Anne Markham Schulz

Over the course of a century and a half more than forty late Gothic sculptures have been recognized as sharing a vocabulary of figure and facial types, drapery, wings, and hair. Despite the fact that all the works date from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, they were widely distributed throughout Northern Italy - from Udine in the east to Venice, Ferrara, Vicenza, Verona, Milan, Genoa, and Savona in the west. Payments for the greatest of these works, the Milanese Tomb of Giovanni Borromeo, name as its authors Filippo Solari and Andrea, both from Carona or its satellite Giona, towns in the Ticino close to Lake Lugano which gave birth to several famous dynasties of stonecarvers. How Filippo and Andrea and their numerous assistants, known generally as maestri caronesi, were linked and what kinds of organizations permitted such wide-spread activity over such a narrow span of time are questions asked here for the first time. On the basis of close analyses of comparable works, moreover, it proves possible - not only to identify the chief among these maestri caronesi as Andrea da Giona (d. 1449) - but to follow his career in Castiglione Olona, Milan, and Venice where he was preeminent during the transition from late Gothic to Renaissance sculpture.

As the first comprehensive treatment of Venetian sculpture of the early Renaissance in nearly a century, this book examines the documents, literary sources, and oeuvre of all Venetian sculptors in stone, bronze, and wood between the decoration of the crowning of San Marco at the beginning of the fifteenth century and the artistic revolution wrought by Jacopo Sansovino from ca. 1530 on. Its text pays particular attention to the style of individual works, to their physical and artistic context, their sources and their influence, and synthesizes forty-five years of attentive looking, of research in archives and libraries of the Veneto, and hundreds of photographic campaigns throughout Italy and as far afield as Croatia and Poland - many from specially mounted scaffolds. The introduction treats general questions of material, purpose, patronage, the origin of sculptors, their workshop practices and the structure of guilds, while the conclusion considers ways in which Venetian sculpture was unique. There is no aspect of the subject to which the author has not contributed major discoveries and her book, with its 800 illustrations, should constitute a work of reference long into the future.

In the first book ever devoted to the sculpture of Venices most famous Renaissance marble carver, Markham Schulz integrates all biographical data from primary and secondary sources and criticism of every epoch, with her own first-hand study of Tullios work over the course of forty years, to create a comprehensive picture of Tullios sculpture - its characteristics and iconography, its sources, development, and influence - within the context of Renaissance Venetian art. At the same time, she explores Tullios relations to his father Pietro and his brother Antonio, both renowned sculptors in their own right. The text is accompanied by 339 newly made and largely full-page illustrations, many of sculptures which, on account of their height and inaccessibility, have never been photographed before. Thus, every detail of the authors meticulous and pellucid analyses is made manifest to the reader by illustrations, which not only meet the most exacting standards for the photography of sculpture, but also provide a treasury of gorgeous images.

Author of statues in the major churches of Padua and Venice, Giammaria Mosca was among the leading sculptors in northern Italy during the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. In 1529 Mosca was summoned by the King of Poland to erect his tomb in Cracow. From 1533 until the artist's death in 1574, documents at regular intervals record important commissions to Mosca throughout Poland from the Polish royal family, as well as from prominent members of the nobility and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Many of Mosca's inscribed and documented monuments survive in their original site and state and testify to the sculptor's key role in the diffusion in Eastern Europe of Italian Renaissance ideals.In both native and adoptive homes, thus, there exists a substantial body of extant and documented works by Mosca; indeed, Mosca is virtually unique among émigré Renaissance sculptors for the completeness with which both halves of his career are documented and therefore offers the perfect test case for assessing the effect of emigration from the center to the periphery. Yet no one has ever asked whether Mosca's move to Poland changed his art. For the first time, Anne Markham Schulz not only explores the effect on Mosca's art of new patrons and materials, of different artistic conventions, functions, and traditions, but also sets Mosca's emigration within the context of those cultural exchanges between Italy and Poland that contributed fundamentally to the formation of the Polish Renaissance.This book represents the first comprehensive study of Giammaria Mosca in any language. It includes more than 260 detail photographs of all of Mosca's sculptures; almost every one has been made anew, many from specially constructed scaffolds. In addition, another 109 photographs illustrate comparative works. All documents concerning the artist, most never published before and many quite unknown, are reproduced in their entirety. There is an exhaustive catalogue of all works attributed to Mosca or his shop and a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship in ten languages.