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Category: English

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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,...

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Forgery, Imitation, Emulation: the Creation of Antiquity in the Renaissance

Zur deutschen Version wechseln The database of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance connects antiquarian drawings and the ancient works that inspired them, making these relationships comprehensible and accessible for contemporary art history and archaeology. Sometimes, however, the ‘Antique Monuments’ depicted in these drawings, if they do not completely elude identification, reveal themselves to be Early Modern works of art that were modelled on the antique in their content or theme. Either mistakenly, or deliberately, they were said during the Renaissance era to be ‘antique’ objects. Given the increasing ability of many artists in the 16th century to create their own works in the style of a glorified antique ideal, to copy surviving antiquities, or to supplement antique objects in collections with modern works, this is hardly surprising. It goes some way in explaining why many objects in museums today are of disputed...

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Tracing the Footsteps of Alfred Scharf: The Early History of the Census and the ‘Republic of Pictures’

Around 1975, two greenish-grey wooden boxes arrived at the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. They contained a precursor of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, one which was only salvaged from oblivion three decades after the Census’s creation. In quest for a clearer picture of the main contributor to this early project, a lesser-known art historian named Alfred Scharf, I embarked on an odyssey across various archives with unexpected encounters. An outline of Scharf’s career was gradually pieced together, but my discoveries also revealed his presence amidst a ‘Republic of Letters’ of art historians and art dealers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who used photographs of artworks as their currency, cataloguing and indexing as their standard methodology.

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Sacsayhuaman in Early Modernity: the Invention of New Ancient Edifices

Amidst the hills encircling Cuzco, a monument of colossal magnitude emerges, Sacsayhuaman. From its heights, the modern city can be observed. Cuzco was built upon the remnants of the pre-Columbian Inca main urban center; the modern city melds ancient foundations with transatlantic models. Yet, the edifice of Sacsayhuaman stands apart, and its presence appears untouched by the currents of modernization. Silently fading, abandoned, and depleted. Over time, it has converted from a living fortress into an Inca ruin, a relic of the past. Now an archaeological site, it stands side by side with Machu Picchu, beckoning global tourism to witness the timeless splendor of the Inca civilization.

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Winged Horses and Snail-shaped Dolphins: A Broader Perspective on Drawings after the Antique in the Census Database

A sketchbook in Oxford dating to the first half of the 16th century (Ashmolean Museum inv. KP 668) is an intriguing work, not only because of its images of winged horses and dolphins with spiral-shaped tailfins, but also because of the art-historical questions it raises. The author of this codex, its function, as well as the original context that gave shape to these drawings inspired the antique remain unclear. In the Census database, the codex is listed as a “document” of the ancient works it depicts, although questions concerning the drawings themselves have so far only been of secondary importance. A closer look reveals, however, that a one-sided view of 16th century drawings as “documents” overlooks their independent artistic value. The imaginative drawings in the Codex also opens questions about how to update the data model of the Census.