Since antiquity, the use of a restricted colour palette has counted as proof of great artistic mastery in painting. Among the best-known examples are Pliny’s (23/24–79 CE) praise of Apelles for his use of the four-colour palette, as well as Zeuxis (late 5th–4th century BC), who painted all in white (‘pinxit et monochromata ex albo’).1 In the same vein as this antique tradition, Erasmus (1466–1536), writing in his De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione, 1528, praised Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) outstanding achievements in black-and-white printmaking:
What does he not express in monochrome, that is by black lines? Shade, light, radiance, projections, depressions […] He even depicts what cannot be depicted: fire; rays of light; thunderstorms; sheet lightning; thunderbolts; or even, as the phrase goes, the clouds upon a wall; characters and emotions – in fine, the whole mind of man as it shines forth from the appearance of the body, and almost the very voice. These things he places before our eyes by the most felicitous lines, black ones at that, in such a manner that, were you to spread on pigments, you would injure the work. And is it not more wonderful to accomplish without the blandishment of colours what Apelles accomplished only with their aid?2
The more minimal the artistic means, the greater the artist’s effort, and the more elaborate the artwork becomes. While the artist’s primary aim was a mimesis of life and nature that looked deceptively real, restricting the use of colour introduced what I shall call a ‘mimetic gap’.3 This mimetic gap was a necessary condition for marking out the result as a highly sophisticated, artificially created – and hence fictitious – artwork. Hence, the reduction of colour, slightly but significantly, shifts the focus: from a deceptive mimesis, trying to reveal its creative process, to a concept of mimesis unveiling, while demonstrating itself as an artistic creation instead.4 However, this formal principle applies rather more in painting and the graphic arts than it does in sculpture, whose three-dimensional materiality, demanding less intellectual effort, approximates it closer to nature. As Kathleen Weil-Garris (1982, 66) puts it, ‘another antique-derived concept [is] that sculpture and, a forteriori, sculptors, were inferior intellectually and socially because their art inherently depends on materials and on manual labor.’ The medium’s immediacy has historically been emphasised by the use of polychromy. Up to the fifteenth century, colours were normally added to sculpture. As Cecilie Brøns of the Tracking Colour Project frames it:
White marble has generally been considered a typical image of antiquity. However, the lack of colour has no relation to ancient aesthetics. In fact, antiquity cultivated a veritable wealth of colours, but after centuries of deterioration, very little paint remains on the artefacts, giving rise to the mistaken notion of white marble as a classical ideal.5
Three-dimensional, lifelike, polychrome sculptures were not only close to nature, but also to life: iconoclasts feared the conflation of sacred archetypes with their sculptural representations, while in the famous paragone debates over the relative standing of painting and sculpture, the latter was often seen as inferior on account of the supposedly lower intellectual effort it demanded.6
In what follows, I want to focus on the late fifteenth century as a turning point when sculptors reduced or abandoned colour, and the medium’s material and traces of the artist’s tools came to be considered the genuine language of sculpture.7 The restriction of colours in painting and graphic arts inevitably produced a degree of material abstraction which identified the painted or drawn product as a fictional one. Doing the same in sculpture usually revealed the material’s natural colour, and the viewer’s eye is inevitably drawn to the artistically worked material as well as the traces of artistic labour inscribed on it. The emphasis on artistic work as a fictitious product achieved in this way could be further increased when artists veiled the material being used by evoking different chromatic qualities on its surface. In many cases, a wide range of pigments and dyes was added to the varnish covering sculptures, so as to produce a delicate, unifying coat.8 Artists discovered the possibilities of adjusting the material’s chromatic values, either by intensifying its natural colour and language, or by seemingly transforming it into an entirely different material: sandstone and clay into marble and alabaster, wood into stone and bronze. Instead of neglecting sculpture’s materials, these techniques of apparent material transformation closely corresponded to the medium’s genuine language, that is its materiality (Dümpelmann 2018, esp. 322–328). As palpable as these material allusions may have been, a certain mimetic gap was always necessary for any artist who wanted his work to be understood not as an imitation of nature, but primarily as an artistic product, consciously displaying the skills and means that had brought it into being. Instead of aiming at a material mimesis in the sense of an equivalent substitute, artists therefore created material fictions. These fictitious results left the beholder suspended between matter and representation. Between two realities, artworks created a specific reality of their own. Did these forms of colour limitation in sculpture translate the formal principle of reduced artistic means, already articulated in monochrome and restricted colour painting, into the vernacular practice of sculptors? Lastly, did this move introduce intellectual effort and fictitiousness into the domain of sculpture, so often neglected in written art theory?
