Eleonora Luciano In collaboration with Denise Allen and Claudia Kryza-Gersch contributions by Stephen |, Campbel, Davide Gasparotto, Dylan Smith Richard € Stone, and Shelley Starman ANTICO The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes PAUL HOLBERTON PUBLISHING, LONDONANTICO AND MANTEGNA HUMANIST ART AND THE FORTUNE OF THE ART OBJECT Stephen J.Campbell Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431~1506) became farnous through his painting, but bronze set the seal on his reputation: his portrait bust, placed against a porphyry disk, glowers imperiously from his funerary chapel in Sant'Andrea in Mantua (fig. 13). An epitaph commemorates him. not as “Andrea Mantegna” but with Latin wordplay as “Aeriea Mantinize....sirmulacra’: “the bronze effigy of Mantegna” (with a Virgilian resonance in “Aenea’).' The elaborate form of the commemoration speaks of the degree to which Mantegna’s unique celebrity was furthered by ideas of fame and virtue that were at the height of their social currency. By 1500, scholars of ancient language and culture had become a shaping force in Italian civic life that is diffi cult to imagine today: the education of princes, conduct of diplomacy, writing of history, and ceremonial self presentation of courts and cities lay largely in their hands. Mantegna was the name most frequently evoked and applauded in their writing as the most perfect archetype of the artist and the peer not only of ancient painters but of classical writers as well. A carpen- ter’s son, apprenticed to a painter at a very young age and without any formal training in clas- sical and literary culture, Mantegna nonetheless presented himself as literatus through Latin and Greek forms of his signature, his use of Latin inscriptions, and the manifest erudition ofStephen J.Campbell his inventions, He was also acclaimed for his knowledge of the material remains of classical antiquity and was consulted with regard to their authentication or even just their apprecis tion.* Through the forms of his self-presentation, in his antiquarian expertise and not least his ability to impress opinion-making intellectuals, Mantegna was a clear role model for the younger artist nicknamed Antico, Pier Jacopo Alari de Bonacolsi likewise rose from modest brigins to become a successful and privileged servant of several Gonzaga princes, valued for his exquisite bronzes and for his skill in assessing and restoring antiquities. Beyond saying that both artists were influenced by humanism, it needs to be stressed that they provided an educated public with a visible and tangible idea of the ancient past— they supplied human- ism with a visual and material correlative to its largely text-based pursuits. This essay exam- ines that aspect of their work and also addresses a striking disparity in the way their society ultimately valued the painter and the sculptor. Both served to exemplify what can be called a Jnumanist conception of art, yet one that preserved and valorized the authorship of Mantegna while it excised the name and even any concept of “author” from the work of Antico, and from the types of production with which he is associated. Humanism and Art Unlike most of the other great Italian centers of intellectual and artistic culture, Mantua maintained no metropolitan university or institution of higher learning in its territory. Since the mid-fifteenth century, however, the Gonzaga rulers had supported scholars of Latin and Greek, primarily employed as tutors and secretaries, These were the nomadic intellectuals who normally practiced the studia humanitatis (language, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, history) outside the universities and were increasingly called wnanista in Italian. In the early 15008 Mario Equicola, a scholar trained in Naples, served the Gonzaga as tutor, secretary, and diplo ‘mat, while also writing philosophical and literary essays in Latin and Italian. The best-known is the anti-Platonic treatise On the Nature of Love, composed for Isabella d’Este before 1510 and published in 1525.* Equicola's sometime colleagues and acquaintances included men trained as philosophers (Pietro Pomponazzi, tutor to Isabella's son Ercole), theologians (the Carmelite friar Battista Mantuanus), or physicians (Battista Fiera); the latter two also claimed the voca tion of poet—a weighty designation in Mantua, which celebrated its near sacred status as the birthplace of Virgil, regarded as the greatest of all the Latin poets. ‘The question of art and humanism is not simply a matter of learned people influencing painters and sculptors with their writings and ideas. More interestingly, it concerns the emerg: ing awareness on the part of literary and scholarly professionals that members ofa trade tra- ditionally considered basely mechanical and unlearned were in fact practitioners of useful and virtuous knowledge with theoretical principles. Leon Battista Alberti, in his famous 1435, treatise on painting dedicated to the marchese of Mantua, had acclaimed the achievements of painters. In 1504, in a Latin dialogue dedicated to the duike of nearby Ferrara, Pomponio Gaur rico did the same for sculptors. De pictura and De sculptura both sought to draw up rules and principles for practicing craftsmen and for their learned audiences, but they also demonstrated the affinity of painting and sculpture with other kinds of knowledge, such as poetry, optics geometry, and natural philosophy. In addition, modern painting and sculpture, invested in the exemplarity of the ancient past, allowed a wider and nonspecialist public a way of participating in humanist culture, In that sense, “literary” art parallels the rise of publishers such as Aldus Manutius in Venice and is analogous to the rising humanist production of literature in the vernacular. The career of Antico (active c. 1480-1528) corresponds to an important phase in the history of Italian letters, which, in the hands of classically trained writers such as Pietro Bembo, Jacopo San-Antico and Mantegna: Humanist Att and the Fortune of the nazaro, Ludovico Ariosto, Baldassare Castiglione, and Equicola, joined principles of ancient philosophy, poetics, and rhetoric with literary and subject matter that would appeal to a culti- vated but nonspecialist public. This is also to say that humanism is not by 1500 to be thought of only as scholarly prac tices defining a specialized group, but as a more widely diffused set of social values and tastes with which elite and educated Italians tended to identify. By the time of Mantegna’s death in 1506, which also corresponds with the beginning of Antico’s rise in the favor of Isa- bella d’Este, their patrons could express identification with antiquity less by knowing how to read Latin and Greek than by acquiring it in the form of objects as well as books. The humanism of Antico’s patrons was a matter