Diana Scultori – Gallery 3: Diana and Francesco in Rome

Diana and Francesco As Diana’s career as a printmaker flourished in Rome, her husband, Francesco da Volterra, experienced comparable success as an architect. To Renaissance eyes, Diana’s association with Francesco was as important as her artistic skill. The couple became a model husband-and-wife team – a good way to reassure patrons of Diana’s womanly virtue, despite her dubious participation in the commercial realm. In reality, Diana’s collaborations with her husband yielded a number of fascinating works, among them an astrological calendar and a large-scale architectural illustration

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Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612) and Francesco da Volterra (1535-1594)
Volute of a Composite Capital, 1576
Engraving 30.3 x 44 cm
Biblioteca Alessandrina, Rome (Image from Lincoln 1997)

Diana based this work on one of her husband’s architectural drawings after a column capital in Saint Peter’s in the Vatican. Though the print’s style is ornamental and illustrative, its unusually large size and proud inscription raise is to a higher level of art.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612) and Francesco da Volterra (1535-1594)
Lunario for the Years 1584-1586
Engraving 44 x 32 cm
Biblioteca Angelica, Rome (Image from Pagani 1991)

Another print after a design by Francesco, this large and complex work would have been used as an astrological calendar. Surrounding the central chart are images of Olympian gods, signs of the zodiac, and labors of the months, along with a nude figure demonstrating the effects of celestial phenomena on the human body. The papacy took some steps toward regulating the production of calendars and astrological treatises during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and a 1586 Bull against astrologers may have stifled the production of lunari in the subsequent years.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612) after Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560)
The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 1582
Engraving
44.3 x 58 cm
British Museum, London

As Francesco’s wife, Diana became an honorary citizen of Volterra. Always the opportunist when it came to marketing her work, she signed a number of her works “Citizen of Volterra” in addition to the usual “Mantuana” (“of Mantua”), affirming her ties to numerous cities and courts throughout Italy. This engraving, depicting Saint Lawrence being grilled alive over burning coals, is dedicated to a member of the Medici family, then rulers of Tuscany and Volterra.

Diana’s Later Works

Although Diana made her reputation through large and ambitious works dedicated to courtly patrons, the majority of her prints are on a more modest scale. As was the case for most engravers of the period, private devotional works and images of classical statuary, to be distributed by a commercial publisher, provided constant employment and a steady income.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612)
Spinario, 1581
Engraving
30.5 x 21 cm
British Museum, London

The Spinario sculpture, depicting a boy extracting a thorn from his foot, was one of the most widely admired antiquities in Rome. Drawings and prints after the work were in high demand. This engraving was published in 1581 by Claudio Duchetti, who had taken over the prestigious Lafreri workshop after the master’s death, and whom Diana may have known through her brother Adamo, one of the heirs to the Lafreri estate.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612) after Parmigianino (1503-1540)
Virgin and Child with a Bird, 1580s
Engraving
16.8 x 13.7 cm
British Museum, London

This humble work shows Diana’s mastery of her art. The textures of the hair, skin, and drapery are all beautifully rendered, the hands of both figures elegantly stylized.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612)
Deposition, 1588
Engraving
39.1 x 28.1 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Image from Lincoln 1997)

Diana’s latest dated prints are from 1588. It was once assumed that her grief at the death of her husband, as expressed in the inscription on this image of Christ’s Deposition (“See, Lord, my affliction”), made her quit making prints. In fact, Francesco did not die until 1594, and the alternate hypothesis that the “afflictione” in the inscription refers to Diana’s arthritis, is equally fanciful. Diana was married again, in 1596, to another architect, Giulio Pelosi. Though no dated works survive from the period after 1588, it is likely that she continued to print from her old plates and possibly made money by selling off the rights to her images. She died in 1612.

Further Reading and Links:

Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 111-145.

Lincoln, Evelyn. “Making a Good Impression: Diana Mantuana’s Printmaking Career.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1997), 1101-1147.

Pagani, Valeria. “A Lunario for the Years 1584-1586 by Francesco da Volterra and Diana Mantovana.” Print Quarterly, 8, No. 2 (1991), 140-5.

Witcombe, Christopher L. C. E. Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder. London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2008.

http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail&entity_id=7268

Diana Scultori – Gallery 2: Rome and the Papal Privilege

Diana in Rome

In 1575 Diana married the up-and-coming young architect Francesco da Volterra and moved with him to Rome. By the end of that same year, she had produced some of her finest and most ambitious prints, and, most remarkably, obtained a papal privilege for the making and selling of her work. This privilege was comparable to modern copyright, giving Diana the exclusive right to distribute her prints and forbidding other artists from reworking or reprinting her plates.

