Italian Renaissance sculpture

Elsewhere there was the Siennese Jacopo della Quercia (1438), from Lombardy Pietro Lombardo (1515) and his sons, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (1522), Andrea Sansovino (1529), Vincenzo Danti (1576), Leone Leoni (1590), and Giambologna (1608, born in Flanders).

Conveniently, 1400 and 1500 work fairly well as dates to mark significant changes in style, with key turning points being the competition for designs for the doors of the Florence Baptistery, announced in late 1400,[15] and Michelangelo's Pietà, completed in 1499, and his David, begun in 1501.

Mannerist style starts to emerge around 1520, but the Sack of Rome in 1527, which greatly shook up and dispersed what had become the leading centre, provides a generally accepted end to the High Renaissance phase; the Medici were expelled from Florence the same year, displacing other artists.

[28] A bronze sculpture was then about ten times more expensive than marble and the difficult founding or making the alloy, as well as the lost wax technique of casting was most often performed by the sculptor and his studio.

[40] Unlike north of the Alps, wood was not a prestigious material, but because of its light weight continued to be used for Crucifixion figures, often hung in mid-air or on walls in churches, for example the Brunelleschi Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella.

[42] Apart from the widespread use of clay for modelli, normally left unfired, the three generations of the Della Robbia family in Florence ran a large workshop producing tin-glazed and brightly painted terracotta statuary, initially mostly religious reliefs for the exteriors of buildings, then later smaller works such as Madonnas for private chapels or bedrooms.

[45] Temporary sculptures in a wide range of quick and cheap materials such as papier-mache and glue-stiffened cloth were produced in lavish quantities as decorations for parades during festivals and celebrations such as weddings; in the 16th century these are often recorded in prints.

[46] One relief panel by Jacopo Sansovino for the decorations for the triumphal entry (a medieval and Renaissance set-piece of pageantry) of Pope Leo X into Florence has survived, despite being in clay and "linen stiffened with size", all mounted on wooden boards; it is a work of the highest artistic quality.

In 1491, 103 men carried in "tigers, unicorns, bucentaurs, foxes, wolves, lions ... mountains, dromedaries, ...castles, saracens ... Hercules killing the dragon..." apparently customized for each guest; "sculptors from Mantua, Padua and Venice were brought in to make them from designs by court painters".

[59] A rare Italian exception was Milan Cathedral, built from 1368 with large numbers of niches and pinnacles for hundreds of statues, which took the whole period to fill; most were too high for the sculpture to be seen very clearly.

[60] Another exception was the nearby Certosa di Pavia, a monastery planned as the dynastic burial place of the Visconti dukes of Milan, emulating other such sites north of the Alps,[61] begun in 1396 but not finished until well over a century later.

[66] Initially figures of the deceased on tombs followed the usual (but not invariable) traditional pattern of a "recumbent effigy", lying with eyes closed, but towards the end of the 15th century they began to be shown as alive.

The Loggia dei Lanzi is an open arcade on the piazza which built up a collection of outstanding statues, mostly in the 16th century, when Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Benvenuto Cellini and the Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna joined the group.

The delay was caused by the dilatoriness of the guilds, but has resulted in a series of works, by the leading sculptors of the day, that display excellently the development of the Florentine style, and especially the cross-currents within it in the years before 1430.

[76] Standing portrait statues of contemporary individuals remained very rare in Italy until the end of the period (one exception is John of Austria in Messina, 1572),[77] but Leone Leoni and his son Pompeo, court artists to the Spanish Habsburgs, made several in bronze for them.

The attraction of the form is shown by two fictive statues painted in fresco in Florence Cathedral: that for Sir John Hawkwood (Paolo Uccello, 1436), is next to that for Niccolò da Tolentino (Andrea del Castagno 1456).

He was assigned the project in 1489, and by the winter of 1492–93 had completed a full-scale clay model, which was displayed to great acclaim in Milan cathedral for the wedding of Bianca Maria Sforza and Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

He may have made the mould, or parts of it, but by late 1494 Ludovico decided he needed the large amount of bronze he had assembled for the statue for cannons instead, given the turn taken by the First Italian War, begun that year.

[86] Mino did a number of similar busts, and artists such as Antonio Rossellino and Benedetto da Maiano took up the form, the latter taking a "life mask" mould, probably in wax, to work from.

They were intended to be appreciated by holding and turning in the hands by collectors and their friends, when the best "give an aesthetic stimulus of that involuntary kind that sometimes comes from listening to music", says John Shearman, talking of Giambologna's small figures.

[107] In the 16th century Venetian sculptors "developed a genre of grandly scaled household objects in bronze" for the patricians' palaces and villas, often including figures amongst the rich decoration.

[128] In the many monarchical princely states of Italy the ruler was the main patron, and they often spent lavishly to glorify themselves: Milan, Rimini, Ferarra, Urbino are examples, but none matched the Medici after they became Grand Dukes of Tuscany in 1531, and wished to promote their new status.

[130] Over the course of the Renaissance the taste, and pockets, of the lesser members of elites, in the nobilities, patricians and wealthy bankers and merchants for art in the latest styles developed, and spread ever further down the social scale.

[154] With Donatello absent in Padua from 1443 to 1453, the 'sweet style' dominated Florentine sculpture for the next 25 years, with the older Luca della Robbia, the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino later joined by Andrea del Verrocchio as leading figures.

The Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini was designed by Leone Battista Alberti, the leading art theorist of the day, for Sigismondo Malatesta, the city's ruler who was also commander of the papal army, before becoming "the only living person publicly consigned to Hell by the Pope" (in 1460).

[159] Lombardy, at the foot of the Alps, was closer to northern influences than most of Italy, and French and German sculptors had already been brought in for the massive programme of sculpture at the essentially Gothic Milan Cathedral, which was to take centuries to complete.

Work continued "spasmodically" until 1545, when "that miserable fragment that we have of the original scheme", with Moses and two other statues by him, was installed in San Pietro in Vincoli, as St Peter's was a building site.

At the time and subsequently it has been seen as a failed attempt to emulate Michelangelo; Cellini described the hero's physique as resembling "a sack of melons", and writers of hostile verses were imprisoned.

His elegant twisting figures climax in his marble Rape of the Sabine (1579–85, a title he adopted after the work was finished, from a friend's suggestion), which is designed to be equally satisfying viewed from any angle,[182] as was his earlier Mercury, balanced on one foot (there are four versions).

[197] In a similar way, Leone Leoni stayed in Milan after he was appointed to run the imperial mint for the Habsburgs, but his son Pompeo moved to Spain, where he finished and installed his father's larger works, and produced his own.