1 The Appreciation of Non-Polychrome Sculpture in Early Modern Art Theory
From the early sixteenth century onwards, numerous records attest to a growing appreciation for the qualities of the material used in sculpture, as the use of what had been an indispensable coating of colour came to be reduced or abandoned. One of the most important of such discussions is Giorgio Vasari’s (1511–1574) chapter on woodcarving from his Introduzione alle tre arti del disegno dell architettura, della scultura e della pittura (‘Introduction to the three arts of design, architecture, sculpture, and painting’), first published in 1550. In the first part, Vasari, an architect, painter, and art historian, surveys the material and techniques used in woodcarving. In the second, he focuses on the famous sculpture of St. Roch (fig. 7.1), carved around 1520 for the Florentine church SS. Annunziata by the South German woodcarver and stone sculptor Veit Stoss (c.1447–1533), analysing the artistic criteria that the sculpture fulfilled, and accounting for its advanced state of perfection and refinement.9 Deeming it no less than a miracolo di legno (miracle in wood), Vasari uses the figure of St. Roch – the only wooden sculpture produced north of the Alps to be mentioned in his Vite or lives of artists – as a perfect exemplar to demonstrate ‘How figures in Wood are executed and […] what sort of Wood is best for the purpose’.10 Writing of one of the material’s main characteristics, Vasari emphasises that wood could never adopt the ‘flesh-like appearance and softness […] that can be given to metal and to marble, and to the sculptured objects that we see in stucco, wax or clay’. In consequence, he advises the use of limewood, which was relatively soft compared to other sorts of wood used for sculpture, such as oak. Limewood was easier for the sculptor to handle, and, according to Vasari, it more ‘readily obeys the rasp and chisel’.11 A few lines later, we read how ‘With exquisite carving he [Veit Stoss] fashioned the soft and undercut draperies that clothe it, cut almost to the thinness of paper and with a beautiful flow in the order of the folds, so that one cannot see anything more marvellous.’12 Veit Stoss’s ability to bring the appearance of softness into being in his St. Roch (and to do so with such refinement) is to count as proof that he had accomplished what had earlier been assumed to be impossible, and such levels of skill are here held up as a principal criterion of perfect woodcarving. Vasari concludes – wrongly attributing the sculpture of St. Roch to the ‘Frenchman, Maestro Janni’ – that ‘in order that the excellence of the artist may be seen in all its parts, the figure has been preserved up to our time in the church of the Annunziata at Florence, beneath the pulpit, free from any covering of colour or painting, in its own natural colour of wood and with only the finish and perfection that Maestro Janni gave it, beautiful beyond all other figures carved in wood.’13 In a similar manner, Vincenzo Borghini (1515–1580), who supposedly suggested the choice of St. Roch as a perfect exemplar to Vasari for his introduction, stated in his 1564 Selva di notizie that the whole power and strength of a sculpture is bestowed by the carving knife, and if any clumsy fellow were to use colour just anyhow, he would betray the very nature of the art of sculpture.14
Veit Stoss, St. Roch, limewood, c.1520, height: 180 cm.
SS Annunziata, Florence
Slightly earlier records from Northern Europe convey a similar appreciation for non-polychrome sculpture. One example is a 1525 entry in the yearbook of Nürnberg’s Carmelite monastery (begun in 1520), referring to the so-called Bamberg altarpiece (fig. 7.2) recorded by the commissioner, the Prior of the monastery and Andreas Stoss (c.1477–1540), Veit Stoss’s son. This passage justifies the explicit prohibition of polychrome painting in succinct terms: every art connoisseur would know why colour was not used on carved wooden sculpture.
Veit Stoss, so-called Bamberg altarpiece, limewood c.1520–1523, 355 cm × 292 cm
Formerly Carmelite church, Nürnberg, now in Bamberg Cathedral
Let no Prior lightly have it painted with colours: every master skilled in the art will tell him why. Note: the altarpiece is to be opened only on at the festivals of the Nativity, Easter, Pentecost and the two days following. Ascension, Trinity, All Saints, Epiphany, Corpus Christi, the Dedication of the Convent’s Church, and all festivals of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On the day of a festival it is to be closed straight after second Vespers. Twice every year it is to be cleaned. And there are not to be large lights on the altar, on account of the smoke: two small wax candles are enough, and any others should be placed away from the altar.15
In 1532, the humanist Helius Eobanus Hessus (1488–1540) described the ambry carved by the Nürnberg sculptor and master-builder Adam Kraft (c.1455–1509) for the church of St. Lorenz in Nürnberg (fig. 7.3, a & b) in keeping with the impression of softness described by Vasari, marvelling: ‘[It seems as if] it would be easy to cast it, model it or flex it this way or that – so isn’t it even more admirable that it should actually be hard to break the marble / since it appears as if one should be able to bend it by hand?’16 Within the seeming softness of the stone that so obediently followed Adam Kraft’s hands, this piece of art gives the impression that the laws of nature might be disregarded. The abandonment of colour appears to be a precondition for rendering the carving tools’ traces perceptible on the sculpture’s surface. In conjunction with this, both Vasari and Eobanus Hessus use a metaphorical language – alluding to paper, flesh, or alien media and techniques – to describe the realisation of artistic ideas that seemingly contradict the material’s true physical laws. The evocation of softness is considered a proof of artistic virtuosity, this highly skilled transformation of nature staging the artist’s effort as mastery of the material. Where art theory used this metaphorical language as a kind of tool, to describe something that tends to escape description, artists at that time were in fact effecting what appeared to be material transformations – practices that might be understood as sculpted art theory. These forms of designated fictitiousness in sculpture can widely be observed north of the Alps as well, and allowed sandstone or clay and wood to appear as alabaster and marble, or wood to appear as bronze. These transformations have in common that a seemingly poorer, cheaper material is transformed (and hence sublimed?) into a more precious one. Perhaps this material transformation might therefore be characterised, as postulated by Alberti, Vasari and Pomponius Gauricus (c.1482–1528/1530), in terms of a hierarchy of materials, within which bronze and marble ranked above the popular materials of wood and terracotta.17 At the same time, different materials possessed their own associations with particular artistic traditions. Weil-Garris points out that, ‘[S]ince surviving ancient statues were marble, not bronze, marble itself became a metaphor of the antique’, while the German-speaking lands were a centre of excellent woodcarving at this time, and the use of (lime)wood ‘has been taken to distinguish German renaissance sculpture.’18 Against the background of these national connotations and traditions associated with Renaissance sculptor’s materials and techniques, one of the central questions to be examined is whether the materials applied or evoked by the artists can be associated with these values – or if the main concern lay elsewhere.