of taste and lifestyle, They sought busts and stat- uettes in a plausibly antique style, with which they furnished their studies and country houses. To be sure, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Bishop Ludovico Gonzaga, and Isabella d’Este stocked their libraries with Virgil, Ovid, Pliny, and Cicero, authors they had probably studied in the schoolroom; they were well disposed toward the neo-Latin literary enterprises of the court physician Battista Fiera or the “New Virgil” Mantuanus. Yet the correspondence of the bishop nd the marchesa as well as of other leaders of taste in the is00s suggests that their primary enthusiasm as readers was for Niccold da Correggio, Bembo, Equicola, Atiosto, Sannazaro, Serafino Aquilano, Antonio Tebaldeo, Castiglione, and Paride da Ceresara. While most of these authors also wrote in Latin, which everyone would have regarded as a more serious undertaking, they were creators of a courtly vernacular literature destined for overwhelming success—we need only think of the phenomenon of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and the best-seller status of Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528). The great philologist and imitator of Cicero, Agnolo Poliziano, was primarily known at Mantua through his play Orféo, Ovid- ian in subject matter but an innovative vernacular composition. Bishop Ludovico Gonzaga sought out and commissioned terza rima (Italian verse) translations of Roman comedies and adaptations of Greek texts from Battista Guarino, Matteo Maria Boiardo, and Ceresara; he and Isabella corresponded about the exotic literary fables of Aquilano, the wandering poet and entertainer.‘ Antico's work, then, allowed such readers and owners to signal their ongoing allegiance to a Latin literary culture. Like the artist's nickname, its very appearance signified antiquity. It will be seen that this elision had consequences for the survival of his very name and reputation as an artist. Carmina Priapeia Antico’s early tour de force, the Gonzaga Urn (pl. 6), is at once compendiously antiquar- ian in its plethora of military trophies and boisterously erotic and neopagan in its imagery of nude sea gods, lusty tritons, cupids, hippocamps, nereids, and Dionysiac masks. The spheres of love and politics collide in an exuberant celebration of conquest of an explicitly sexual kind it is Eros here who rules over the hordes of Neptune, even as the sea god appears in majesty asa triumphant commander (pl. 6c). Sea nymphs ride on the backs of marine centaurs, with whom they exchange kisses and intimate caresses; one nymph has been seized by a triton in 4 state of arousal, while Cupid spurs on two horses. Undocumented before 1797, the urn has been connected with the marriage of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, lord of Bozzolo, and Antonia del Balzo: it bears Gianfrancesco’s Latin motto, pRosrras LavDaTve (virtue is honored), and Antonia’s Italian one, wat pty (never more)? The um is one of several late fifteenth-century works of art that give visual form to some preoccupations of contemporary literary culture, especially with regard to the cult of Virgil. Readers of Virgil would have thought of the poet's evocation of Neptune and his familiar demigods Triton and Cymothoé calming the unruly waves in the first book of the AeneidStephen J.Carpbe!l (1142-156); they may also have thought of the humorous and erotic characterizations of the marine divinities in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Sea Gods, but the eroticism and erotic violence of Antico’s composition is in large measure a response to Roman sarcophagus reliefs of the marine thiasos, and to modern compositions freely based on these such as Mantegna’s, engraving Battle of the Sea Gods (figs. 14,15). Although the Gonzaga sometimes consulted with humanists regarding the subject raatter of mythological painting, itis doubtful that a specialist program or compilation of literary references was drawn up for the bronze urn.* ‘The imagery of the urn resonates within humanist literary culture, but rather than being inscrutable and requiring a specialist's knowledge of texts, its components would have been familiar from ancient and modern works of att. ric. Andes Mantegna, Bate af the Nationa Gallery of At, Washing ode left ¢1485/0488, engraving, niles Mellon Stace Fund, 584 ‘These components form part of what might be called a Virgilian code: a more erudite composition in the same vein, in which humanist expertise was clearly at stake, is the print by Girolamo Mocetto depicting the mythological tale of Amymone (fig, 16). According to @ number of ancient authors (Lucian, Philostratus the Elder), the water god Neptune converted the princess into a spring after rescuing her from a rapacious satyr.? Mocetto’s print is one of several variants on the same composition—another is the drawing now in the Uffizi, Flor. enice—that combine the themes of sexuality and poetic inspiration, Amymone, shown asa sleeping nymph, the flowing urn signaling her conversion into a river, is an unuswal subject, but was chosen because the Greek word Amymos, which means “untouched” or “inviolate,”‘neo and Mantegna: Humanist Art and the Fortune ofthe Ar Objec was a motto of the Gonzaga. Nearby a figure in classical attire appears to dissuade the satyrs with the offer of wooden flutes, suggesting that their longing should be sublimated into song: beyond is a herm of the phallic garden god Priapus. Bizarre as these juxtapositions might seem, they serve to identify the man with the flutes as Virgil. Not only was Virgil the prin- cipal exponent of pastoral and epic poetry, but he was also credited with the composition of another genre known as Carmina Priapeia or “priapic song.”* His authority in fact made the genze—consisting of humorous, graphic, or punning lyrics on themes of fertility and sexual domination—respectable, and sanctioned its imitation by modern poets, although almost always in Latin rather than in the vernacular. The head in the basin from which water flows designates the river Mincio, celebrated by Virgil and by Dante in their poetic references to 1c. 9§ Andes Mantegna, Satie of the Sea God ight al, . 485/488, engraving National alley of At, Washington, if of W.G. Rossel Allen, 194) Mantua, although in some versions of this composition it represents the spirit of Virgil him- self, the “fountainhead” of all poetry, here located in Mantua and mingling its fertilizing stream with the pure waters of the immaculate Mincio (Amymone) The celebration of sexual fulfillment was also a poetic code for reflecting on natural vitality in the physical world. Weddings of the Gonzaga and other princely families often featured the recital of epithalamia, which combined praise of the couple with the frank cel- bration of love's physical joys; plays were performed—comic or romantic in theme—and might include intermezzi with cavorting satyrs, cupids, and other personifications of human libido.