In fifteenth century Italy, sculptures made of wood, terracotta, stucco, stone, cork, and other materials were brought to life with color – they blush and bleed. Some of these life-sized works have hinges in order to be used to act out a sacred drama, and others were dressed in real clothes and jewelry, given offerings, or covered with veils, so that the sculptures would not witness what happened before them. These vividly naturalistic works, made by both unknown craftsmen and such luminaries as Donatello and Verrocchio, were often treated as if they were alive, and indeed many were reported to have spoken, moved, bled, or lactated. Contemporary fiction is replete with comical, often sexual stories of people getting angry at polychrome sculptures, aroused by them, or pretending to be a sculpture in order to hide from a jealous husband. These tales reveal what was at stake in making such vividly naturalistic polychrome sculpture –the both great advantages and perils of having such fleshy images at home, in the piazza, and at church. By the early sixteenth century, for the most part polychrome sculpture had gone out of fashion in central Italy, but the tradition continued in other parts of the peninsula. In Sicily, Lombardy, and elsewhere artists who were aware of the latest developments in Florence and Rome continued to make sophisticated, classically-inspired polychrome sculpture, which acts as a kind of commentary on this understudied Renaissance tradition.
Una Roman D’Elia, professor of art history at Queen’s University, explores in her research such subjects as issues of decorum in Renaissance art, allegory and problems of interpretation, varieties of classicism, and the tensions between artifice and naturalism. Along with numerous articles, she is the author of The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge UP, 2005) and, more recently, Raphael’s Ostrich (Penn State UP, 2015), and the editor of Rethinking Renaissance Drawings: Essays in Honour of David McTavish (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015). A member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, she has received grants and fellowships from such institutions as Harvard University’s Center for the Study of the Italian Renaissance at Villa I Tatti, the Kress Foundation, the College Art Association, the Delmas Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