Adam Kraft, ambry, sandstone, iron framework, glue-bonded rock flour, limewood, 1493–1496, height: 2000 cm
Nürnberg, St. Lorenz
2 ‘Woe to the Ancients’ – Fictitious Marble Monuments South of the Alps
South of the Alps, one of the first known examples of apparently transformed sandstone is the ‘Cavalcanti Annunciation’ (figs. 7.4, a & b) by the Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donatello (c.1386–1466), commissioned by the Cavalcanti family for the Florentine church of Santa Croce, and dated around 1435.19 It is made of local grey sandstone, pietra serena, with the angels at the summit modelled in terracotta. Partial gilding of the garments, the hair, the angel’s wings, and the architectural decor adds highlights that may seem unusual in conjunction with the pietra serena’s greyish surface. This rather soft, slightly glittering sandstone, ‘which was widely used in Florentine architecture in the Renaissance, was an unusual choice for a monument of this kind, during a period when white marble was regarded as the ideal material because of its intrinsic value, its aesthetic beauty, its echoes of works from classical antiquity and, not least, its availability’ (Vaccari 2003, 21). When referring to the work, Vasari applied the term pietra di macigno, a name in common use for pietra serena at that time: ‘but what made [Donatello] known for who he was and what gave him a name was an Annunciation in grey stone, which was placed close to the altar of the Chapel of the Cavalcanti, in the Church of S. Croce in Florence’.20 The choice of this unusual, to some extent humble and unworthy, material actually in use for architecture, and its decorative elements, stands ‘in clear contrast with the tension inherent in this work, the idealised beauty of which comes so close to classical sculptural prototypes and which therefore should have demanded nothing less than the use of brilliant white marble’ (Vaccari 2003, 22). Vasari must have been aware of this tension, even though the effect was softened by adding white covering to the stone’s surface; as analysis has shown,
Donatello, Cavalcanti-Annunciation, pietra serena (Florentine grey sandstone) and terracotta, partly gilded, c.1434, 218 cm × 168 cm
Florence, S. Croce
the tabernacle of Santa Croce was glazed from the beginning in white with gold highlights. This is further demonstrated by the fact that no traces of atmospheric residue were found on the stone, indicating a long time between the completion of the work and its colouring. Moreover, the exact consistency between the results of stratigraphic analysis of the parts in stone and those in terracotta make it clear that all parts of the tabernacle received the same treatment through the centuries. It is now fairly clear that the intention was to harmonise two different materials, both humble.21
One of Donatello’s intentions was certainly to harmonise terracotta and pietra serena. However, the reason why he did not execute the Cavalcanti Annunciation in marble – as contemporary beholders would have expected for such an ambitious assignment – but intentionally chose inferior material has not yet been satisfactorily answered by art historians.22 Taking a closer look at the ‘classical sculptural prototypes’ to which Donatello was alluding, Ulrich Pfisterer has pointed out that Donatello’s Mary clearly references the antique model of a Venus pudica, both in posture and gesture.23 The fact that Donatello did not depict a particular moment of the events, but rather tried to evoke both beginning and end of the story through the bearing of the angel and Mary, is a striking testimony to the fact that sculpture is able to visibile parlare, to stage the depicted scene as a visible speech. With this, Donatello not only transformed a pagan antique prototype, dressed in antique style, into Christian fifteenth century art, but also reflected – and strengthened – this process of transformation in respect of materiality. Making the pietra serena obviously look like marble, while definitely not working in marble, allowed Donatello to make it unmistakably clear that his aim was in no sense to imitate or copy antiquity, but rather to transform it into his own specific language: to give an idea of the antique model to which he was alluding. He achieved this by following the concept of reduced artistic means, itself derived from antiquity, that is, by working in a humble, inferior material. The painted stone and terracotta needed to remain visible to a certain extent underneath the white coat, as a necessary condition for making the fictitiousness perceptible in and of itself, perfectly articulating that notion of transformation as an artistic idea, an artistic fiction that was realised in sculpture. In an apparent parallel to Alberti’s instruction not to paint gold with gold, but rather to create the effect of gold with colours, Donatello evoked all the qualities and effects of an antique marble monument in his sculpture, without its being either antique or sculpted of marble.24 By this means, he presented himself as a true master sculptor of transformation, inviting the beholder not to marvel at the sculptures’ precious material, but rather at the sculptor’s exquisite skill in sculpting.25 It is worth recalling that the depicted scene’s content per se is also one of transformation: it concerns the transformation of God’s word into flesh, incorporating both the human and divine nature of God.26 Against this background, the mutual correspondences between subject, style, and material could hardly be more dense and prolific.