* This festive culture leaves its imprint not just in the Amymone images and in theStephen |. Campbel Antico urn (which, ifit does not concern the myth of Amymone itself, deals with closely related mythic material), but in the startling bronze plaquette known as the “Martelli Mirror" (fig. 17), once attributed to the circle of Antico and now often given to his Milanese contem porary Caradosso Foppa.* A satyr is nourished by a robust female personification of Natura, who expresses milk from her breast into a rhyton; he salutes her with a lewd gesture, while Priapus once again appears in the background. An inscription along the bottom points to the “moral”: “Nature provides for what necessity urges.” While the Amymone images portray an elaborate mythological allegory of Mantua—it is also a kind of foundation myth—through a visual counterpart to “priapic song,” its subject is in some ways Mantegna himself. All versions of the Amymone group derive figures from Fc. 16 Girolamo Mocetto, Metamorphosis of Ampmone,c.r495, engraving, Bish Museum, Landon the great painter's work, implicitly treating him as a classic source on a par with Virgil: an exemplar that brought renown on Mantua, and one that affirmed the modest city’s unrivaled importance as a center of culture. So, too, Antico's virile tritons seem to respond as much to Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods as to any ancient work of art. This is very much in line with the image of Mantegna proposed by Mantegna himself, who, as we saw, was styled as. an Aeneas in his funerary epitaph and even as a Virgil by contemporaries. ‘Thus wrote Battista Mantuanus: “Mantegna is to painting as Virgil and Homer were to Roman and Greek literature." Mantegna was a “Virgil” (he was also compared to the Roman historian Livy)" because of the monumentality, painstaking perfection, and sublimity of his work, which seemed to take the place of the (lost) painting of the ancients. His great seriesStephen j,Campbell ‘The Triumphs of Caesar (c. 1485~3501; fig. 18), also Virgilian in conception, seems to have underscored that reputation, especially because it was widely reproduced in woodcut)’ as did his much-copied series of mythological engravings, which had acquired the status of “cl sics.” Battista Fiera wrote a poetic description of a room painted by Mantegna, which, while probably fictitious, demonstrates something of the range of values that his work embodied: “Here with painterly splendor a lofty wood casts shadows of its leafy tresses on the springtime 1.18 Andeea Mantegna, Trumps of Caesar, eighth caas, The Musvans, 851488, he Royal Colecton, Hampton Court Palace meadows, cloaking in modesty the retreat of Venus and the nymphs. Here the naiads wander to the fountain with clothes girded up. Swect leisure for whoever rests under the shadow of the woven fronds, and a garden free of January frost, joyful in the care of Nausicaa and the cult of the phallic god.” The wider point here is to stress the high premium on invention as the quality most appreciated in artists as well as poets, and that boisterous, sexual mythologi- cal imagery with satyrs, sirens, centaurs, telchines, tritons, and other hybrids demonstrating,Antic and Mantegna: Humanist Art and the Fortune ofthe Art Object the poetic faculty of invention at its fullest.” Further, the enterprise of Mantegna and Antico here is to be understood as far more than the manual realization of a “program” provided by a scholarly specialist (a witty text by Fiera makes fun of the humanists who sought to give ‘Mantegna advice on the portrayal of Justice). In Mantegna’s case, the unprecedented compari- son with classical writers signals recognition of his own authorial status, and praise for his own powers of invention. What then of his younger contemporary, the gifted and successful goldsmith of Mantua? Canon Formation in Literature and Art Scholars have generally regarded Antico as being comparable to Mantegna in his artistic aspirations or goals—he becomes, in effect, a Mantegna follower. Rather than pursuing that line of inquiry, this essay seeks to draw some important differences between the painter and the sculptor. Both were artists who professed antiquity, through forms of artistic produc tion that are not just analogous but intrinsic to the enterprises of humanism. While compa- rable in so many respects, two crucial circumstances led to significant differences in the later reception and estimation of their work: the first is the relative absence in most of Antico's later sculpture of the free play of invention visible in the Gonzaga Ura; the second is his con- lack of literary reputation. ‘o's assumed name implicates him in humanist debates regarding the imitation of, the ancient past, when there was a great deal at stake depending on whether one chose to fol Jow the “ancients” or the “moderns.”® “Antico” signals an ideological choice or commitment, one that was challenged by another North Ttalian artist who produced works under the sobri- quet Moderno (his original name and origins are controversial.” Moderno’s “modernity” may have to do with the fact that, unlike Antico, he produced many Christian devotional and liturgical works, and because of his eclectic approach to imitating antiquity, which closely resembles Antico's early essay in a similar vein—the Gonzaga Urn, Antico’s artistic stature ultimately depended on his thorough command and creative redeployment of ancient works, as a restorer of antiquities and a maker of miniaturized replicas. He could restore a series of ancient busts so that they could pass as pristine antiquities (Isabella regarded them as improvements),” and he could produce clever pastiches, such as his adaptation of the Apollo Belvedere as the seated Trojan shepherd Paris, about to award the Apple of Discord to Aphro- dite (pl. 54). Antico’s career in the 15008 corresponds with a phase of canon formation in classical literature: against the challenge of more exotic Latin authors such as Apuleius, who was embraced as a model by several North Italian humanists (some with connections to the Gon- aga), Virgil and Cicero were proclaimed —most inftuentially by Pietro Bembo—to be the outstanding models for Latin poetry and prose; for vernacular poetry, Petrarch was to be pre- ferred over Dante.” The same applied to ancient art: the most prestigious works then known were those displayed in the Vatican Belvedere, the so-called Cleopatra (or Sleeping Ariadne) the Venus Felix (fig. 54), the Apollo Beluedere (discovered c. 1489; see fig. 53), the Laacodn (dis- covered 1506), the “Gipsy” (Camillus, see fig. 24), as well as the Capitoline Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius (see fig. 55), the Spinario (fig. 56) at the same location, and the Dioscuri of the Quirinal, which Antico himself restored, discretely adding his own signature (see fig. 5) to ‘works bearing the (pseudo) signatures of Phidias and Praxiteles.”