Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture offers provocative insights into the sculpture produced primarily in Florence but in other regions as well, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Focusing on the achievements of such artists as Donatello and Michelangelo, this volume demonstrates how the methodologies of cultural anthropology, aesthetics, conservation, political theory, and literary analysis, among others, can be successfully applied to the study of sculpture. Among the themes explored in this collection of essays, many written specially for this edition and others revised and updated, are the relationship of sculpture to nature, as well as to the cultures of Greece and Rome; the role of patronage; the development of new forms, such as the statuettes and portraiture; and the creation of public monuments as vehicles of propaganda. Also emphasized are the techniques of creating sculpture in a variety of media, including bronze, marble, wood, stucco, and terracotta.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The materials and techniques of Italian Renaissance sculpture
• 3 The revival of antiquity in early Renaissance sculpture
• 4 On the sources and meaning of the Renaissance portrait bust
• 5 Familiar objects: sculptural types in the collections of the early Medici
• 6 Holy dolls: play and piety in Florence in the Quattrocento
• 7 The virtue of littleness: small-scale sculptures of the Italian Renaissance
• 8 Public sculpture in Renaissance Florence
• 9 Looking at Renaissance sculpture with Vasari
• 10 A week in the life of Michelangelo
• 11 Michelangelo: sculpture, sex, and gender
• 12 Gendered nature and its representation in sixteenth-century garden sculpture
• Selected bibliography

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This carefully conceived volume--richer than its title suggests--aims to extend the ways in which we think about Italian Renaissance sculpture. The editor has brought together a group of 11 superb essays that, in an array of methodologies, make the case for sculpture as one of the more fruitful areas of investigation in Renaissance art. Two previously published classics of the field--by H. W. Janson and Irving Lavin--are included, joined by more recent analyses that range from studies of technique, genres of production, and objects of personal piety to the intermingling of male and female references in Italian garden design. The footnotes are a bibliographical goldmine, providing a road map to newly opened areas of investigation in Renaissance art generally. One of the important themes, stressed in a number of the essays, is that valuable information can be gleaned from modest works by anonymous craftsmen as well as from the dazzling virtuoso pieces by famous artists. Both students and experienced scholars will profit from the new charting of the field that is laid out here. Undergraduates through faculty. D. Pincus; National Gallery of Art