Papal privileges were not often given to printmakers, and Diana’s receipt of this special honor attests to her fame as an engraver as well as her ability to pull strings among the highest levels of society. Four of the five prints listed in the privilege are displayed here.

Diana Scultori (Italian, ca. 1535-1612) after Giulio Romano (1499-1546)
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1575
Engraving
41.8 x 62.4 cm
The British Museum, London

Like many Renaissance engravers moving from one city to another, Diana took with her to Rome a number of drawings after famous artworks in her native Mantua from which she could make prints. In the age before photography or speedy cross-country travel, such printed reproductions of artworks from other cities were in high demand. A large number of Diana’s prints copy the works of the great Giulio Romano.

This is an ambitious work, incorporating more than a dozen figures in a highly complex architectural setting. The limitations of Diana’s highly specialized training as a printmaker are evident in awkward rendering of human anatomy and perspective; but just as obvious are her great technical skill and command of the medium.

The inscription in the lower right corner dedicates the work to Eleanora of Austria, the Duchess of Mantua. Diana thus reaffirms her ties to her home city and situates her commercial practice within the more respectable realm of courtly patronage and gift exchange.

Diana Scultori (Italian, ca. 1535-1612) after Giulio Romano (1499-1546)
The Feast of the Gods, 1575
Engraving
37.5 x 113.4 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Diana based this print on the frescoes of the Palazzo del Tè, the most famous work of Giulio Romano. Giulio’s work depicts the wedding of Cupid and Psyche and includes a rather racy image of the nude couple in bed. Diana, anticipating the censorship of her counter-reformation Roman audience, omitted this particular scene and restructured the composition, prompting the more accurate title of The Feast of the Gods.

An inscription in the lower left corner dedicates the print to Claudio Gonzaga, a member of Mantua’s ducal family and an influential figure in Rome. Claudio may have used his position in the papal household to help Diana secure the papal privilege.

“[…] the works of your Madame Diana are most wonderful, and The Feast of the Gods is a stupendous thing, so much so that I, who have held the greatest opinion of her, am overwhelmed by her worthiness, and confess that I have had a less high opinion of her than she deserves.”

– Francesco Peranda to Francesco da Volterra, 1575

Diana Scultori (Italian, ca. 1535-1612) after Giulio Romano (1499-1546)
A Procession of Roman Horsemen, 1575
Engraving
17.2 x 98.8 cm
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

For this engraving, which spans three sheets of paper and depicts thirty figures and horses in dynamic poses, Diana again adapted a design by Giulio Romano. She would have known this particular work through her father, who sculpted a stucco frieze after Giulio’s drawing of the subject.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612) after Daniele da Volterra (1509-1566)
Saint Jerome, 1575
Engraving
29 x 22 cm
Uffizi, Florence (image from Lincoln 1997)

Saint Jerome kneels at the mouth of a cave, gazing up at a crucifix and clutching the rock with which he will beat his chest in penitence. He offers a model of worship to the pious viewer of the print, which is based on a painting by the Tuscan artist Daniele da Volterra (not to be confused with Diana’s husband, Francesco da Volterra).

Diana made some minor adjustments to Daniele’s painting: the lion has been reduced to the size of a small dog, and the more of Jerome’s right hand is visible on the rock. Lavinia Fontana likely used Diana’s engraving as a source for her 1581 painting of the same subject, which includes the same alterations to Daniele’s composition.

Further Reading and Links:

Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 111-145.

Lincoln, Evelyn. “Making a Good Impression: Diana Mantuana’s Printmaking Career.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1997), 1101-1147.

Witcombe, Christopher L. C. E. Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder. London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2008.

http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail&entity_id=7268

Diana Scultori – Gallery 1: Art and Engraving in Renaissance Mantua

Diana’s Origins in Mantua

Diana was born in 1535 in Mantua, the daughter of Giovanni Battista Mantovano. Giovanni Battista, who called himself Scultori to indicate his profession as a sculptor, was a keen self-promoter who spent much of his life trying to make connections among Mantua’s courtly circles. This flair for professional networking was to serve Diana well as her own printmaking career developed.