* Late quattrocento imitations of antiquity represented by the Gonzaga Urn, the Martelli Mirror, and Mantegna's mythological images might be thought of as “precanonical”: antiquity here was still more a fictive construction by artists rather than a dialogue with a relatively limited repertoire of authoritative and celebrated works. While Mantegna certainly drew uponStephen |. Campa and adapted ancient gems and reliefs, never at any point did he profess allegiance to a canon of classics. With very few exceptions, Mantegna’s borrowings from antiquity are not cita- tions.* Antiquity was a language or a code, but not yet a familiar set of forms ‘Antico's restoration of the Quirinal sculptures inaugurated a new phase of intensive iden tification by the artist with the canonical statues of the city of Rome. The famed sculptures of Rome provided Antico with his basic lexicon of forms and themes that he worked and reworked in bronze and gold, introducing nuances and variants, intensifying elegance; when Isabella praised him for improving upon the marble statues he restored, she may have been articulating the point of Antico's enterprise in general, To a large extent, and more than is the case with his contemporaries Riccio or Tullio Lombardo, Antico helped to stabilize the “look of the antique and to disseminate it in a reproducible medium that he himself perfected.”* Like an Aldine imprint of a newly edited work by Pliny or Lucretius, Antico's versions and imitations of the Belvedere sculptures have the character of a “standard edition." ‘Antico’s relation to the past might be compared with that of his Venetian contemporary Tullio Lombardo. Working in Venice, Tullio had a relationship to Roman art that appears more selfconsciously eclectic, a calculated blend of ancient and modern elements. Any- ‘one encountering Tullio's extraordinary double half_length reliefs (fig. 9, or the one in the Ca d'Oro, Venice), most likely in the study of a wealthy Venetian collector, might first be reminded of an ancient Roman funerary stela, fragmented and detached from its original context—but would surely also notice the manifest contemporaneity of the hairstyles and costumes, Tullio was producing a cultural hybrid, in acts of artistic imitation designed pre- cisely to register the difference between ancient and modern.* Riccio, however, worked in Padua, a city proudly claiming origins more ancient than Rome. While some of Riccio's small bronzes, like Antico’s, could (and did) pass for ancient works, itis noteworthy that Riccio's antiquity —like Mocetto’s, Francesco Colonna’s, and Mantegna’s—is one of the imagination, almost never quoting directly or remaking an ancient model.’ For these “moderns,” the per sona of the artist is transmitted by the work: through signatures in the case of Mantegna and ‘Tullio, and through the occasional inclusion of self-portraits by Riccio, Antico placed the sig- nature ANTICVS MANTVANVS (see fig. 5), but in a well-concealed location, on the Montecavallo monument in Rome; his name otherwise appears only on three earlier medals and on the Frankfurt version of the Apollo Belvedere (pl. 3b). This may be more than modest self-efface- ment: itis as ifthe look of authentic antiquity were enough to declare the persona of Antico, just as the perfection of line and composition was evidently enough to identify Mantegna as the inventor of his unsigned works (such as his engravings). ‘This does not mean that on occasion Antico could not reveal himself to be a highly ver satile artist who created experimental works in the idiom of the “moderns.” At first glance, the Cleopatra looks like an idealizing head in the antique style; on closer inspection it turns out to be a dramatic close-up of a tragic protagonist—the queen Cleopatra at the moment of her suicide (pl. 53). The model for the bust is not in this case the “canonical” Cleopatra of the Belvedere, but rather Mantegn2’s imagined antiquity in the Triumphs of Caesar: the heads of goddesses borne as trophies in the ‘Triumphs (see fig. 18)" It resonates with the Mantuan court’s interest in the figure of Dido, another tragic ancient queen brought to suicide by the vicissitudes of love and politics. However, for the most part Antico’s works proclaim his skill- ful adaptation of prototypes rather than invention ex novo, and this would have consequences for his own decidedly noncanonical status in the history of art. While Mantegna is more celebrated by humanists than any other artist before Raphael, and while Fiera and the poets of Mantua write with almost equal enthusiasm of his succes- sors Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Bonsignori, no writer saw fit to hail Antico, or indeed to——eeEeEEeEEE——EEEE Antico and Mantegna: Humanist Art andthe Fortune ofthe Art Object ‘mention him at all.” Several circumstances may have a bearing on this absence from literary records, It is notable, for instance, that literary reputations tended to be acquired by artists who traveled between major centers, shared among cities and courts as valued cultural prop- erty. No sculptor or goldsmith had a greater literary celebrity than the itinerant Milanese jeweler Caradosso Foppa, who served several rulers of Milan, the king of Hungary, and two popes. Yet the literary neglect of Antico is also symptomatic of a tendency by humanists to associate “art” first and foremost with painting. Its true that Gian Cristoforo Romano enjoyed a certain measure of literary celebrity, most notably in Castiglione’s Libro del Corteg- : iano, and this perhaps lay in his own peripatetic career and adaptability to court life as well 16.19 Tullo Lombardo, are snc, 1505, marble, Kunsthstorsches Muscur, Vie as in his reputation as a monumental sculptor in marble; Leonardo da Vinci was celebrated for his great equestrian project in Milan, but he was prominent for many other reasons. Noth- ing in the occasional literary name-checking of sculptors compares with the fulsome lyric Praise of Pisanello, Mantegna, Leonardo, Costa, and Raphael. One of the most notable poetic celebrations of a work of art in this generation was the group of Latin and Italian lyrics cel- ebrating Isabella d'Este’s marble cupids, one ascribed to Praxiteles and the other by Michel- angelo; no writer seems to have concerned himself with the authorship of the modern work.» ‘The literary record is yet more slender on artisans who made small collectible objects in metal, like Antico; Caradosso is the outstanding exception. Pomponio Gaurico, writing for 3”Stephen | Camptell a limited and specialist audience, constitutes almost the sole literary memory of Bartolomeo Bellano, Riccio, and Severo Calzetta