The Use of Sculptural Models by Painters in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Fusco, Laurie

doi:10.2307/3050215

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The bust shows all the traces of a live cast. 30 The doctor's cheeks are indented under the weight of the heavy plaster, causing his cheekbones to project. Below his jaws, the ageing man's soft, wrinkling skin is pressed against his jawbone.…”

Section: Joost Keizermentioning

confidence: 99%

Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Keizer¹

2014

Art History

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Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the Virgin and child and the infant Saint John the Baptist (plate 1). The donor -an old man, almost completely bald -is undressed for the grave. 1 By the time the Italian painter Luca Signorelli made this painting, probably in the late 1480s, the man was dead. Signorelli indicated this not only by depicting the man in a state of undress. The colour of his arms is grey and the man's face seems painted after a death-mask had been made from the corpse. The weight of the plaster has caused the man's cheeks and eye-sockets to sink into his face; and this is also why his nose bridge and jaws protrude remarkably. Signorelli has opened the man's eyes and has made him stand upright, but he amended little more. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the man's portrait is the folded ear. There is no physical cause for the ear to fold so dramatically; there is no cap or hat.Flap ears were a regular consequence of the process of making a death-mask. In order to protect the hair against the wet plaster, a piece of cloth would be wrapped over the hair -a procedure described around 1400 by Cennini Cennini. 2 There were two ways to do this. The fi rst was to wrap the cotton over the tip of the ears, causing them to fold tightly against the head; the second was to wrap the cloth behind the ears, which made them fl ap out from the head.A terracotta bust of a member of the Capponi family, made around 1500 and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which is based either on a death-mask or a life-cast, is an example of the second procedure (plate 2). 3 His ears do not only fl ap; they also miss their cavities, probably because the caster had fi lled them with cotton wool in order to prevent the plaster from entering them, which is what Cennini had recommended. Another terracotta portrait of a Capponi family member, also at the V&A, was partly made from a mould and partly modelled by the artist himself (plate 3). The face and neck were cast after a death-mask, and the artist added the shoulders and hair. 4 Parts of the cast have also been remodelled: the eyes are open and the artist kneaded the sitter's hair. The curiously folded ears, however, were not corrected. In common with Signorelli's donor portrait, there is no cap or some other headdress that would help to explain the ears' projection from the head.The fl ap ears of the two Capponi busts might have been the result of an extremely economical way of making portraits. Terracotta was a relatively inexpensive material, and you could shape it by pressing it into a mould, into a death-mask for example. 5 But the same cannot be argued for Signorelli's painting. It would have been easy

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Section: Joost Keizermentioning

confidence: 99%