Giovanni Battista’s choice to train his daughter in the art of printmaking was unusual but not unheard of. Nearly all the great women artists of Renaissance Italy – including Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana – received their initial training in their fathers’ workshops. It was during her apprenticeship with Giovanni Battista that Diana caught the attention of Giorgio Vasari, whose brief but enthusiastic mention of her in The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects was vital to her historical legacy.

It is worth noting that, contrary to the convention of modern scholarship, Diana never called herself by her father’s adopted surname, “Scultori.” She nearly always signed her work “Mantuana” or “Mantovana” – “from Mantua.”

Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1430/31-1506)
Bacchanal with a Wine Vat, 1470s
Engraving and drypoint
29.8 x 43.8 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most prestigious artist to work at the court of Mantua was undoubtedly Andrea Mantegna. Mantegna’s pioneering use of copperplate engraving, a relatively new artistic technique in the fifteenth century, led Vasari to credit him with its invention in the first edition of the Lives of the Artists. Recognizing the advantages of the new medium, Mantegna used his easily transportable and reproducible prints to spread his reputation throughout Italy and beyond.

Giulio Romano (Italian, before 1499-1546)
The Holy Family, ca. 1520-1523
Oil on canvas
77.9 x 67.5 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The only modern (i.e., not ancient or biblical) artist mentioned by name in Shakespeare’s plays is not Leonardo or Michelangelo or some other high-Renaissance giant, but the Mantuan painter Giulio Romano (The Winter’s Tale, V.ii). A pupil of Raphael and later court artist to Mantua’s Gonzaga family, Giulio was widely admired and influential in his day. Giovanni Battista Scultori worked as his assistant on the frescoes of the Palazzo del Tè (built and painted 1527-1535). These same frescoes provided the material for one of Diana’s most famous prints, depicting the Feast of the Gods (see Gallery 2).

Giovanni Battista Scultori (Italian, 1503-1575)
Naval Battle Between Greeks and Trojans, 1538
Engraving
40.6 x 58.5 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Though he preferred to be known as a sculptor and a painter, Giovanni Battista Scultori is now remembered mainly for his work as a engraver. Giovanni Battista used his prints as a way of marketing himself to the Mantua’s ruling Gonzaga family, an important task in the increasingly competitive world of artistic patronage.

“[…] to that Giovan Battista Mantovano, an excellent sculptor and engraver of prints, of whom we have spoken in the Life of Giulio Romano and in that of Marc’ Antonio Bolognese, have been born two sons, who engrave copper-plates divinely well, and, what is even more astonishing, a daughter, called Diana, who also engraves so well that it is a thing to marvel at; and I who saw her, a very gentle and gracious girl, and her works, which are most beautiful, was struck with amazement.”

(Giorgio Vasari, from the Life of Benvenuto Garofalo)

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574)
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
Second Edition, 1568
Beinecke Library, Yale University. Image from Wikipedia (no source provided).

When the great artist and historian Giorgio Vasari visited Mantua to do research for the second edition of his Lives of the Artists, Giovanni Battista Scultori proudly showed him the work of both his children. Vasari was suitably impressed, writing that Diana “engraves so well it is a thing to marvel at,” and praising her manners and character.

Further Reading and Links:

Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 111-145.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Vol. 2, 462-3.

Boorsch, Suzanne, Michael Lewis, and R.E. Lewis. The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985. Available online.
Note of Caution: This source is outdated. Until recently, a misinterpretation of Vasari led scholars to confuse Giovanni Battista Scultori and his children with the Ghisi family, who were also printmakers in Mantua around the same time.

http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail&entity_id=7268

http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/2983/giulio-romano-giulio-pippi-italian-before-1499-1546/

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1986.1159

Diana Scultori – Introduction

Welcome to Museum Remix’s first online exhibit! Four virtual galleries will be posted over the course of the week, each organized around a particular theme relating to the exhibition’s subject. 

Medallist T.R., portrait medal of Diana Mantuana, ca. 1580. British Museum, London.

Diana Scultori (ca. 1535-1612) was one of the most important Italian printmakers in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Diana’s works, like those of most contemporary printmakers, are mainly copies of well-known paintings and sculptures by other artists – an important method of transmitting images before the age of photography. Nevertheless, the inscriptions, adjustments, and compositional changes that Diana made to the artworks she copied give us fascinating glimpses into her life and career. Diana’s works show, above all, the type of networking and strategizing that was necessary for a woman printmaker if she wanted to succeed in the competitive world of sixteenth-century Italy. Through careful use of personal contacts both inside and outside her own family, as well as prodigious technical skill and ambition, Diana was able to catch the attention of such powerful figures as the “father of art history” Giorgio Vasari, the great Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana, the pope, and the ruling families of Mantua and Florence.