da Ravenna.» In Gaurico's chapter on modern sculptors, ‘Antico —although well established by 1504—is conspicuous by his absence. The goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini would receive poetic accolades, but not before he unveiled his monumental Perseus before the Florentine public in 1554. Perhaps, after all, the most significant acclama- tion of Antico by a contemporary is a rival’s assumption of the name Moderno, or from the hands of Riccio, whose Shepherd with a Goat acquired by the Gonzaga before 1520 emulates the older sculptor’s practice of partially gilding hair and other details, as well as his smooth, burnished surfaces and idealizing anatomy.” The Plight of the Object We are at a stage in the history of Renaissance art that throws into particular relief what might be called the “plight of the object.” With an increasing valorization of art went the valo- rizing of painting, sculpture, and architecture, and a corresponding de-privileging of forms of skilled making associated with goldsmiths, jewelers, gem carvers, enamelists, ceramicists, and other highly accomplished artisans, even as many of the latter acquired fame and stat- ure in their lifetimes and were articulate in defense of their art.°8 With the former goes the notion of art as “idea,” of the artist as an author figure who speaks in his work, and of artistic creation as a mental or cerebral process rather than as skilled manual labor; this is the view of art typified by later sixteenth-century writers such as Giorgio Vasari (generally uninter ested in the makers of bronzes and, despite reliable contacts in Mantua, oblivious to Antico's existence), Gian Paolo Lomazzo, and Federico Zuccaro, and the one we inherit from the Renaissance. The privileging of disegrto—which designates drawing and design in the con- ceptual sense—is not simply the consequence of the fact that figures such as Mantegna, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo dominated the field.»? There was also the sense that “real” art was “liberal art.” made for its own sake and circulating in a courtly economy of reciprocal gift exchange. Michelangelo famously disdained the notion of working for profit like an artisan keeping a shop; court artists were “rewarded” (if they were lucky) rather than paid a fee. Production for clients other than their prince was sometimes tightly controlled, and when it occurred (as in the case of Mantegna’s work for Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Innocent vit), it generally reinforced protocols of diplomacy and gift exchange between rulers. Antico’s Paris, referred to above, seems strongly imprinted with the notion of gift giving— Paris bears not only a golden apple in his right hand, but also a golden ring in his left (pl. 54). By the end of the fifteenth century there is a discernible rise in the production of new kinds of objects that existed just to be owned and were no longer describable—as most paint- ing and sculpture had been hitherto—in terms of a devotional or commemorative function.*° Although Antico appears to have worked exclusively for the Gonzaga and their clients, his ‘works lent themselves to reproduction: replicas, probably unauthorized, were circulating commercially by 1500.4’ One courtly patron seems to have resisted the multiplication of these exclusive objects: Bishop Ludovico Gonzaga in 1497 attempted to arrest the circulation of, multiple versions of the Apollo Belvedere that Antico had made for him. Isabella d’Este’s ver sion of the bishop’s Hercules and Antaeus (pl. 44) was personalized with her name inscribed on the base (see fig. 7), as if to make it seem she was the original owner. Small bronzes and other crafted objects are subordinated into environments created by their owners, devoted principally to the signaling of refined taste and exclusive possession, Isabella wrote to Antico about ornaments for “nostri lochi”; Antico, in a 1539 letter to Isabella (see fig. 6), promised to indulge her wish to “adorn some place with any sort of bronzeAntico and Mantegna: Humaiat Ar and the Fortune ofthe Art Object bust” Such installations seldom outlasted their owner. Movable works of art could be gifted, exchanged, or even sold, and circulate without ever bearing traces not only of an original context, but also of an original intention. Itis thus that the works of Antico reach us today. In most cases, we do not know for whom they were made, or when, or why. They are objects that bear none of their history, nor the original intention behind their making, as if their lus- trous surfaces were impervious to memory or identity. While much effort has been expended to understand sculptures by Antico in terms of the particular personal iconographies of ‘members of the Gonzaga family, such approaches are at best speculative. It seems more to the point that unlike medals, or portraits, or portable works that circulated as intimate com: ‘munication among Renaissance owners, these works bear no legible traces of the person for whom they are made—that, like the antiquities and eventually the New World exotica that circulated in the same markets, they are always already detached from their owners.” As with architectural spotia, or spoils of war, it is as if the owner has managed to capture and sequester a prized object belonging somewhere else, rather than having it made according to his or her specifications. It was the transferability of bronzes that allowed later generations ofthe Gonzaga to acquire the illustrious collections of other owners, such as Pietro Bembo and the Canossa family, and on occasion to treat bronzes as reserves of potential gifts for dis- tinguished recipients. Salability and acquisition by a range of owners precludes them from being marked as the exclusive property of one, although we have seen a pair of instances where an early owner sought to curtail such transferability: Isabella, in fact, was one of a few collectors who attempted to arrest the circulation of her collection after her death—an arrangement successful until the great sale of the Gonzaga collections in 1627.55 Mantegna was hardly impervious to the motivation of making art for profit and social advancement; the courtly “gift economy” of service and reward sometimes left him uncom- pensated. Yet perhaps he also perceived that the increasing supply of “objects of virtue” to fill the shelves of collectors, including the Gonzaga, ultimately compromised values other than the commercial. There might, for instance, be little room in such an economy of art produc- tion for the work to sustain an authorial enterprise worthy of comparison with Livy or Virgil. The market for bronzes and other objects would have evoked long-standing humanist preju- dices, inflected by the values of classical stoicism and ascetic Christianity, against the idea that paintings and sculptures could ever be more than vain tokens of luxury, unworthy of the attention of the learned and the virtuous, Petrarch’s philosophical denigration of artistic worldly goods resonated throughout the fifteenth century, in writings by Angelo Decembrio and even Leon Battista Alberti. The latter had celebrated learned artists who exercised the poet's invention but was generally indifferent to questions of making, and even style; in his moral writings, he satirized collectors as hoarders and idolaters of worldly goods.