from a time, the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when paintings and sculptures were regularly commissioned, had a particular destination, and were contracted for at a set price of which a portion was paid before work began. They all were finished, and in some cases attempts at purchase had been refused; a number were in the artist's studio after his death. All seemed to have been made, kept, and cherished for personal reasons.
Knowing that the project was almost entirely hypothetical (because undocumented), the author undertook the task of grouping them together in order to ferret out the various circumstances that might have motivated each case. The results published here suggest a previously unidentified class of objects that reveals a new aspect of the emerging self-consciousness of the artist in the Italian Renaissance.
List of Illustrations i
Preface ix
Chapter I 'Pre-Oration': The Historical Condition 1
Peroration: Artists' Tombs 14
Chapter II Lorenzo Ghiberti and the Expressive Self 16
Peroration: Artists' Collections and the Extended Self 31
Chapter III Piero della Francesca and the Joyful Self 49
Chapter IV Mantegna and the Consolable Self 84
Chapter V Michelangelo and the Self-conscious Self 114
Peroration: Botticelli and the Political Self 141
Chapter VI Giovanni Bellini and the Surviving Self 143
Titian and the Satisfied Self 175
Chapter VII Bernini and the Truthful Self 179
'Post-Oration': The Artist as Such 192
Bibliography 199
Index 209
Overview
Some years ago, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin noticed that certain Italian works of art had remained in the possession of their makers throughout their lives. They came from a time, the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when paintings and sculptures were regularly commissioned, had a particular destination, and were contracted for at a set price of which a portion was paid before work began. They all were finished, and in some cases attempts at purchase had been refused; a number were in the artist's studio...