Donatello’s fictitious marble monument is to be understood as embedded in ‘a series of works produced in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna between the third and fourth decade of the fifteenth century, in which a use of the restricted range of colours – white, blue, gold – seems mutually complementary to stone, terracotta or marble sculpture’ (Vaccari 2003, 27). In the next century, Antonio Begarelli (c.1499–1565), from a family of potters, would become one of the leading artists in expressive Emilian tableau sculpture – ‘staged arrangements of veristically painted life-sized figures, done in terracotta or in mixed “non-precious” materials of other kinds’. He has been depicted by Kathleen Weil-Garris (1982, 62–71) as vindicating this popular tradition and preventing it from being banished from high sculpture. Based on the false belief that ancient sculpture was white, Michelangelo (1475–1564) and others of his close circle reinforced the aforementioned hierarchy of materials, focusing especially on marble as a metaphor for the antique. This was one possible answer to the dominant vision at that time of Cinquecento art as pictorial rather than sculptural, invoking the inferior position of sculptors and their manual labour mentioned above. Another answer was to make tableau sculpture ‘pictorial’ in a new sense, and this was the answer articulated in Begarelli’s terracotta work (fig. 7.5) – praised by none other than Michelangelo himself, who, according to Vasari (1550), proclaimed: ‘were this clay to become marble, woe to the ancients!’ It was not only for the articulation of exalted pathos in group sculpture, but especially for the characteristic white coat of colour on Begarelli’s terracotta sculpture, that Michelangelo celebrated Begarelli’s modelled pictorial fictions.27 From his first documented work onwards, the so-called Madonna di piazza (fig. 7.6), executed in 1522 for a niche in the facade of the Palazzo Communale in Modena, Begarelli made use of this unifying white coat of colour.28 The community of Modena had launched an open competition for a sculpture, preferably carved from Carrara marble, because, as two counsellors explained, terracotta, although cheaper, would be less durable and more in need of repair.29 The young and still unknown Begarelli (quidam adulescens de domo) did not respond by producing a conventional bozzetto (a small-scale model), but with a finished, larger-than-life Madonna, measuring 190 cm in height, modelled in clay. This Madonna, praised as most beautiful, good (pulcherrima, bona), and far less costly (multo minor impensa), was chosen by the committee. In light of the original commission and the prominence of the setting, Begarelli was instructed to make it look like marble (et eam faciet que de marmore videbitur esse) and to guarantee its protection from wind and water for two years.30 The fact that the community of Modena had originally besought a marble sculpture, but then opted for Begarelli’s Madonna modelled in clay, could hardly be a better demonstration of the great success that the artist’s characteristically whitened terracotta sculpture had right from the start. Just like Donatello, Begarelli seemingly transformed a humble, inferior material – here clay – into marble as superior substance; and just like Donatello, Begarelli applied it in conjunction with a specific stylistic mode: in his case an emphasised pathos, to prove sculpture’s ability to depict historiae, an ability which was traditionally restricted to painting. Taken in tandem with the Cavalcanti Annunciation, one might wonder whether this material transformation should be understood as an attempt to compensate for clay’s inferior position in tableau sculpture as a material ‘reserved for the plebs’. Begarelli’s modelled pictorial fictions certainly strengthened the position of Emilian tableau sculpture. The primary function of his material transformation was not to upgrade the material itself, but rather to emphasise the artist’s work. The reduction of artistic means was a necessary condition for leading the beholder to worship the artistic opus, not its materia. As Kathleen Weil-Garris (1982, 66–69) has pointed out, this shift of emphasis may be considered as effected ‘under the aegis of Raphael’s school’, when ‘the artistic idea became paramount and the preciousness of material was no longer essential to sculpture.’
Antonio Begarelli, Bust of Christ, terracotta, c.1530, 52 cm × 52 cm
Berlin, Bode-Museum
Antonio Begarelli, so-called Madonna di piazza, terracotta, 1522, height: 190 cm
Modena, Museo Civico d ’Arte
Both Donatello and Begarelli benefited from their local origins and traditions: Donatello increased the value of the local Florentine material pietra serena, and Begarelli, due to his family background, possessed the necessary skills that enabled him to elevate modelled clay to the same level as sculpted marble. Still, their developed forms of material mimesis do not primarily focus on material values, but rather demonstrate a gradual shift of attention from the applied material to the represented idea. A glance at parallel forms of material mimesis north of the Alps may shed light on the techniques developed by Northern sculptors.
3 Marble and Alabaster Evoking Monuments in the North
Adam Kraft’s steeply rising ambry for the Nürnberg St. Lorenz church (fig. 7.3, a & b) appears to surmount the church’s vaulting; the slender artwork’s summit is forced to curl due to its monumental size. Its delicate ornamentation oscillates between architectural and vegetal forms, while it is hard to tell at first glance of what this seemingly organic artwork is made. Even though Eobanus Hessus, praising the ambry in 1532, repeatedly described Adam Kraft’s ambry as made of marble (‘There it stands in white marble’), it was in fact sculpted of sandstone, its core and the delicate covings supported by an iron framework encased in rock flour bonded with glue.31 A wooden statue of Christ placed on the ambry’s first level was covered by a coat of whitish colour to disguise its actual substance. This so-called unifying stone colour (Steinfarb) was applied to the whole object – records indicate that it was renewed during Adam Kraft’s lifetime, since his wife received a sum of money for grinding rock flour.32 Partial polychrome painted faces, and landscape backgrounds made it even more difficult to decipher this oscillating, to some extent supernatural, materiality – whether Eobanus Hessus really believed in its marble substance, whether this is something he wanted to see, or whether referring to this material was a way for him to praise the artwork’s virtuosity, are questions that cannot readily be answered today. Just fifteen years later, we learn in Johann Neudörfer’s (1497–1563) Nachrichten von