![]() ![]() Plaster was a material with which painters were well acquainted. All of them were cheap in comparison with tempera paintings or sculpture in marble, and where Bartolomeo mentions his sources, they do not include sculptors: he acquired one work from a goldsmith, and two works from painters 4. 7 On this shield, see Wright, 2005, p. 296-298, 526-527 see also Malgouyres, 2015.ģ Two of Bartolomeo’s sculptures were in plaster, three in terracotta one was patinated in imitation of bronze, another was gilded, and two are likely to have been polychromed.6 In his treatise mentioned below, Cennino Cennini describes the making of pastiglia elements Cennin (.).5 For the techniques of Italian early Renaissance panel paintings and their grounds, see Dunkerton, F (.).4 Bartolomeo paid 5 lire for the gilded plaster tondo of the Virgin, a similar price for the Pietà, a (.).The works this banner-maker acquired provide a convenient starting point for a discussion of Florentine and Italian plaster works of the period and will form a point of reference to which I shall return regularly in the course of the present text. In his book, The Building of Renaissance Florence, the economic historian Richard Goldthwaite takes Bartolomeo’s acquisitions as an indicator of the wide range of artistic production in 15th-century Florence that also succeeded in catering for members of the more modest social classes 3. Finally, on 23 November, he acquired from the painter Battista a painted, presumably polychrome, Pietà in terracotta 2. On 6 September he added two more works to his possessions: a Mary Magdalen in terracotta, and a plaster relief of “nude men in battle” there is no mention of their finish or who sold them to him, but one might safely assume that the Mary Magdalen was polychromed. As a successful professional whose workshop was located on the Piazza della Signoria and who owned a house in the countryside, he acquired five moderately priced sculptures in 1520: from the goldsmith Vincenzio Finiguerra he bought on 16 April a St Jerome in terracotta, painted black to make it look like a bronze relief, and on 17 July he acquired from the painter Bernardo Rosselli a gilded plaster tondo depicting the Virgin. Goldthwaite refers to him as (.)Ģ The vestment-maker Bartolomeo di Lorenzo Berti may be seen as representative of this stratum of society. ![]() 2 Bartolomeo’s full name varies in the sources and secondary literature.It was the availability, cheapness and versatility of plaster as a material that allowed it to play an important role in making accessible sculptural products for those more modest, though by no means poor, parts of the Florentine society, for whom sculpture in marble or bronze was out of reach. As a result, they did not betray their materiality to the beholder and would therefore have been difficult to distinguish from works in the sculptural materials they imitated through patination, or from other polychrome works, in wood, terracotta or papier mâch é. Rather, away from artists’ workshops, the majority of these works appear to have been patinated 1 to look like bronzes, were gilded with gold leaf, or painted to look life-like. As regards surface treatment and outward appearance, probably only very few were left untreated or simply varnished so as to provide them with a protective outer skin. Once fully set, such objects could be manipulated further with saws, rasps or files. In Renaissance Italy, some sculptural works in plaster were produced by a mechanical casting process involving moulds that themselves were often made of plaster others were modelled by hand. Plaster is a cheap and versatile material that had manifold uses in sculpture, painting, and architecture, and there are essentially two types (gypsum and lime-based), a distinction I shall touch on towards the end. 1 The polychrome stucco reliefs that stand at the centre of the present publication form part of a wider group of Renaissance works in plaster that is not as coherent as one might assume. ![]()
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