Italian Renaissance sculpture

Italian Renaissance sculpture was an important part of the art of the Italian Renaissance, in the early stages arguably representing the leading edge.^[1] The example of Ancient Roman sculpture hung very heavily over it, both in terms of style and the uses to which sculpture was put. In complete contrast to painting, there were many surviving Roman sculptures around Italy,^[2] above all in Rome, and new ones were being excavated all the time, and keenly collected. Apart from a handful of major figures, especially Michelangelo and Donatello, it is today less well-known than Italian Renaissance painting, but this was not the case at the time.

Italian Renaissance sculpture was dominated by the north, above all by Florence.^[3] This was especially the case in the quattrocento (15th century), after which Rome came to equal or exceed it as a centre,^[4] though producing few sculptors itself. Major Florentine sculptors in stone included (in rough chronological order, with dates of death) Orcagna (1368), Nanni di Banco (1421), Filippo Brunelleschi (1446), Nanni di Bartolo (1451), Lorenzo Ghiberti (1455), Donatello (1466), Bernardo (1464) and his brother Antonio Rossellino (1479), Andrea del Verrocchio (1488), Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1498), Michelangelo (1564), and Jacopo Sansovino (1570). Elsewhere there was the Siennese Jacopo della Quercia (1438), from Lombardy Pietro Lombardo (1515) and his sons, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (1522), Andrea Sansovino (1529), Vincenzo Danti (1576), Leone Leoni (1590), and Giambologna (1608, born in Flanders).^[5]

While church sculpture continued to provide more large commissions than any other source, followed by civic monuments,^[6] a number of other settings for sculpture appeared or increased in prominence during the period. Secular portraits had previously mostly been funerary art, and large tomb monuments became considerably more elaborate. Relief panels were used in a number of materials and settings, or sometimes treated as portable objects like paintings. Small bronzes, usually of secular subjects, became increasingly important from the late 15th century onwards, while new forms included the medal, initially mostly presenting people rather than events, and the plaquette with a small scene in metal relief.^[7]

The term "sculptor" only came into use during the 15th century; before that sculptors were known as stonecarvers, woodcarvers and so on. Statua ("statue", and the art of making them) was another new Italian word, replacing medieval terms such as figura, simulacrum and imago, also used for painted images.^[9]