A Garden in Florence

John Haber
in New York City

Bertoldo di Giovanni and the Renaissance Etching

For a Renaissance artist, the sculpture garden of Lorenzo de' Medici was the place to be. It could have put the sculpture garden at MoMA to shame. Michelangelo went there, because he took in everything, and it reinforced his conviction that his vocation as an artist was sculpture. Leonardo passed through, too, because Lorenzo was worth cultivating.

The most powerful figure in Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent built his collection of antiquities near San Marco as a display of his learning and largess. Just who, though, tended the garden? Bertoldo di Giovanni found favor not just as the head of an informal academy, but also as a sculptor himself. He may have become a footnote to the career of others, and you may have walked right past his Shield Bearer in the Frick Collection. Now the Frick makes the case for him as a shaper of the republic's self-image, a teacher of Michelangelo, and a missing link from the early Renaissance. Could that have come, though, at the cost of his dedication to sculpture?

Anyone wondering how Albrecht Dürer astounded his peers need only look at his prints, for their virtuosity alone. He could make a woodcut as detailed as an engraving and an engraving as richly textured as an etching. He could make an etching as conforming to his hand as pen and ink. If all those media have you confused, the Met offers a welcome introduction, on its way to "The Renaissance of Etching." The title aside, etching for Renaissance artists was not a rebirth, but a novelty. And it freed them to disseminate a new art.

Two sides to sculpture

Even if you have noticed the small bronze in the Frick, you may have seen only one side. For Bertoldo di Giovanni, a story always had at least two sides. He designed medals to commemorate Lorenzo's triumphs and his powerful guests like the Holy Roman Emperor, the Venetian ambassador, and the sultan Mehmed II—with a profile on one side and a chariot or other processional on the other. Even when he comes to free-standing sculpture, Bertoldo seems to have conceived it as having, like a medal or a coin, an obverse and a reverse. From one side, Hercules on horseback looks stately, from the other active, if maybe a little bored. One can step right around Bellerophon Taming Pegasus to focus on the tamer or the tamed.

In the case of the standing figure from the collection, its dualities translate into many sides. Its very designation as a shield bearer masks how hard it is to pin down. Less than nine inches tall, the young man raises a crude club in one hand and presses his shield to the ground with the other. One marks him as a primitive man or, alternatively, Hercules (an early subject for Michelangelo as well). The other marks him as a classical and noble warrior. His features mark him as young and placid, while the curls in his hair run wild.

He has smooth, even languid flesh, rather than the body hair of a proper faun or wild man, but look closely enough, and he sports pan pipes at his waist and a horn on his forehead. He is growing a small tail, too—on, of course, the reverse. To top it off, Bertoldo made it one of a pair of gilded shield bearers, the other older. They could be meditating on youth and age, innocence and maturity, heroism and play, or the human and the animal. In their poses, they are also mirror images. Once again, they could be two sides of the same coin.

The curators, Aimee Ng and Xavier F. Salomon with Julia Day, see the inconsistencies as the work's richness. For Alexander J. Noelle of the Frick, "such statuettes were prized for their ability to inspire conversation and debate." Lorenzo's court, by extension, valued both. Then again, they could have valued elegance, charm, and a wealth of classical references that much more. Who needs consistent iconography when you are the heir to antiquity? Let your sculpture garden grow.

Bertoldo never did see things fully in the round, psychologically or physically. For religious scenes, he preferred very low relief. He also preferred life to death and playfulness to high drama. He accompanies the Virgin and child with no end of cherubs. At the base of the cross, he places a full eight figures, side by side as in a frieze—including not just distraught apostles, but also Saint Jerome at one end and Saint Francis at the other. He could always count on experts to cast his models, however fanciful, although he could then hammer and chisel away at the bronze for added touches.

Medals, too, prefer glory to specificity, but then that is what medals are for. You are likely to remember the Holy Roman Emperor's fur trim more than his profile portrait. An unqualified success, Bertoldo traveled with Lorenzo and became his favorite. He executed much of his bronze for the Medici palace and a terra-cotta frieze for the portico of the Medici villa outside of Florence, at Poggio a Caiano, running over fifteen meters long. Completed around 1490, a year before his death, it brings the show to a magnificent conclusion—but by then his career as a sculptor was over as well after barely fifteen years. He had become an old master at age fifty, but even more a courtier and a servant.

From Mannerism to Michelangelo

Bertoldo studied with Donatello, the most daring of early Renaissance sculptors—and the most influential, on painting and sculpture alike, after Lorenzo Ghiberti. He also completed some of Donatello's work after the latter's death. Scholars once attributed a life-size Saint Jerome to Donatello alone, and Bertoldo never aspired to its raw emotions again. The standing saint brings his stone to his nude chest, while his other hand falls almost as violently to his side, and his head jerks away. Together, they give the figure the torsion of a gigantic screw. From the front his hair covers his agonized face like a coarse mask. Like Leonardo's Saint Jerome, he has all the unadulterated wildness that the shield carrier leaves out.

The sculptor had his wild side all the same. What he lacks in anatomy, he makes up in motion. Hercules on horseback turns his head back while the horse carries on, and the cherubs beneath the Virgin and child flutter about. Pegasus rears with his tamer at his feet—anticipating an equestrian moment by Leonardo da Vinci by nearly a decade. (Leonardo never finished his engineering feat, because the duke of Milan melted down its bronze for armaments.) Shine a strong light on the crucifixion in relief, and the clouds come alive.

