Giambologna

What makes a work of art original? How have measures of originality changed since the early Italian Renaissance? The bronze statuette of Rape of a Sabine at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College is a nineteenth-century copy of the original, marble group sculpted by Giambologna in 1583. When assessing originality, one must consider the workshop context of production, where copying was a necessary practice. This assessment becomes even more complicated when considering works in bronze—a material that aids in replication and reproduction. But by the late sixteenth-century, patrons had become more concerned with issues of attribution. Growing wary of the collaborative nature of workshop production, they placed greater value on the identity of the artist and his unique style. However, these patrons’ new interest in collecting art created a greater market for popular works like Giambologna’s bronzes, and craftsmen made copies to meet the demand. Through their creation of copies, the craftsmen were creating their own, original interpretations of the marble original.  Tracing the history of the Davis’ statuette allows one to evaluate its originality and reveals that some copies are more original than others.

Many questions remain open on the long stays in Italy of Joseph Heintz the elder (Basel 1564-Prague 1609), although it has been the subject of a rich bibliography that has extensively investigated his activities as draftsman, painter and architect.
This study aims to offer a contribution to the reconstruction of the painter’s relationships with artists and collectors, and the culture that deeply changed his painting and, through him, influenced his contemporaries in Basel and at the court of Prague.
The first long visit to Italy of the painter began in Rome (from 1584 to 1587) at the workshop of the Flemish Antonis Santvoort, where he studied the collection of drawings by Hans Speckaert, and mainly the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance (Michelangelo, Raphael, Polidoro, Federico Zuccari). It is, however, surprising that the visit to Florence  (in 1587) did not  lead to studies taken from paintings or frescoes, but only from works by Giambologna, witnessing the very familiar relationship between the sculptor and the swiss painter.
The numerous drawings of Heintz the Elder from the antiquities and the best known models by Giambologna attest that he acquired awareness of the infinite variety of attitudes that a painter could have found in a sculpted figure. The practice of «paragone delle arti», together with the precepts theorized by Benvenuto Cellini, were spread by Heintz the Elder upon his return to Basel, involving his teacher, Hans Bock, as evidenced by two drawings by the latter which provide eight points of view of Giambologna’s Venerina.
In addition to the derivations from works by the Flemish master already reported by several scholars, four more works are added in this study. In particular, in the drawing of an athlete attributed to Heintz the Elder and dated 1589, we recognize the model of Giambologna’s Ercole with the club, seen from behind, the only graphic memory known in the sixteenth century.
Reconsideration of a previously neglected testimony, the artist's biography written by Marco Boschini in the Carta del navegar pittesco (1660), provides new light on the favorite painters of Heintz the Elder during his stay in Venice (1587-1588/89): Pordenone, Titian and Tintoretto. Both, Heintz and Tintoretto,  shared the interest for the study of a small seated and naked male sculpture (from Giuliano de’ Medici by Michelangelo). The same model was also taken up later by Palma the Younger, as here identified.
The second long visit to Rome (from 1592 to 1595) of Heintz the Elder, sent, as his court painter, by Emperor Rudolf II, opened him the doors of the great collections of Roman antiquities. His acquaintance  with the Cesi collection is proved by the group of Pan and Dafni drawing, signed and dated 1593; to it is here added evidence of his knowledge, in the same place, of the Leda and the swan group, reproduced in a series of drawings and in an unpublished painting which we cautiously propose to include among his works.
The persistent success of the graphic corpus of images collected in Rome by Heintz the Elder gave rise, in the following decades, in Prague and Augsburg, to a series of copies by his students (in particular by Hans Friederich Schorer). Some of these drawings, in turn, testify about his lost ones, and help to expand his repertoire. In the same way, it has been possible to identify traces of his works in his son’s, Joseph Heintz the younger. This occurs in the triple representation of the statue of Cincinnato, which Heintz the Elder had seen and studied in the Montalto collection, of which only two printed representations are known in the XVI century.
Finally, this study examines a small painting attributed to Heintz the Elder - Venus, Cupid and a male figure - as an example of a work built around a model by Giambologna and two figures from ancient sculptures, attesting Heintz's knowledge of the Farnese collection and of another Roman one not yet identified. The painting, whose history remains obscure until 1741, enjoyed such a great success in the eighteenth century, to be reproduced, in large size, in an unpublished canvas by Anton Franz Hampisch representing an ideal picture gallery.