Künstlern und Werkleuten (1547) that Adam Kraft ‘was famous and skilled at softening and casting hard stones. He would have moulds made in which he mixed lime with small ground stones, then fired it, and painted it with “stone colour”; however, all the twisted curvatures of this workpiece are hollow on the inside, and supported by iron bars. Otherwise they would not stay as they are’.33 When Neudörfer first attributes quasi-alchemical knowledge to Kraft, as a master skilled at softening and casting hard stones, and then rather pragmatically unveils the construction methods of this supernatural artwork, his words seem to reflect the fact that, technical knowledge notwithstanding, the impression of this supernatural artwork leaves the beholder suspended between its actual composition and its appearance (Oellermann 2002, 132). Eobanus Hessus expressed this by referring to Kraft’s ambry as a living organism: ‘One believes the master himself could have animated the stones’.34 Despite everything, the very essence of this delicate artwork cannot be translated into spoken language. Hessus concludes: ‘All that remains concerning this work, it is impossible for me to report; for the muse, in admiring the splendour of this work, has forsaken me.’35
The Creglingen altarpiece (fig. 7.7) by the woodcarver and stone sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider (ca. 1460–1531) kept scholars busy with the eye-catching whiteness of its limewood, which contrasted with the framework’s reddish fir.36 It may count as one of his most delicate works, in view of the highly elaborate surface, richly adorned with decorative elements. However, the question as to whether the altarpiece was originally polychrome, or at least intended to be polychrome, remains anything but resolved. Two serious paint strippings, one to remove a dark monochrome, oil emulsion varnish, the second to remove a white coat of paint, were often referred to as a reason for this open question.37 Discussing the Münnerstadt altarpiece, Eike Oellermann (2008, 216–218) states that even repeated treatments with acid would not have completely destroyed the original traces of colour, and concludes that, in a technical sense, there is nothing to support the surface of the Creglingen altarpiece originally having been painted. Referring to the restless, broken patterns of the carved drapery, which turn in upon themselves and out again, Oellermann suggests that polychrome painting would indeed have helped to clarify these artificially complicated forms. Furthermore, in considering some surprisingly “empty” spaces, such as the strangely emphasised gap between the two apostles in the middle scene, or the blank letter presented by the archangel to Virgin Mary, Oellermann sees the punchworks’ delicate finish standing in a curious opposition to these seemingly unfinished parts, which, again, colour would have clarified. Against the technical result, but following the natural logic of the artwork, Oellermann, then, suggests that the sculpted wood was originally polychrome, but does not venture into any details as to what it may have looked like. I suggest, on the contrary, that the Creglingen altarpiece was designed by Riemenschneider without any coating on the whitish limewood apart from partial gilding, with the aim of evoking precious alabaster or marble. Unlike Donatello, Begarelli and Kraft, Riemenschneider may have exposed the bareness of the wood itself in order to bring this material mimesis into being – which may be considered to be an even stronger statement of a woodcarver self-confidently unfolding the qualities of his genuine material, rather than disguising it with a pigmented glaze. The fact that Riemenschneider tied his partly gilded annunciation groups made of alabaster (fig. 7.8) to the tradition of depicting the Virgin and Mother Mary in precious white marble or ivory reinforces still further this reading of the Creglingen altarpiece as a monumental showpiece of partly gilded alabaster.38
Tilman Riemenschneider, Altarpiece with the Assumption of the Virgin, limewood, c.1505–1510, 930 cm × 273 cm
Creglingen, Herrgottskirche
Tilman Riemenschneider, Virgin Annunciate, alabaster, c.1500, height: 54 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Two wooden sculptures – St. Lorenz and St. Stephan (figs. 7.9 a & b) – probably carved by a student or follower of Veit Stoss, illustrate that Riemenschneider was not the only sculptor to think of stone while carving in limewood, with the difference, however, that these two figures are wearing a coat of colour that evokes stone. Kept in Nürnberg’s St. Lorenz church, the two limewood sculptures are conserved in their original polychromy: mostly covered in a colour imitating greyish stone, with only the hair and parts of the garments gilded. Their current appearance, much closer to bronze than stone, is related to significant darkening of the varnish – restorers described the much better conserved traces of colour on their back as exhibiting a range of dull greys, imitating limestone.39 It may have been the original appearance of the Volckamer monument, executed by Veit Stoss as one of his first assignments back in Nürnberg, that inspired the artist to apply this coat of colour in imitation of stone. The huge relief was embellished with scenes from the Passion of Christ in limestone, flanked, on the upper level, by two lifesize figures of the Man of Sorrows and the Mater dolorosa executed in oak. While the dark oak tree seems to create a disharmonious contrast with the spongy limestone, we may suppose that it too was originally painted in a unifying greyish colour.40
Veit Stoss (pupil or follower), St. Stephan (top) and St. Laurent (bottom), limewood, painted in grey, partly gilded, ca. 1520, height: 149 cm and 144 cm
Nürnberg, St. Lorenz
That painting techniques alluding to the material qualities of alabaster (and other precious stones) were common in the North is further supported by a most interesting record in the Prague guild book of painters (1490–1582):
Let the journeyman carver or [master] carve an image of the Virgin Mary out of wood. Then let the image be carved in a masterly fashion both before and behind, and polished smooth yet without colours, being neither painted nor limned […] beforehand, let the journeyman have a painting made for himself […] let him then ornament the frame around this picture after his fashion and skill […] yet let a smooth white work be executed upon it, akin to alabaster, but with a little silver added for the shine, as gilding, so as to turn it a golden colour and dye it, so to speak.41
