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Indicative Weekly Topics
1. Introduction: A ‘Renaissance’ body? – the body as corpus, as corpse, as statue, as ‘man’.
2. Nature and artifice:
Clay and bone - Myths of origin, modelling and firing the earth
3. Effigies, robots and gods:
Metal alloys and gold: gilded effigies, pagan idols, enslaved and hybrid bodies.
4. The body of difference:
Paint - Painting skin, ‘Incarnazione’, astral bodies, and the bodies of ‘others’
5. The nude set in stone:
Marble and coloured stones - making giants, the body in fragments, the figura ‘liberated’ and analysed.
6. Simulacrum and substitute:
Wax, plaster, hair – the ‘like life’ body, votive images and casts from death and life.
7. The suffering and the aging body:
Wood – carving from the living wood, the Crucifixus, penitent and abject bodies.
8. Group presentations of virtual exhibition themes, rationales and preliminary list.
9. Fashioning the body:
Cloth of gold and steel, tailoring and shaping the body
10. Bodies in Time: Petrification, decay, destruction and preservation
Suggested Reading
Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop and Pamela H. Smith, The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics c. 1250-1600, Manchester 2014, esp. Anne-Sophie Lehmann, ‘The Matter of Materials’, pp. 21-41
Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago and London 2004, Chapter 3
Michael Cole, ‘Cellini’s Blood’, Art Bulletin, 81, no. 2, 1999, pp. 215-35
Jim Harris, ‘Defying the Predictable: Donatello and the Discomfiture of Vasari’, in J. Harris, S. Nethersole and P. Rumberg eds., ‘un insalata di più erbe’: A Festschrift for Patricia Lee Rubin, Courtauld Institute, London 2011, pp. 151 – 163 and 229-235
Martina Droth and Penelope Curtis, Bronze: The Power of Life and Death, exh. cat. Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2005