Early Islamic Brass Eagle

Aquamanile in the Shape of an Eagle
Made by Suleyman, A.H. 180/796-7 C.E.
Cast brass inlaid with silver and copper
H. 38 cm
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

The early Muslim rulers of Mesopotamia and the Levant adopted the luxurious trappings of their Byzantine and Sassanian predecessors. Hunting and falconry were central to Umayyad (661-750) and later Abbasid (750-1258) court culture, and images of birds of prey abound from this period.

This brass sculpture of an eagle would originally have been used as an aquamanile or water pitcher. It is outstanding among the numerous surviving works of its type not only for its high level of craftsmanship, but for its inscription, which gives the name of the artist (“Suleyman”), the name of the city in which it was made, and the date 180 A.H., which corresponds to the years 796-7 C.E.

Further Reading and Links:

Bloom, Jonathan and Sheila Blair. Islamic Arts. New York, NY: Phaidon Press, 1997, 123.

Evans, Helen C. and Brandie Ratliff, ed. Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th-9th Century. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012, 234-5.

https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digital-collection/08.+Applied+Arts/117995/?lng=

A Great Piece of Turf

Albrecht Dürer
German, 1471 – 1528
The Great Piece of Turf, 1503
watercolor and gouache heightened with white, mounted on cardboard
40.8 x 31.5 cm
Albertina Museum, Vienna
Image by the National Gallery of Art

A modest plant study never meant to be exhibited, this tour de force of the watercolorist’s art is now numbered among Dürer’s greatest masterpieces. The meticulous details of the individual blades of grass, roots, and flowers are perfectly integrated into the larger compositional whole. Not only do we wonder at the careful rendering of every fold and wrinkle in the greenery, but we feel caught up in the atmosphere of the picture: the wet soil, the cool spring air, the tickle of the grass against our skin – all are brought alive by Dürer’s brush.

An additional note:

It is interesting and often entertaining to compare different scholars’ ideas of how (and where) Dürer created the work. Some imagine the artist lying down by the side of the road to paint, while others ridicule such an idea and say that Dürer obviously collected the individual plants and either arranged them in the studio or created a fanciful arrangement through memory and imagination. One recent study suggests intriguingly, though rather implausibly, that Dürer dug up the piece of turf in its entirety and transported it carefully back to his studio (Fisher 2011, 119).

Further Reading and Links:

Panofsky, Erwin. Albrecht Dürer. Princeton University Press, 1943, Vol. 1, 80.

Eichberger, Dagmar and Charles Zika, ed. Dürer and His Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Fisher, Celia. Flowers of the Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011.

Robinson, Andrew and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, ed. Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2013, 134.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/durr/hd_durr.htm

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/2013/durer_albertina.html

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/the-large-piece-of-turf-1503/NgELdACk3I8Jkg?hl=en

 

 

 

Primordial Couple

Male and Female Pair
Senufo (Côte d’Ivoire or Mali), 19th-20th century
Wood with traces of pigment
Height (male) 115.9 cm; height (female) 96.8 cm
Private Collection (Image by Sotheby’s)

Among the Senufo peoples of West Africa, sculptures such as this one evoke the ideal complementarity of the genders, as exemplified by the first two humans created by the god Kolotyolo and the primordial couple’s offspring, a set of male and female twins.

These sculptures may originally have been planted in the ground at an ancestral shrine (as suggested by the decay on their bases), which would suggest that they were used by the men’s society known as Poro. Images of the ideal/primordial couple were also used by the women’s Sando society, where their beauty was used to attract spirits for divination. The man and woman depicted here carry the attributes of their respective societies, thus linking contemporary social practices with the ideals of the mythic genesis.

Further Reading and Links:

Gagliardi, Susan Elizabeth. Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015. In particular, p. 78.

LaGamma, Alisa. Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002. In particular, pp. 30-32.

LaGamma, Alisa. Echoing Images: Couples in African Sculpture. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. In particular, pp. 16-19.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/divi/hd_divi.htm

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/poro/hd_poro.htm

http://www.clevelandart.org/events/exhibitions/senufo-art-history-and-style-west-africa

Welcome!

Welcome to Museum Remix, a blog for art enthusiasts and anyone who wants the museum experience brought right to their screens.

I hope to post some thematic online exhibitions, as well as individual artwork features and informational “gallery labels” on topics related to art and museums.