Volume 48, Number 12 · July 19, 2001
Bronze Beauties
By Andrew Butterfield
Donatello e il suo tempo: Il bronzetto a Padova nel Quattrocento e nel Cinquecento
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Davide Banzato and Gian Franco Martinoni
an exhibition at Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, April 8–July 15, 2001.
Milan: Skira, 376 pp., L80,000
Art historians, like tourists, tend to think of Padua as a stop between other destinations. But during much of the Renaissance, Padua—not Florence or Venice or Rome—was the major center for bronze sculpture. For some eighty years, beginning in the 1440s, it was the site of one work after another of extraordinary scale and ambition, including both the first bronze equestrian statue and the first monumental bronze altar since antiquity and one of the tallest and most complex bronze sculptures of the Renaissance. It was in Padua, too, that bronze statuettes for domestic display first became popular and were produced in significant num- bers, thus revitalizing a kind of personal collecting that had been dormant since the end of the Roman Empire.
Review, 3511 words
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