Painting techniques in sculpture which imitated marble or alabaster may thus be considered widespread both in Italy and in Northern Europe throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Both practices placed high value upon artistic invention. Although the attempted material mimesis always proceeds from a seemingly inferior material (“simple” stone, terracotta, or wood) to one that was considered superior (marble and alabaster), none of the examples discussed above seems to be principally concerned with material value, even though the emulated material is more costly. Rather, in line with the antique tradition of reduced artistic means as a proof of skilful mastery, each work in its specific historical context seems to be focusing on the articulation of ingeniously created artistic ideas, exposing the artist’s work, not the preciousness of the applied material. The use of humble material can therefore be read as an invitation for the beholder to focus on the quality of the finished artwork as a product of artistic labour, and the use of a humble material be considered a logical condition of bringing this into being. Artists were not constrained to use the humbler materials for reasons of cost, but rather chose to use them, as intentionally applied artistic principle, to designate their material mimesis. To some extent, these highly-elaborated forms of material fictitiousness can be considered an immediate result of a daily workshop practice where limewood and sandstone were both in use – just like Riemenschneider’s figure of St. Matthias, which the artist repeated in stone after having sculpted it in limewood a few years earlier.42
4 Fictitiousness as a Paramount Criterion of Material Mimesis in Colour-Reduced Renaissance Sculpture
A brief comparative look at how woodcarvers treated the surface of their artistic medium indicates that the works that could rightly be described as holzsichtig (allowing the wood to be seen), in the true sense of the word, are much less common than one might expect. Far more common were slightly pigmented glazes, which went beyond the mere function of protecting the wood to adjust and unify the genuine colour that it possessed in its natural substance.43 Tilman Riemenschneider’s slender ‘Adam’ (fig. 7.10), acquired in 1866 from the Böhm collection by the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, and then housed in Ambras castle until 1875, is one of the few works that demonstrably exposes the completely untreated texture of the nutwood from which it is carved.44 In fact, this figure of Adam was formerly covered with a toned glaze, giving a bronze effect. As chemical analyses have shown, this coating was not original, and it was removed in 2008.45 Nowadays, the exposed bare wooden texture planned by Riemenschneider lends the seemingly dancing figure a vital epidermis. Quite a few small-scale wooden sculptures created for, and collected in, the context of the Kunstkammer display elaborate treatment of their wooden surface in conjunction with additional pigments and dyes, which together evoke the quality of cast bronze sculpture. It is the appearance of such objects that may have inspired a former owner of Riemenschneider’s ‘Adam’ to dress the sculpture in a shiny coat of bronze; an effect Vasari too described in 1568, especially in connection with walnut: ‘There are also most praiseworthy works in boxwood to be seen done by workmen in this trade, and very beautiful ornaments in walnut, which, when they are of good black walnut, almost appear to be of bronze.’46 Other examples, including carved altarpieces and crucifixes, such as the so-called del Maino altarpiece, or Veit Stoss’s Bamberg altarpiece and his crucifix in St. Lorenz, Nürnberg, illustrate that these forms of material mimesis were by no means restricted to Kunstkammer contexts. As I have shown in detail elsewhere (Dümpelmann 2022), these phenomena can be closely linked to the daily workshop practice of making wooden models for cast bronze sculptures, in the course of which woodcarvers evoked the effect of bronze in wood. While aiming at the invention and creation of material aesthetics in model-making for cast bronze sculptures, woodcarvers founded a rich experimental field, leading them to highly-skilled and self-reflective results that gradually developed from anticipatory models into independent artworks. In analogy to the works evoking marble and alabaster discussed above, the artists did not primarily focus on material values, but rather grasped and staged the artistic idea as an immediate result of model-making in their daily workshop practice. Despite the predominant role of the German-speaking lands in high quality woodcarving at this time, as mentioned above, the usual designation of wood as a typical “German” material does not seem appropriate for this period. Examples like the del Maino altarpiece, or Vasari’s praise of St. Roch, seem rather to illustrate that wooden sculpture was also highly appreciated south of the Alps, while the fact that Vasari considered St. Roch to be a French-Italian product – being completely unaware of its actual origin in Southern Germany – suggests that such issues of origin were hardly of paramount importance for him. Within the evocation of bronze as an important antique material second to marble, these works implicitly allude to antiquity, an allusion explicitly staged by Daniel Mauch’s small-scale Madonna on a crescent moon, carved from lime between 1529 and 1535 (fig. 12). The sculpture’s base, painted with a fictitious marble polychromy, contrasts ingeniously with the skin of the infant Christ and Virgin, which originally showed bright, completely untreated limewood.47 The correspondence of the bare exposed wood with the purity of Christ’s and Mary’s flesh, juxtaposed with the fictive marble painting on the base, could hardly provide a clearer appreciation of the material and its highly-skilled mastery by Mauch (c.1477/1479–1540). This aspect is emphasised through a pronounced, self-conscious signature on the base, proclaiming Mauch as the artwork’s author, stating that the carving belonged to Berselius (Pascal Bierset, 1480–1535), a Benedictine monk from the abbey of St. Laurent in Liège, and, lastly, explicitly competing with antiquity. On the front are the following words: ‘What do you, antiquity, marvel at your Myrons! Desist from it! The time-honoured centuries hand the palm to the New’. Similarly, the words on the reverse read: ‘Antiquity’s famous artworks may bid farewell / they are all nothing compared to Daniel’s work’.48 In this particular case, the fictitiousness of the sculpture’s polychrome, ‘false’ base appears inferior to the unveiled, ‘true’ incarnate substance of the Virgin and the infant Christ. We might perhaps read this as a gesture of humility on the part of Daniel Mauch; certainly these confident words of praise for him as the work’s author – probably bestowed by Berselius, its commissioner – show no other signs of modesty.
