Early Renaissance Sculpture in Italy

Italy throughout the Middle Ages in certain areas had preserved an unbroken connection to their Roman past in sculpture commissioned for large-scale church-building campaigns, which were the chief occasions for the creation of monumental sculpture after the collapse of the Roman Empire and subsequent Dark Ages of the Early Medieval era. Sculpture in Early Renaissance Italy took significant departures from the church figures of Gothic Europe before them; not only new forms, but new and daring interpretations of the human form which would reverberate in the medium and concepts of the sculpted image through the present day. Sculpture was forever transformed in the Western European history of art by the developments which we see coming out of Italy. Most histories start the clock on the revolutions from fifteenth-century Florence- linear perspective and the reclamation of the Classical male nude are some of them-, but this course places them in the context of Classicizing artworks which came before; specifically, we will look at examples from Romanesque Modena and Medieval Pisa. Through this course, we will see how sculpture in Western Europe would evolve from its Medieval characteristics into new distinctly Renaissance forms. Major works in bronze and marble are covered in this course, as are major artists such as Donatello, Verocchio, and others.