That sense of motion accords with Bertoldo's indifference to gory details. He bases a battle scene on a Roman sarcophagus, which depicts Romans versus barbarians—and one might think that Lorenzo would like to tell his own story the very same way. Instead, it is every man and every horse for himself. The opposing sides have become indistinguishable, and the relief leaps out of the plane. Arms and legs fly apart, bodies intertwine, and heads lean well over. At nearly forty inches across, it must have impressed the young Michelangelo, fresh from the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Still, when the younger artist takes up his battle scene in 1491, as his first major work, he shows just what was missing. Bodies press against each other more tightly than ever, daring you to find order in chaos—and denying you the casual delights of a horse's butt or an extended limb. They also convey musculature and mass, all the more so in that he carves them in marble. Last, they derive their chaos from a sense of order after all. The swirl boils down to near circles, centered on a bare-chested warrior at top with an arm curved back over his head. It could be the ancestor of god's gesture at creation in the Sistine Chapel.

If you did not know better, you might think that Michelangelo came first by more than fifty years. Bertoldo as ever conveys less weight, less feeling, a greater intellect, and an excess of distended male bodies. Does that sound at all familiar? It could be the very definition of late Mannerism, or what I have called the "post-Renaissance." If the artist has dropped out of the history books, he might almost have stepped out of their time line on his own. If you have overlooked his sculpture before in the Frick, it must have seemed just another example of decorative art and the Renaissance bronze.

Bertoldo defies a major retrospective, however insightful. The show unfolds in the lower-level galleries, often the space of small paintings and work on paper. It unfolds well at that, with key loans from the Bargello in Florence. Stairs lead directly to the battle scene, for a sensational opener, and the entirety of the terra cotta relief takes up much of one of two rooms. You may remember not the details, of births and deaths or days and seasons, but an august procession in white against sky blue glazing. If they tell a story, of the origins of gods and the emergence of order from cruelty, you can be sure that this was Bertoldo's and Lorenzo's story all along.

Not Just a rebirth

Etchings began shortly before 1600, with Daniel Hopfer in Bavaria. Augsburg there had a reputation for its armorers, and the Met sees him as working in much the same way. Where they applied acid to metal for decorative patterns, he conceived of the grooves in iron or copper not as ends, but as repositories for printing ink. And Hopfer did create designs for armor, but his real ancestor was the Renaissance print. He took it further, with Jesus not in triumph or pain but in thought, and Albrecht Dürer must have found a kindred spirit. One can see what the technique meant to both.

In etching, the artist covers the plate with protective wax, draws in the wax with a needle, and lets an acid bath, an ink wash, and the printing press do the rest. Engraving requires a burin, or a rod with a hooked end, and disciplined strokes. Looking back further still, woodcuts are relief prints from soft wood blocks and an expert carver—and each invention brought printing closer to freehand. Dürer relished the experiment with etching but completed only a handful. Maybe he already had all he needed in his hands. Others had a breakthrough.

They found the possibilities of crosshatching, colored inks, and brushing acid directly on the plate. They could finish off with drypoint, the free application of a needle directly to metal. They also found themselves in the middle of not just an artistic but also a publishing revolution. Think of what books meant to Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution. And the show proceeds from makers of maps and topographic landscapes to hybrid artist-publishers in the Netherlands just past 1550. Thanks to the tradition of artist workshops, largely forgotten names in the new medium could also disseminate the art of others.

The greater artists tried their hand, too, much like Dürer. Albrecht Altdorfer in northern Europe found an uncanny stillness in not a monastery but a synagogue. Jan Gossart kept in touch with the folk art of woodcut with a mocking of Jesus and Lucas van Leyden with a fool and a woman—one leering more suggestively than the other. While printers in Italy worked from drawings by Titian, Michelangelo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Parmigianino, the last used etching to lend a seated woman mass and shadow and to fill her lap with light. Once known as the second Raphael, he made a print after that artist, too. Cornelis Anthonisz etched the Tower of Babel after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, while Bruegel in his own prints used ink closer to stippling.

The show brings out an evolution not so much in time as in space. Engravers took as models the painting genres they knew, like Gossart's and van Leyden's mockery or a double portrait by Hanns Lautensack in Vienna, with city views out the windows. Italy softened, integrated, and mythologized the landscape—much as with Italian drawings last spring at the Morgan Library. Parmigianino had his encounters with etching in Bologna. Could that be why the heightened emotions of his Mannerism become something more solid and gentle? As the show turns to the court of Francis I in France, it gives way, too, to denser hatching, shallow reliefs, and stately processions.

For all the concern with religion, myth, and maps, it is not easy to sort them out. Prints show ice skaters and feast days, but also a singularly overblown Resurrection. It is not easy, either, to sort out courtly and commercial demands. Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen seems a true European explorer when he captures a Spanish woman and a moor. Antonio Fantuzzi no doubt saw his royal elephant at Fontainebleau in France. It would take photographic plates to see more.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Bertoldo di Giovanni ran at The Frick Collection. through January 12, 2020, "The Renaissance of Etching" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 20.