Tilman Riemenschneider, Adam, nutwood, 1495–1505, height: 24 cm
Wien, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer (formerly considered to be a for gery, exposed in 1975 as a work by Tilman Riemenschneider)
Daniel Mauch, Madonna on the Crescent Moon (the so-called Berselius-Madonna), 1529–1535, height (including base): 74.5 cm
Grand Curtius, Liège, Deposit by St. Pancrace, Dalhem
Given traditional views of marble as the antique material, it may seem surprising to find a woodcarver competing with antiquity through his mastery of a seemingly inferior material. The fact that the woodcarver and stone sculptor Daniel Mauch did so in the face of this tradition further underscores both his own self-confidence and the increased artistic value of woodcarving. Even wooden sculpture could engage with antiquity, but, as has been pointed out for the objects which evoked marble or alabaster, the crucial point of reference is not to be found in the mere allusion to antique materials as such. In fact, the forms of material mimesis discussed here, both those alluding to marble and alabaster and those alluding to bronze, took a concept of reduced artistic means, itself derived from antiquity and traditionally related to painting, and applied it to sculpture, transforming the art in keeping with the genuine material language of the media it used. In so doing, Renaissance sculpture both north and south of the Alps introduced fictitiousness as a theoretical concept, closely developed from, and articulated in, artistic practice. Instead of the value of materials, the artist’s work and the artistic idea, as articulated through highly elaborate forms of material mimesis, are paramount criteria for evaluating these specimens of Renaissance sculpture.
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Endnotes
Pliny 1952, 298–299, 308–309.
Quoted in Białostocki 1986, 31; see also Grebe 2015, 174.
I owe this expression to Ann-Sophie Lehmann, who introduced it at the conference ‘The matter of mimesis. Studies on mimesis and materials in nature, art and science’, Cambridge, 17–18 December 2015.
Chantal Conneller (2013, 90) introduced the distinction between ‘deceptive’ and ‘honest/creative’ in order to characterise two different types of skeuomorphs.
http://www.trackingcolour.com/ [accessed 1 February 2019], with extensive bibliography; see also http://www.stiftung-archaeologie.de/publicationsen.html [accessed 1 February 2019] with reference to cat. San Francisco 2017.
See Hinz 1989; Rosenfeld 1990; Hoeps 1999; Wenderholm 2006, 74–78; Fricke 2007; Fehrenbach 2011, 47; Dümpelmann 2012, 20 ff.
Kahsnitz 2005, 39; Gasparotto 2014, 88–103, at 95; and Dümpelmann 2018, esp. 317–320.
Oellermann 2004, 113; Oellermann 2008, 213–214; Marincola 1999, esp. 108–112. Current research has repeatedly presented the field of furniture manufacturing as an important source of knowledge and experience in the matter of wooden surface treatments; see Rommé & Westhoff 2009, 100, with reference to Michaelsen 2002; Koller 2008, 214–215, and recently Habenicht 2016, 22 ff, 30 ff and 59.
Vasari 1960, 173–176; also Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 1, 108–110.
Vasari 1960, 173; Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 1, 108: ‘Come si conducono le figure di legno e che legno sia buono a farle’, title of his chapter on woodcarving.
Vasari 1960, 173; Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 1, 109: ‘ubbidisce più agevolmente alla lima et allo scarpello’.
Vasari 1960, 174; Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 1, 110: ‘e condusse con sottilissimo intaglio tanto morbidi e traforati i panni che la vestono et in modo carnosi e con bello andar l’ordine delle pieghe, che non si può veder cosa più maravigliosa’.
Vasari 1960, 174–175; Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 1, 110: ‘acciò si veggia in tutte le sue parti l’eccellenza dell’artefice, è stata conservata insino a oggi questa figura nella Nunziata di Firenze sotto il pergamo, senza alcuna coperta di colori o di pitture, nello stesso color del legname e con la sola pulitezza e perfezzione che maestro Ianni le diede, bellissima sopra tutte l’altre che si veggia intagliata in legno’. The passage with the wrong attribution reads thus: ‘by the hand of the Frenchman, Maestro Janni, who living in the city of Florence which he had chosen for his country […]’ (see Vasari 1960, 174).
Varchi & Borghini 1998, 115: ‘E perch’i’ ho detto ch’e e colori non sono [de] gli scultori, no vo dire che non le possin colorite le loro figure, se le vogliano, come fanno i ceraiuoli o quei che fanno ritratti di gesso; […] la forza dello sculture e la virtù consiste ne dintorni dati dallo scarpello, e se qualche goffo ne l’arte sua usa i colori, esce della natura di quell’arte et il lor medesimi se ne ridono et appena gl’accettano fra loro’.
Quoted after Baxandall 1980, 48. Original Latin text from the ‘Anniversarium’ of the Carmelite Church held in Nürnberg, Stadtbibliothek: ‘Nullus prior faciat eam coloribus pingere faciliter. Causam sibi narrabunt omnes arteficiosi magistri in illa arte. Nota: aperiatur tabula solum in festo nativitatis domini, pasche, penthecostes et duobus diebus sequrntibus, ascensionis, trinitatis, omnium sanctorum, epiphanie domini, corporis Christi, dedicationis ecclesei ac in omnibus festiviatibus beatae Mariae virginis. Eo die mox finitis vespersi secundis claudatur. Et omni anno binies mundetur. Et ne magna lumina super altare propter fumam. Sufficiunt due pave candele de cera. Alie vero extra altare locentur’, quoted in Schaffer 1928, 362, note 3; more recently, see Habenicht 2016, 182, note 182. On the Bamberg altarpiece, see Kahsnitz 2005, 39, 402–410.
