What is Sculpture Made Of?

Cava del Braschi, Monte Ceceri

This lecture opened in entertaining style with an immediate reference to the previous one. Dr Dent had practically skirted over material/technique of sculpture but here Dr Jim Harris went straight into this interdisciplinary aspect with the statement (I paraphrase):

Sculpture is what it is we do when we take a memory of people. It goes to the heart and into the very notion of humanity.

We quickly dispatched painting and slammed the door firmly in its face. Painting can be anything but sculpture is better. Materials are as varied as the sculpture they make. Painting tells us a lot but the material of sculpture tells us more. At this point we could have concluded the lecture. But as he says, we would have been rather disappointed. I think what we needed was to be in a quarried amphitheatre, sat amongst the elements of sculpture.

Metaphors for embodiment; Or I'm really losing it this time

This is a work in progress taken from my latest essay but it works quite nicely as a standalone piece, I think. This series of Janice Gordon's work was on show at La Specola, Florence's Natural History Museum and I've talked about it in a previous post Hearts of Florence.

The Materia Medica/Metafisica series of portraits are described in the catalogue;

© Janice Gordon 

Gordon has constructed “portraits” using images from antique anatomical drawings, art history and nature, creating them on original 17th century materia medica manuscript pages. The beeswax that has been used contains virgin wax from the apiary at the Benedictine Monastery of Torrechiara near Parma, Italy. While “materia medica” refers to medicinal substances used to heal the body, “metafisica” refers to the aspects of spirit, mind and mystery, which transcend the body

In order to draw out some of the complex iconography, I want to concentrate on one image in the series. The most recognisable feature is the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 1477 portrait of Ginevra de Benci which sits within a profile dissected head, surrounding her face like a halo. A skeletal orange torso with arms folded is affixed to her forehead. The serious austerity of her gaze takes on a sadness due to her slightly tilted face. The lines of her neck continue downwards towards the head and arms of a sleeping foetus which lies over her upper chest, whilst figures in old fashioned diving costumes surround it. Snippets of red musculature, a curved spine, cut ribs and coloured nerves form her shoulders and truncated arms, in a parody of a stiff renaissance costume. The three quarter pose with cropped arms is familiar from other fifteenth century portraits. The beeswax marks the manuscript parchment at the top and bottom of the collage.

Ramblings about the Grotto Grande

Interior of first chamber

This piece of work has been sat in my MA file for years. However the subject matter has recently become quite popular and if the gossip is anything to go by, it's shortly to get the Dan Brown treatment. So before this happens, I thought I'd get this essay into an abridged form (ha!) on here.

The Grotto Grande, or Buontalenti's Grotto sits in a quiet corner of the Pitti Palace/Boboli Gardens in Florence and has been subject to many interpretations. It is very much a patchwork reflecting the personalities of the three Grand Dukes under which is was built. The ostentatious façade (1556-1560) built for Cosimo I began as Vasari's fish pond and decorated with Bandinelli's Ceres and Apollo. It was the partnership of Francesco I and Bernardo Buontalenti who designed and constructed the façade’s second storey and the three unusually decorated chambers. The completion of the third chamber and the finishing touches were provided by Ferdinand I (1587-92) after the death of his brother, Francesco.

The surface of the upper storey has been covered with material from nature. Stalactites soften the classical edges of the facade and there are mosaics of coloured shells and stones which picture the insignia of the various Medici dukes. Though they are now poor specimens and you have to really look for them, there are plants in terracotta pots behind the stalactite edges of the gable. There is an anonymous eighteenth century watercolour of the grotto showing large healthy plants; this was a considerable time after Buontalenti but there is no reason to doubt that this was his idea.

Hearts of Florence

It's almost Valentines Day and warmth, Spring sunshine, tiny fluttering love birds (sparrows if I'm being honest) are in evidence in Florence. Being of a romantic disposition, I found the coldest and dampest museum possible, and was immediately drawn to the stone, metal and broken hearts of New York based contemporary artist Janice Gordon.