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One of four books nominated for CAA’s Morey Award, Michael W. Cole’s Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence is a group portrait of three late Cinquecento sculptors. They are most often compared to their forerunner Michelangelo, but were just as influenced by each other, Cole writes: Early writers make it clear that sculptors and their partisans mocked one another’s shortcomings, publicly … [M]ost vicious of all was the sculptor Michelangelo Naccherino’s denunciation of Giambologna, his former teacher, to the Inquisition in 1589 … We can only assume that artists so intent on undermining one another would also have paid close attention to the work their rivals produced.
Cole also puts the sculptors’ efforts into a larger context, in a belated attempt to bring T.J. Clark’s methods to the study of early modern Italian art, “to see the politics in pictures,” and specifically to ask how “shared ambitions led sculptors to become political actors”: The sculptors worked primarily for a single individual, but the things they made addressed a broader public … The indifference they could show to any kind of market must have seemed a liberation as much as a limitation. This is not to say, however, that the Medici dukes deserve the adulation some recent fans of their collections have offered them. These were men who crushed the residual early republics of Europe, who unhesitatingly jailed enemies or disposessed them of home and property, and who invaded and colonized foreign territories, strategically using sculpture along the way. Exhibitions celebrating the dukes’ “treasures” and their “magnificence” have sometimes helped to render invisible these rulers’ brutality …
Cole evokes a time in which artists and patrons were outwardly pious but often much more interested in fame and power than the saints they were bronzing: “Giambologna, who may never have gone to mass or said confession … devoted much of his late career to the design and execution of chapels.” Those chapels bore witness not just to Giambologna’s genius but also to the godless score-settling of his patrons and their families. Cosimo de Medici (and his uncle, the Cardinal Giovanni Salviati) expelled the Dominicans from their own church, San Marco, flatly stating “San Marco was founded and built by my house and was mine, and I could dispose of it as my own possession and without license from His Holiness or any other person.” Cole sees parallels between the late Cinquecento and today: The artists this book concerns were working at the moment that the gallery was just beginning to take shape, the moment when it was just beginning to be possible for an artist to think of his or her paintings and sculptures as autonomous things. Not accidentally, it was also the moment when “Italian” art was becoming truly European, as the impact of travelers from abroad became unavoidable and as Italy’s products began in numbers to find homes well beyond the peninsula’s shores. It is a moment that suits our own, our identification of the modern with the cosmopolitan. Yet what we lose with our comparative, microscopic gaze is the experience of a place.
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