Verein zur Erhaltung der Lorenzkirche 1996, 45: ‘Gießen ja ließ sie sich leicht, modellieren und hin und her biegen – Ist drum nicht mehr zu bewundern, daß brechen sich lässet der Marmor / Eben noch hart, daß es scheint, man könne mit Händen ihn biegen?’
Weil-Garris 1982, esp. 62–63, 72–73, note 7; Gasparotto 2014, 95.
Weil-Garris 1982, 66; Dacosta Kaufmann 2004, 344 (reference to Baxandall 1980 at 257, note 20); see also Gasparotto 2014, 95.
Rosenauer 1993, 153–157, cat. 35; Pfisterer 2002, 232–268, esp. 233; Fehrenbach 2011, 47–48; Fehrenbach 2010, 37–38; Vaccari, 2003, 19–37.
Vasari, 1912–1914, vol. 2, 239; Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 2, 203: ‘Ma quello che gli diede nome e lo fece per quello che egli conoscere, fu una Nunziata di pietra di macigno, che in Santa Croce di Fiorenza fu posta all’altare e cappella de’ Cavalcanti’.
Vaccari 2003, 27.
To some extent, this is due to the fact that in 2002, the original appearance of the artwork’s surface had not yet been examined (Pfisterer 2002, 233; Harris 2010, 3).
Pfisterer 2002, 239–241; on the artist’s reception of antiquity, see also Trudzinsky 1986, esp. 47–95.
Alberti 2011, ‘On painting’ (1435), 45, 72.
See Claussen 1996, 47, note 13, for additional references.
See Arasse 1999 and 2003; Kruse 2000, 2003, 175–224; Drummond 2018.
Weil-Garris 1982, p. 67; on the white monochrome glaze, see also Ferrari 1986, and Bonsanti 1992.
Cat. Modena 2009, 214–217, cat. 55.
Bonsanti 1992, 123, 249.
Bonsanti 1992, 122–130, 249; Bonsanti 2009, 49.
Verein zur Erhaltung der Lorenzkirche 1996, 42: ‘Weiß steht es da von Marmor’; Schleif 1996, 17; Oellermann 2002, 132 ff.
Schleif 1996, 24; Oellermann 2002, 142–144.
Neudörfer 1547, 11: ‘Er habe Formen gemacht, darein Leimen mit kleinen gestossen Steinlein vermischt, den darauf gebrennt und mit Steinfarb angestrichen, es sind aber an solchem Werkstück alle krummen Bogen inwendig hohl und mit eisernen Stangen eingelegt. Sie könnten sonst nicht so bleiben’; Schleif 1996, 24.
Schleif 1996, 45: ‘Man glaubt es habe der Meister selber die Steine beseelt’.
Schleif 1996, 18: ‘Alles, was drüber hinaus noch übrig bleibt, zu verkünden, hat mir die Muse versagt, die den Glanz dieses Werkes bewundert’; Verein zur Erhaltung der Lorenzkirche 1996, 45.
Simon 1998, esp. 59–65; Kahsnitz 2005, 238–244, esp. 244; Oellermann 2008. Marincola & Serotta (2022) (323–338), supports ‘Eike Oellermann’s contention that the Creglingen Assumption Retable is an unfinished work originally intended to be polychromed’.
Oellermann 2008, 214; Marincola 2004, 131–147.
Cat. National Gallery of Washington/The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York 1999–2000, cat. No. 2, 163–167; cat. No. 3, 168–171; cat. No. 21, 246–249.
Oellermann 1976, 180; cat. Nürnberg 1983, 214–218, cat. No. 19, 214.
Oellermann 1976, 180, (with reference to Lossnitzer 1912, 193, note 325); Dümpelmann 2012, 184.
For the Czech original text, see Chytil 1906, 319–323; compare the German version in Nejedly 1999, 30–39, at 38, n. 30; see also Zindel 2010, 90.
Michael Baxandall viewed Riemenschneider’s sandstone sculpture as showing characteristics more proper to limewood, and therefore concluded that limewood ‘clearly ha[d] priority’ for the artist (Baxandall 1980, 182–185; see also Buczynski and Kratz 1981, 335–375; Westhoff 2004, 153–165).
Oellermann 2004; Marincola 1999.
In his restoration report of 19 December 2008, the Viennese conservator Georg Prast identified the wood as nut, not pear as previously argued. See cat. Washington/New York 1999, No. 20, 242–245; cat. Munich 2006, cat. No. 30, 168 et seq. This may support the assumption that Riemenschneider also made use of pure limewood in the Creglingen altarpiece without any additional glaze.
Compare, e.g., the description by Timothy B. Husband (written before the removal of the shiny glaze): ‘Without the attributes this figure could readily be mistaken for a Northern interpretation of a Renaissance bronze – or a model for one, as the surface is remarkably similar to that of a wax worked up with a tooling knife – and thus may be evidence of Riemenschneider in a rare expression of Renaissance interest’; cat. Washington & New York 1999, 245.
Vasari 1966–1997, vol. 1, 109: ‘E degli artefici di così fatto mestiero si sono vedute ancora opere di bossolo lodatissime et ornamenti di noce bellissimi, i quali, quando sono di bel noce che sia nero, appariscono quasi di bronzo’.
Cat. Ulm 2009, 284–288, entry 39.
Cat. Ulm 2009, 285: ‘QVID MIRARE TVOS AETAS ANTIQUA MIRONES/ DESINE DANT PALMAM SAECULA PRISCA NOVI // AETATIS VALEANT ILLUSTRA SIGNA VETVSTAE / CVNCTA NIHIL FACIUNT AD DANIELIS OPIS’.