** Manteg- na's learned and serious paintings and engravings had constituted an answer to such preju- dice, reinforcing a humanistic defense of the interest in art, claiming that such was nothing less than identical with an interest in books and learning.’ In an epigram addressed to Francesco Gonzaga, Fiera speculates that if Virgil could see the work of Mantegna he would declare it to be “no empty thing”; its subject was virtue.** At any rate, several of Mantegna’s late works seem preoccupied by the nature of the artistic object and whether it might be more than a thing to be bought and sold. His paintings resist “objecthood” by being meta-objects, reflections on the nature and potential of made things. ‘The Triumphs of Caesar (see figs. 18, 25) is generally seen as a nostalgic evocation of the spectacular imperial rituals of conquest and domination among the Romans, and certainly the enormous fame of the cycle lay in the appeal of its political pageantry, antiquarian exper tise, and copious invention. Yet these paintings are concerned to a degree unprecedented inStephen | Campbell earlier Renaissance works of art with objects of artifice, displayed in profusion but according to media and type, heralding the proto-museums of early modern rulers. Mantegna depicted sculpture and craft objects in different media, including cult images of goddesses as well as commemorative statues and busts, along with carved and cast vases, candelabra, weapons and armor, jewelry and goldsmith work, painted banners, military insignia, and musical instruments. The cycle, however, also discloses a profound ambivalence about the displace- ment of objects and the violent cultural annihilation that it portends, visualized above all in the burning cities in the first canvas of the series, and in one devoted to prisoners of war, a scene of pathos that replaced a planned depiction of senators. The ambivalence thus pro- duced extends to the rendering of things, which become tragic vestiges of something lost. Mantegna confronts us with the pathos of their displacement, as traces of an annihilated fic, 20 Andéea Mantegna, The intaducton ofthe Cl of Cybele at Rome, $05~1506, glue on linen, ‘The National Calley, Londo culture, and intimates that the erasure of meaning and function is the very condition of objects being acquired and displayed. Objects with entirely different histories, functions, and identities are leveled in significance to the category of spolia, of plundered riches at the disposal of the victors, to be sold or exchanged or salvaged for their materials. A large part of the governing inspiration of the Triumphs is the theme of art, decontextualized and made to serve as a display of power—power in its most crushing and belligerent form, The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome (fig. 20}, a very late work made for a private study around the time Mantegna was completing his monumental canvases, stands as an “answer” to the Triumphs, in that its subject is the active power (magical, or just psycho- logical) of images. In this case, the idol of the Phrygian Mother Goddess seems to wreak extraordinary effects on its beholders: Mantegna drew on the poet Lucretius, who described the goddess’ literally castrating power, “carried over the great earth in awful state,” as well 40tio and Mantegna Humanist Art and the Fortune f the Art O as the fanatical and tumultuous rites of the eunuchs in her train who seek to inspire fear and amazement through the goddess’ majesty.‘ Here, even the sober Romans have to acknowledge the force of the idol. The idea of an image possessing force, of bringing about effects in the world around it, ‘was an issue that preoccupied Mantegna throughout his career and one that he explored in large altarpieces and in ambitious mural projects such as the Camera Picta.® There are signs that on occasion, in his pursuit of heightened psychological effect in his sculptures, Antico was doing likewise — perhaps in direct response to Mantegna, and to assert the special capac- ities of his own medium. Among the sculptor’s most distinctive effects were the treatment of hair and accessories with gold, and the use of silvering in the eyes: in the case of a work such as the life-size bust ofa young man (pl. 46), this does more than suggest the preciosity of goldsmith work, imparting an almost uncanny enlivening effect that has little to do with naturalism. The work becomes an artificial “being,” more dauntingly present than any living one. Although the mustache comes from Antico’s ancient source (pl. 47]. it gives the youth an odd particularity that departs from alVantica formulas, making the bust into a visionary portrait." As with Mantegna’s late pseudo-reliefs, the viewer responds in one moment to the effect of unsettling presence, in the next to the materials of the object and their fashioning through recognizing the “magical” transformation of materials, the viewer becomes, as it were, a vicarious artist or "imaginary maker.’ Yet on the whole Antico was a purveyor of allantica effects for libraries and studies, a maker of portable decor that blends in with its surroundings, nestling unobtrusively among the ancient fragments placed high on shelves. His trademark effect was for the most part the performance of a sculptural canon that he himself had done so much to popularize. aStephen |. Campbell We can see then a parting of the ways between the two artists: on the one hand, Antico as the classical canon, the maker of parergonal ornaments; on the other, Mantegna as the maker of meta-artifacts, resisting the objecthood /decor category to which Antico is ultimately consigned. