Applied Arts or Ancient Sculpture? A Renaissance Gem in the Census Database
Zur deutschen Version wechseln Sculpture has always held a special place in the reception of the antique. Because of the fragility of ancient painti ng, the majority of antiquities studied by early-modern artists belong to architecture, sculpture or the applied arts. While vases, silverware, and decorative objects have always fascinated artists and antiquarians as documents of ancient life, the importance of the human figure in Renaissance art endowed the life-sized, marble statue with a disproportionate importance relative to other media. The reception of the antique in art history is, to a large extent, the history of marble statuary transferred from one medium to another; In this blog post I want to consider a special case of sculpture that has often escaped the attention of art historians, but which shaped receptions of the antique in the early modern period: the engraved gem. The Census lists engraved gems under the Kunstgewerbe category,...

