Author Description

The self-portrait of Baccio Bandinelli shows the sculptor pointing to an object that he has placed on a kind of pedestal. Among the most remarkable aspects of this object is that it is not a sculpture but a design in red chalk, a medium that few other Renaissance sculptors used. Bandinelli was particularly proud of his skills as a draughtsman, and he produced hundreds of drawings, many of them as striking and unusual as the one his portrait depicts. His talent and productivity set him apart from other sculptors of his day, most of whom left little evidence of having worked extensively on paper. This publication, which accompanies an important exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, puts Bandinelli's portrait in context by looking broadly at the practice of drawing by Renaissance sculptors, including such luminaries as Donatello, Verrocchio, Michelangelo, Cellini and Giambologna. The book surveys two centuries of material, considering rough sketches and more finished sheets, isolated studies and sequences of ideas. Comparing designs on paper to related three-dimensional works by the same artists, the book directly confronts the question of the importance drawing held for sculptors in the period. The authors, who include specialists in the history of sculpture and drawing, among other fields, pose new questions about the creative process and the relation between the arts in Renaissance Italy. A focus of the book will be Bandinellis own drawings and the development of his practice across his career and his experimentation with different media. The broader question considered, however, is when, how and why sculptors drew. Every Renaissance sculptor who set out to make a work in metal or stone would first have made a series of preparatory models in wax, clay and/or stucco. Drawing was not an essential practice for sculptors in the way it was for painters, and indeed, most surviving sculptors drawings are not preparatory studies for works they subsequently exec