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the small bronzes of the European Kunstkammern teacquired the proper names of their authors and were distinguished from each other (and sometimes distinguished from antiquities)» Before this happened, such ‘objects did not belong in a history of art, but in other spheres of discourse—those of anti- quarianism or curiosity, those that took an interest in the natural properties of substances and their harnessing and handling, and how human virtuosity draws on those properties. Yet within this refined ‘culture of objects,” the conception of human virtuosity and natural virtues is generally indifferent to individual human makers. In no sense is the virtuoso object regarded as bearing an author's ideas, or even as sustaining the idea of an author. By the time Odoardo Stivini drew up his inventory of the contents of Isabella d'Este's studiolo and grotia in 1542, such an important source for Antico scholars, the name Antico was consigned to oblivion, even while several works by him are described.» The names Mantegna, Perugino, Costa, Michelangelo, and Correggio, however, are all duly cited alongside that of the “classic” Praxiteles. Finally, in the great scattering of Gonzaga patrimony in 1627, works by Antico, Riccio, Severo, and others were dispersed anony of 39 bronzes.» ymously and indistinguishably from a group -ABNEA Ma(NJZENZAE QUT sttUEACRA IDES ("You who see the bronze images of Mantegn, know that he i eq superior to Apelles.") For recent discussion ofthe bustin the chapel see Woods- Marsden 1998, 88-97, who reviews the case for attribution of the sculptze to the artist himielé For some temps, not generally convincing, o attribute other sculptures to Mantegna, see Sgacbi 2006, » For instance, while taking a cute at the baths of Poetta ln g72, Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga weoe to request the presence of Mantegna, 0 that they could discourse together bout the cardinal’ collection of ancient gems, See Kristeller 90,527, doc. 45. When consulted about the design of 7 . ‘monumental statue of Virgil in 499, the humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano advised that Mantegna was the best source con the particulars of ancient costume. See Luzio and Renier 2005, 248-25 fessoredeantquita" see Brown 2003, 1 On Isabella's reference to Mantegna as “pro » Fora tecent assessment of umanism adits histor ‘ography sce Celenza 2004. See also Grafton 1991, and fora classic account, Krstlleri99@, 4+ Equicol 1999) 5 On Albert and the culture of humanism see Baxandall 1988: forthe text of Des Gaurico 1999 On the literary culture of Bishop Ludovico Gonzaga see Rossi 889, 305~n, and Canoa996, as~a40, “The marriage took place on fly, 1479, but the ues should not necestrily be dated so etl ould have been ‘ade in honor of the couple oer the sueceedng years. On the urn see Davide Gasparotto in Trevisan and Gasparoto 2008132 = Fora diferent pura with an Italien trentation, spective, se Allison 1993 1994 3 the neve who fllows Neptune's 8-95. Allison identi teiuraphal car asthe Egyptin goddess Isis (pl. 6b), on the basis ofa certain similarity of costume witha figut leaning ‘ona sphinx in the cameo cup known a the Tazo Farnese [sce ig. 27), owned in the lat fifteenth century by Loenzo de! Medic. The identification is enconvincing, not only because Isis never appears in ancient literary ot aztistie ass, ut also becege the representations ofthe marine same costume occurs on other more prominent seulptical figutes that were not then recognized as les, among the the halflength female figure atthe Palazzo San Mateo in Rome, believed in the Renaissance to represent Minerva See Christian 2010, 96, Given te erotic subjet ma Allison's connection of Vers with the marine thigss in Apu ‘he work of authors suchas Candin, Lucan 9 On the Mant 1930, 381~ 402: Millard Mes, “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Mths and Renaissance Poclvtes* in Millazd Mes, The Painter Choice: Problems he Interpretation of Art (New York 1976), a12~241; Morar and Vergani 992, 67743 Ventura 1995, 82187; Forenza 2008, 87-100; and Campbell 2006, 167-168 © On the reception of the Carmina Priapeia attribution to Virgil ce Floren 2008, 87-88, For instance, Priapus appeared as part of mythologt ‘al masque atthe Fereaese court i 4, in the company ofther divinities. See Sabbadini 980, 18285. On epitha lamia and marrage festivity see D'Eia 3002, 379433. 2 The Martel Mirorin the Victoria and Albert Masur, ‘London, is sometimes ascribed tothe “citcle of Antico” See Collaeta 1997, 137-139. The Mantusn goldsmith Cristoforo Ai Geremiais the probable author ofthe bronze lap with 4 Sacrifice to thas a pendant depicting a Sacrifice to Cupid: ee Syson and an images of Arymone se Gerola the ps now in the Victoria and Albert Museumqhornton 2001, 109, For another version bearing the mone: Lal. in the Ksnsthistorisches Muses, Vienna, sce Fr 2006, 64-63 “The poem by atts Mantuanusi in Kistler 190, 491-493 doc 10. Fora survey of humanist poets responding fo Mantegna ee fane Martineau, David Chambers, and Rodolfo Signorin, “Mantegna and the Men of Lees ix Andrea Mantegns (Milan, 993), 828; Agost 9938, 43-53: and Agost 1993, 66-82, Janus Pannnius wrote: “Thow art mach the prime siory of painting as your Titus Livius is the prt glory of istry” Textin Lightbown 1986, 459-460. vO Mantegna Trsraph of Cast, see Halliday 994 337-396. and Stephen Carapbell, "Mantegna’s Triumphs The Cura! Poitics of tiation ‘alfantiza’ atthe Court of Mantua” in Campbell 2265 91-205 “The Fiera poe isin Batt 2965, 27 0 Campbell 2006, 0-168. A diferent kind of allegors cal reading i suggested by Luchs 2010. This potion etaken by several of the contebutors to Trevisan and Gasparoto 2008; see exp. 144-166, Foratsctment ofthe encent ers madera” pos see Back982, 3-32. 1 For Antico, Moderno, and the “ancients versus mod cena debate, see Davide Gaspar, “Antico e Modern,” in Trevisan’ and Gasparotio 2008, 88-58. (On May 8,508, eabellscongratusted Antico for storing busts soa to improve upon them withthe “perfec tion” ofhis art. Frzari 2008, 3, do. 6. See Davide Gasparotoin Trevisan and Gasportto 2008, 196. Asis sp often the cae, the circumstances ofthe work’ orginal production are unknown, and the dating isdigpate, > On canon formation n general see Guillory 93, and in regard to talian literature, Quondam ao0a, For contover sies about imitation crea 500 se D’AmICO 1984 + Magister 2002, On the Itecary and artistic fortunes of the Belvedere group inthe ssteenth century see Barkan 1999, 233-47 and flowing. On the culture of collecting Anges n Rome, se Christan 20.0 » The exceptions are the cation of the Quirinal Diescurt or Hors Tamersin the San Zeno altarpiece around the 14608 and again in the fat canvas ofthe Triumphs of Caesar before 1490). The Bat ofthe Sea Gods ee igs gs) has ‘been seen by Vickers 1983, 97-104, a8 a Rind of parody of ‘celebrated cameo depicting Diomedes and Odysseus, % Stone 198, isnot generally accepted that Antico produced a version of the Laacob, discovered several eats aftr his sojourn in Rome, but see the discussion ofthe Liechtenstein bronze in the essay by Smith and Starman in this volume (01 56) The Goneaga souglt miniature versions of the work fom Caradosso in gh and late fom Jacopo Sanovino, See Trevisani and Gasparotto 2008, 280, © Inthis respect, Tllio was like his contemporary Francesco Colonna, who produced a comparable culral yb in his HypnerotomachiaPolphl 4499}, written in an ‘malgumation of Greek, Latin, and Trevisan vernacul (the ‘unknown artist ofthe famous woodcut ilusrations modeled one of them, showing a cenotaph for two lovers, ot Tuli's Cx'd0r0 relief). On Tullio see Lachs 2009, and the Fortune ofthe Art Ob (On Riccio se Allen and Motture 2008, and Bacchi and Giacomelli 2008, ‘6 The Frankfurt signature probably indicates tat the version isnot the original but an approved epics tis ig nificant that the Apollo's original owner, Ldovio Gonzaga pursued legal ation to prevent unauthorized reprodiction ofthe bronze. See Trevisan! and Gasparatto 2008, 208, » Asmoted by Denise Allen, cited in the catalogue enty by Marietta Cambereri in Trevisan and Gasparoio 2008, 26a, 2 As Filippo Trevisan, in Trevisan and Gaspaotto 2008, 75.56, points out, the interpretation ofa eference to the *scalpelo del nobile Antico seopitore” in he Seve of Niccolo Liburaio | Venice, 5) i highly problematic and seems to referin generic terms to “the noble sculptor of antiquity? 