The National Gallery of Art’s new Antico exhibit, which displays more than three-quarters of the Mantuan bronze master’s surviving small statues, busts and medals, is in the same East Wing gallery space that recently featured the paintings of Gabriel Metsu. The ceilings are a bit low, and the whole of the Antico show fits in two modest-size rooms. But given the size of the statuettes, most of them one to two feet tall, the domestic scale of the gallery works well.
More than most works of art, these bronze figures want to be indoors, enclosed and contained. Several of the most exquisite were made for the studiolo, or scholarly cabinet or study, of Isabella d’Este, one of the most renowned and finicky of the great Renaissance art patrons. All are based on classical precedents, but they are a polished form of classical homage, domesticated, delicate and inward.
(Michael Bodycomb; Copyright The Frick Collection/ MICHAEL BODYCOMB ) - Antico. ‘Hercules,’ model created by 1496, cast possibly by 1496 bronze with gilding and silvering
(Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) - Antico. Gianfrancesco Gonzaga di Ròdigo [obverse], Trinacria [reverse], c.1486-1490 bronze
Antico was the nickname of Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, born near the mid-15th century, the son of a butcher. His skill as a student and restorer of antiquities, an expert artist and meticulous bronze caster earned him insider status in the court of the Gonzaga family, which made Mantua a haven for artists and intellectuals during the Renaissance.
Antico died relatively wealthy in 1528, having aligned his passion for ancient art with the collecting passion of members of the Gonzaga clan. They sought Antico’s exquisite replicas and reinterpretations of classical figures such as the Apollo Belvedere, a standing nude that was for centuries the most admired relic of antiquity, and the Spinario, a figure of a boy pulling a thorn from his heel.
In his career, Antico made only a handful of works that weren’t based on classical pieces, including some early medals struck to honor contemporary patrons and a small-scale figure of John the Baptist as a 3-year-old. Everything else looked back to the pagan golden age of the Greeks and Romans, including a bust of Cleopatra and statuette of pretty-boy Paris, rendered nude and holding a gilded apple. This has led to the unfair belief that Antico was just a miniaturist, producing what we might dismissively call figurines or collectibles.
It’s hard, at first, to get all of the post-Antico antique-shop dreck out of mind when encountering his work. Some of his most striking figures were ebulliently gilded, creating a contrast between the dark patination of their bronze bodies and their brilliantly glowing hair, cloaks and drapery. This was a fashionable look for art nouveau collectibles, too, and for an endless parade of table-size nymphs, mantel clocks and other decorative pieces throughout the 19th century.
The National Gallery exhibit is arguing that there is far more to Antico than miniaturism. Certainly he was an essential first transmitter of classical forms that were thrillingly new to the Renaissance mind. The Apollo Belvedere, now in the Vatican Museum, was rediscovered only in 1489, in a vineyard in Rome. Antico made a sweet-tempered version of it almost immediately thereafter.
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