Renaissance sculpture is understood as a process of recovery of the sculpture of classical antiquity. Sculptors found in the artistic remains and in the discoveries of sites of that bygone era, the perfect inspiration for their works. They were also inspired by nature. The Flemish artists in northern Europe, in addition to overcoming the figurative style of the Gothic, promoted a Renaissance distinct from the Italian one.
The rebirth of antiquity with the abandonment of the medieval, which for Giorgio Vasari "had been a world of Goths", and the recognition of the classics with all their variants and nuances was a phenomenon that developed almost exclusively in Italian Renaissance sculpture. Renaissance art succeeded in interpreting Nature and, with freedom and knowledge, translating it into a multitude of masterpieces.
Characteristics
Renaissance sculpture took as its basis and model the works of classical antiquity and its mythology, with a new vision of humanist thought and the function of sculpture. As in Greek sculpture, the naturalistic representation of the human body was seen as the highest subject, and aligned with the contemporary study of human anatomy. In Italy, profane and religious themes coexisted; this was not the case in other countries such as Spain and Germany, where religious themes prevailed.
The human body represented absolute Beauty, whose mathematical correspondence between the parts was well defined, and the contrapposto was used from Donatello to Michelangelo. It was at this time that sculpture was practically freed from the architectural framework, the reliefs were made with the rules of perspective and the characters were shown with dramatic expressions that led to the sensation of great terribilità in the feelings expressed in Michelangelo's sculptures, as in the face of his David.
A fundamental role was played by the figure of the Maecenas, represented by the church and noblemen who, with their patronage, obtained social prestige and political propaganda, and covered all themes: religious, mythological, daily life, portraits of characters, etc.
With the Renaissance, the Greco-Roman glyptics reappeared, which had been almost completely forgotten during the Middle Ages in fine stone carving (except for a few examples of Byzantine art), and from the 16th century, precious cameos of classical taste were carved, so perfect that sometimes they could be confused with the ancient ones. However, the use of fine stone carvings, so favoured by the Greek and Roman civilisations, was hardly restored. These small reliefs served as a model, once enlarged, for decoration by sculptors in large medallions for palaces in Italy and France.
Materials Renaissance sculpture made use of a wide range of materials, mainly marble, bronze and wood. Reproductions of bronze statuettes were widespread in the Renaissance due to the large number of collectors. In Florence, Antonio Pollaiuolo (Hercules and Antaeus) and Andrea del Verrocchio (Winged Boy with Fish) were the initiators, commissioned by the Medici. From the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, small bronzes with the rearing horse of a height of 23 cm are preserved. The Mantuan sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, called Antico, settled in Rome to execute bronze reductions of ancient marbles.
Wood was used in countries such as Germany and Spain, where the great forest wealth and the traditional polychrome woodwork were deeply rooted; it was used in the execution of religious imagery, altarpieces, and altars.
Terracotta was used as a more economical material, in natural colour and polychrome, as used by Antonio Rossellino and his disciple Matteo Civitali in the Virgin of the Annunciation in the church of the Servants of Lucca. The Italian artist Pietro Torrigiano made in Spain several sculptures in polychrome clay, some of them are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville. Luca della Robbia, who followed the Donatello style, is credited with the invention of enameled clay, which he used in the tabernacle of Santa Maria Novella in Florence in combination with marble to give color to the work, and later in tondos and Madonnas; his workshop, followed by his nephew Andrea della Robbia, produced a large number of works in enameled terracotta that spread throughout Europe. This has reached different parts of the world as it is a manifestation of feelings and history.
Techniques
The technique of marble carving was revived during the Renaissance, with the perfection it had reached in the classical period. From the Renaissance onwards, the hand drill, or trepan, was used to remove stone to a certain depth. This tool was used whether the sculpture was made in direct carving, as Michelangelo had sometimes done, or whether the past of points from a model made in plaster was used, as was usually done by artists such as Giambologna, whose marked points can be seen in many of his sculptures. Donatello used the Greek method of working the block in the round, but Michelangelo carved it from one side. This is how Benvenuto Cellini described it:
For bronze works, the work had to be previously made in clay or wax for its subsequent casting; it was then chiselled to eliminate possible casting defects, the surface was polished with abrasives, and patinas were added to the sculptor's taste.
Wood carving was mainly used in Northern Europe and Spain and could also be done by direct carving on the wood block, with a small sketch for guidance, or with a previous model in plaster or clay, and also by passing it through points, as in marble.