1 Here we might think of Gioto, Simone Martin Pisancllo, Donatello, Mantegna, Leonard, and even Costa to claborateon an observation in Agosti 998, indispensable survey ofthe literary response arts in Lombardy, The occasional sculptor and enamelist i Included in Agosts survey ~ Gian Cristoforo Romano Andes Bregno, and Riccio, mest notably—although most are cbscure. Poems dealing with sculpture ae frequently celebrations of fr instance, a carved portrait of «beloved woman, whois the main suis dete ofthe poem. Agosti 1998, So, notes the sarc of literary responses te mos important and grandiose project in cary sinteenthcentury Lombardy —Bambaia's tomb of Gaston de Fois, Can (end also. humanist sad acannon maker ina poem dosso was mentioned in company with Leonardo by Bernardo tellincion from the 490s, in Rome by the humanist Paolo Cortes around so, i the teste De nobiliate rerun by Ambrogio Leone ($35), and by Sabb da Castiglione in is Rico (Venice, 54) In Da pntura Aasigua ts48) Holanda briefly mentions Caradosso and Moderne along with the medalist nd gem carver Valerio Belli: subsequently Caradoseo wat referred toby Vase and by Giovanni Paolo Lomtzzo, See Gaspattto, "Antica ‘e Moderuo” in Trevsanl and Gasparott 2008, 90. For these Caradosso soutces see also own 1997, 9-39, and Holman 2005, 2-575. 3 For the poems see Campbell 2006, 91-102, » Gaurieo's mention of Ricio and Bella led to tix being given shot biographies by later Pacuan writer, Beniamino Scardeone, in Scardeone $60, 426-427, As suggested by Bertrand Jestaz in Morel 2003, 116: Jotaz 2003, 961-362, Se also the essay by Stith and Sturman in this volume, Regarding the reat ceramicst Bernard Paiesy, Leon ad N. Antico reports that although mentioned in many documents, “almost no word of paseo sign of appreciation for his work was issued by his urs, religious, o scientific colleagues during his own lifetime" Amico1996,7. » Aconeisoaccount of the concept of dsego can be found in King 2007; se also Willams 1997, 29-73 «© A useful survey ofthe rise of ae production for cll: tore markets presented in Syson and Thomnton aeor, On the srt matket see Guerzoni 2006, and Fanti, Matthew. and Matthews-Grieco 2003 «The Seated Nymph 30), hich appears to have been originally made for Isabella, was produced in atleast oneStephen rersan by Antics the Redford version (pl 37) sof qual hat suggests it may be a second autograph casting. No fewe than thirteen later versions are eatat, hough with various relationships to Antico's design, See Alison 993/1994 58, 13-192, 18-200: se also Stone 198 ve See Adriana Asigust in Trevisan and Gasps 2008, 208. ‘6 Such objet are tobe contrasted withthe medals and other tokens that circulated a signs of intimate attachment arnong members of Renaissance elites, The phenomeno hha tecenty been examined in PRsterer 2008. Eras of Rotterdam, writing to Peter Gilles in si, makes a wel Jknown reference to the exchange of objects a8 signs of intimacy: “Friends ofthe commonplace and homespun sor ry opentearted Pieter, have their iea of relationship, like this whole lives, attached to material things, And ifthey er have to face a separation, they favor a frequent exchange of rings, knives, caps, and othe tokens ofthe kind, fr fear that teiraffection may cool when contact between them is interrupted or that it may actually die away wit the passage oftime. lt yos and I, whose dea of friendship rests wholly ina meeting of minds and the enjoyment of studies in com: mon, may greet one another from time to time with presents forthe mind, and keepsakes of literary description, And so | send yon a gift—no common gf, for you ace no com: mon frend, but many jewels in one small book” Quoted in Jardine 1996, 430 ilanee’s bronze equestrian statuette of Marcus Autlius (1490-1495; se 8g. 9) presumably acquired from the sle of Medici property in 4g2, was given in 586 by Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga to Christan 1 of Saxony and lagen, Dresden. Se is now in the Stati 2 95 alletors who tok meas Jest 20 #08. of thei calle A speaker dilogue De po sto prevent te dsperel ions after their death, see Campbell 3006, 5. chau Desamorbe mh tenthacntary “arg of books but had no... falas Ww for be consideted that they had nothing da with reading inpbell arked, th make so uch ofthe or instruction twas strange, he et somenne a Corinthian foonze|igue in his brary” Baxandall 2003, 6 For Alberti, Decersbrio, andthe transmission ofa human ist prejudice against luxury art objects, se Campbell 2006, legibiliy” and literary nature of art in humanist tradition, soe Campbell 2006, 30-3, 4 “Si quae Aantynia, quae Coste munera donas, vidi set noi gloria Virgil, en princes, non Pituram dixie st nance, ut su vrtus non pert ula tus." Dionisot 1958, 497. The reference is to Aeneid 464, where Aeneas weeps on seeing a painting of the Trojan War on the wall on the empty of temple in Carthage —he “feeds bis 30 picture” (annum pictur posi ina), atura 2: 600-6. Stephen Campbell "La Camera Pita de Mantegna: Oeil de VAutre,*in Penser rangle Vivo de ar de, itt. Albers} Koering, and Cyl Gerbon (Paris, 200 forthcoming, see Allison 1995/1994, 257-260, ea. 39, nd Fittschen These designations come fom Malcolm Baker in Baker 2005, 129; "In the cae of the late Renaissance Dutch sculp or Adraen de Vries for instance, the processes of modeling sing are thematized within the sculptures therm ves and serve assigns of the author’ distinction... Wit artists like van Gogh de Vries, Rodin and Giacomett recog ton is made of the materiality ofthe art object in terms of {at eat implicit the beholder a6 a vicarious asst. Tiss, ‘ofcourse, the rle thatthe spectators invited to take on by he way the process of making has been staged ery explic lyin the wotk—the objct— itself” It shouldbe stressed, oweve, that such effects ate relatively rae in the oeuvre Amtico, whose works ate generally not selfrelexiv 1 or the Sivni inventory see Brown 2002, 329-346.