Acknowledgments

Cole, Michael W.

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Acknowledgments

Michael W. Cole

Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence

~This book would not have taken the form it did, and might not have existed at all, had I not benefited from the generosity and intelligence of many dear colleagues and from the support of several wonderful institutions. My first attempts to write on Giambologna and Danti came in an article about the...

Author

Michael W. Cole

PublisherPrinceton University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00009.012

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18383

Acknowledgments

This book would not have taken the form it did, and might not have existed at all, had I not benefited from the generosity and intelligence of many dear colleagues and from the support of several wonderful institutions. My first attempts to write on Giambologna and Danti came in an article about the use of wax and clay models (“The Figura Sforzata: Modeling, Power, and the Mannerist Body,” Art History 24 [2001]: 520–51). While working on that, I had regular conversations with Mary Pardo in Chapel Hill, and the paper that became the article was also the first I ever presented at the quadrennial “Provo-Athens” conference, through which I have met many of the Renaissance sculpture specialists I most admire. The discussion of Giambologna’s Medici Mercury in chapter 3 picks up from a paper that Henry Millon and Therese O’Malley kindly invited me to deliver at a 1999 Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts symposium on “Large Bronzes of the Renaissance.” Frank Fehrenbach read an early draft of that paper and offered immensely helpful suggestions, and Peta Motture’s editorial comments significantly improved the version that appeared in the 2002 acts of the symposium. I’ve recast elements of my original argument here in response to the skeptical responses that that publication provoked in some quarters. In 2001/2002, while I was at the American Academy in Rome with funding from the Getty Foundation, Patricia Rubin asked me to participate in a lecture series she had organized at the Courtauld Institute on the naming of Renaissance artworks; I ended up speaking on Giambologna’s Sabine. The discussion in London that spring provided a major primary impetus for my thinking on Giambologna’s abstraction, and Prof. Rubin’s comments on two subsequent drafts of the paper sharpened my thinking on the artist in general. I presented a slightly different version of the essay, on Evelyn’s Lincoln invitation, at Brown University in 2004; it finally appeared as “Giambologna and the Sculpture with No Name” (Oxford Art Journal 32 (2009): 337–60). I use many of the sources from that article in chapter 3 of this book, though readers will find that the key points in the chapter are somewhat different.

I became interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of movement while researching the paper I wrote for a conference honoring Joachim Poeschke at the University of Münster in 2004, but also delivered at the 2004 “Provo-Athens” conference and at a colloquium in my home department at the University of Pennsylvania. The realization that I should shift the emphasis from movement to stillness, however, developed through a series of conversations I had with Tom Gunning and Davide Stimili at a pair of workshops organized by the Clark Art Institute and the Getty Foundation in 2004/2005. I rewrote the paper I delivered at the Getty for a second pair of workshops organized by Alina Payne at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2007/2008. Karen Beckman kindly read a draft of that essay and steered me from some of the more naive things I had to say about photography (which played a larger role in the essay than they do in this book). It was through the Radcliffe event that I met Sachiko Kusukawa, with whom I had a very helpful conversation about Renaissance taxidermy.

I delivered an abridged version of the “sculpture as architecture” chapter at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. David Leatherbarrow’s insightful comments on the De Witte portrait in particular led me to rethink my account of that painting. I presented an excerpt from my work on the Salviati Chapel as part of a panel I co-organized with Giorgio Caravale and Maude Vanhaelen for the 2008 Renaissance Society of America Meeting in Chicago and a summary of the chapter as a whole in a series organized by graduate students at Rutgers University. The book’s final chapter, on urbanism, was the last one I drafted, and I tested that out on more audiences than most of the others, presenting versions at University College London, Williams College, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and at Stanford University. I wish to express my thanks to Tamar Garb, E. J. Johnson, Christopher Heuer, Alessandro Nova, and Morten Steen Hansen for the invitations, and to all of those audiences for their comments. I reworked some of what I write in the chapter as it appears here in response to illuminating remarks from Maria Loh and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi in particular.

This book required extended periods of research in Europe, and I could never have undertaken it without the leave time provided to me at the University of North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, at a crucial moment in my reflections on the shape the book should take, I had the good fortune of being able to attend a remarkable semester-long seminar (“Circa 1600”) taught by Charles Dempsey, Giovanni Careri, and Michael Fried at Johns Hopkins University. They kindly invited me to present and discuss my project to the group there over the course of an afternoon class; that was the first occasion on which I had to pull together and speak in some detail my thoughts on the project as a whole. The semester was one I will not forget.

I could not have completed the book, and I would not have completed it in the way I did, had it not been for two magical libraries in Florence. The fellowship I held during the 2006/2007 academic year at the Villa I Tatti allowed me to draft a complete manuscript, and conversations with many people there, especially Giorgio Caravale, Ippolita Di Majo, Morten Steen Hansen, Wendy Heller, Nora Stoppino, Giovanni Zanovello, and Maude Vanhaelen, left me better informed on many topics and helped me ask smarter questions. The hospitality of the Kunsthistorisches Institut during the early summer of 2008, finally, allowed me to finish the book. I owe special thanks to Nicola Suthor and to the Institut’s two directors, Alessandro Nova and Gerhard Wolf.

Exchanges with James Ackerman, Claudia Kryza-Gersch, Evelyn Welch, and Patricia Wengraf corrected my understanding of several sites and objects I discuss in the book. Acquiring the photographs for it was expensive and arduous. I owe thanks to the University of Pennsylvania and to Williams College, both of which provided me with subventions; to Isabel Suchanek and Alice Sullivan, who helped me collect the images; and to Michael Slade and Graziano Raveggi, who went out of their way to make the job easier. Finally, I wish to express particular gratitude to Claire Farago, Steven Ostrow, and Madeleine Viljoen, all of whom read the complete manuscript; their criticism and advice made this a better book.

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