Composition
Sculpture in the round
The Renaissance adopted the basic elements that had been described by Vitruvius, who held:
The use of the human figure sought was rooted in the search for perfection in anatomy, about which many artists of this period acquired real knowledge through the practice of dissection. The first Renaissance free-standing sculpture that showed the harmony of the nude was Donatello's David during the Quattrocento, in which the influence of Praxiteles' style could be appreciated with a slight contrapposto to achieve balance in the composition. In the following years, knowledge of human anatomy was acquiring great perfection, until it reached a full contrapposto. The expressions on faces stopped being hieratic and began to reveal inner feelings; the so-called Renaissance terribilità (Michelangelo's David, around 1504). In the sculptural groups of religious character, the combination of naturalism with an intense expressiveness was shown, the Florentine serenity disappeared before the passions shown by the characters with their faces deformed by gestures of despair and pain, visible in the Burials of Christ by Guido Mazzoni and Niccolò dell'Arca. Sculpture evolved in its conception and in the compositions of its groups, until it reached the serpentinata typical of Mannerism, which is clearly shown in works such as the Florentine Pietà (Michelangelo) or the Rape of the Sabine Women (Giambologna).
Relief sculpture
In relief, architecture and the newly acquired laws of perspective were used to compose the backgrounds of the representations, as in the famous Gates of Paradise by Ghiberti or in the reliefs with the stiacciato technique for the altar of St. Anthony in Padua by Donatello. Architectural structures were composed as a backdrop, just as Giotto had done in his Proto-Renaissance paintings. Some Italian bronze laudas were transported to Spain, such as the one in the cathedral of Badajoz by Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa.
Flemish sculpture, together with that of the Germanic countries, developed a realism that was appreciated in all the ornamental details, where the sculptural work was presented almost as a work of goldsmithing applied to the great wooden altars. Also in Spain, the Gothic-Flemish influence together with the Italian influence was reflected in reliefs, such as the one on one of the doors of the cathedral of Barcelona made by the Flemish sculptor Michael Lochner and by Bartolomé Ordóñez in Italian style in the backchorus of the same cathedral. The reliefs around the sarcophagi usually represented scenes from the life of the deceased: their life, miracles and martyrdom if they were religious, or battles and military deeds if they were nobility figures. The funerary monuments were developing different phases of composition, from the traditional structure of the funerary slab or the statue of the solitary recumbent in his sarcophagus used in medieval times, to the tombs attached framed by architectural elements in the manner of a triumphal arch, and with a result similar to an altarpiece, where in the central street was the urn usually with the figure of the recumbent on it and allegorical figures in the side streets. Finally, they were made with the representation of the deceased in a praying attitude, typical of Spain and France.
During the Renaissance, the Plateresque style originated in Spain, which represented a change in the way buildings were decorated with sculptural elements in a mainly Italian style, not only in the stone of the facades but also in wood and plaster in the interiors of the buildings, based on historiated reliefs and vegetal ornaments typical of the early Renaissance (called "in candelieri") with large heraldic escutcheon and putti around them.
Bust
Bust portraits continued to be used in the Quattrocento, with the new humanistic conception that emphasised representation with great physical resemblance, while also affirming the sitter's personality. According to Alberti, the artist had to "characterize but also establish harmonious relationships". They were made in bronze, polychrome terracotta and marble (Donatello, Verrocchio, Francesco Laurana).
Equestrian statue
The life-size equestrian statue in bronze had already been treated by Roman sculptors such as the Marcus Aurelius then located in St. John Lateran; also the bronze horses of St. Mark's in Venice served as a model for the Italian Renaissance, and can be considered inspirational for Donatello's Gattamelata and Verrocchio's Colleoni. Leonardo da Vinci's studies led to a change in the representation of the horse, which was placed on its hind legs and in an attitude of pouncing on the enemy; the idea was probably taken from reliefs of ancient sarcophagi.
Italian Sculpture
The historiography divides this period between the 15th and 16th centuries, in two stages that take the name of Quattrocento and Cinquecento.
The Quattrocento Florentine sculptors
While in the rest of Europe Gothic art still prevailed, in Italy the Quattrocento or early Renaissance began in the 15th century. It was the moment when Man and Nature triumphed. Sculpture was ahead of architecture and painting, developing vertiginously. Its antecedents took place in the south of Italy, in the court of Frederick II, under whose protection an artistic school was born that already brought anticipated lights of what would be the Renaissance of the 15th century. It was the region of Tuscany during the previous Trecento period that inherited this new way of making sculpture in the figure of Nicola Pisano, followed by his son Giovanni Pisano, and later Andrea Pisano (first bronze doors of the Baptistery of Florence) and Nino Pisano.
Nicola Pisanus (he signed his works with this appellative), whose name was Nicola de Apulia, came from this region of southern Italy to settle in Pisa (Tuscany). In Pisa (as in most regions of Europe) Romanesque art was still maintained and Gothic art was beginning to be used. Nicola Pisano was commissioned to carve the pulpit of the baptistery of the cathedral of this city. He did it following the new trends learned in Apulia, especially emphasizing the classical form of the naked Hercules. This work, the pulpit, is considered a precursor of the Italian Renaissance.