1

Compelling Presence: Wax Effigies in Renaissance Florence*

Giuliano di Piero de’ Medici was assassinated by political conspirators on April

26, 1478, during high mass in the Cathedral of Florence; his brother Lorenzo the

Magnificent, wounded by the assailants, escaped the attack with the help of his

supporters. Later that day Lorenzo appeared at the balcony of the Medici palace to

placate the mutinous crowd gathered there to avenge the double attack. Deadly

pale, his throat bandaged and clothes stained with blood, he spoke with caution

and consummate concern: “Do not harm the innocent. My wound is not serious

[...]”.1 The very same bloody clothes, lacerated by the knives of the assailants,

were used to dress one of the three life-size wax votive effigies ordered by

Lorenzo’s “friends and family” in thanksgiving for his safety: two to be placed in

Florentine churches and one in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi.

We have no documented trace of the image sent to Assisi; it was reportedly

placed in front of the “image of the Virgin” and coincided with Lorenzo’s

commission for the paving of the street leading to the sanctuary as well as the

restoration of two fountains commissioned by his grandfather Cosimo Pater

Patriae.2 We know, however, about Lorenzo’s ex-votos in Florence: the one

dressed with the blood-stained clothes was placed in the church of the nuns of

Chiarito3 in Via San Gallo “in front of the miraculous crucefix” while the ex-voto

in the church of the Annunziata wore the sleeveless lucco of affluent citizens. All

this we learn from sixteenth and seventeenth century sources, particularly from

Vasari’s 1568 version of the Life of Andrea Verrocchio.4 Vasari also tells us how

the wax ex-votos were made by Orsino Benintendi, a member of the most
 2

prominent family of Florentine wax workers and Medici sympathizers5, and

author of other effigies in the church of the Annunziata.6 Lorenzo’s ex-votos were

made by Orsino “with the help and under the guidance” of the more famous

Verrocchio:

[...] making the skeleton within of wood [...] interwoven with

splint reeds, which were then covered with waxed cloths folded

and arranged so beautifully that nothing better or more true to

nature could be seen. Then he made the heads, hands and feet

with wax of greater thickness, but hollow within, portrayed from

life, and painted in oils with all the ornaments of hair and

everything else that was necessary, so lifelike and so well

wrought that they seem no mere images of wax, but actual living

men [...]7

Lorenzo’s ex-votos—particularly the one bearing the tangible traces of the

attack—clearly reflected a devotional intent, and, as stressed in the official

literature, served to give thanks to God for his deliverance, to render his gratitude

permanent and public through eternal adoration. But the votive offerings,

appropriate for the occasion, were also manifestly a tool of political

representation. Lorenzo, whose lineage and political shrewdness had made him de

facto ruler of Florence, had arguably chosen this extremely realistic and popular

medium for political reasons: he was advertising his survival and consolidating

his standing in the city by association with former generations of Medici and their
 3

civic role.8 The wax ex-votos—particularly the one in the Annunziata—were not

just votive offerings, but also visible and prominent displays of civic status and of

enduring political eminence for Lorenzo and his lineage.

The medium of wax, long associated in Florentine popular and elite culture with

representational strategies of substitution for the votary, shaped reception in

unique ways: the expressive force of the colored wax allowed for a degree of

verisimilitude that conveyed an undeniable physical presence; the full impact of

plastic realism created a simulacrum that carried associations of civic stature and

had the performative effect of a “double”. In the discussion of Lorenzo’s effigies,

as well as those of other votaries represented in the Annunziata, the comparison

with sympathetic magic—underpinning votive and honorary functions—is thus

inevitable and irresistible and has its precedents in the works of Aby Warburg and

Julius von Schlosser, and recently of David Freedberg in his Power of Images.9

Although not contesting the magical or pseudo-magical attributes of life-size wax

portraits, nor arguing against the votive import of the effigies, the aim of this

paper is to nuance the boundaries between devotional, honorary, and funerary

sculpture in Florentine Renaissance tradition. Furthermore, I intend to foreground

some of the questions pertaining to life impressions and extremely realistic

polychrome sculpture and re-inscribe the power of verisimilitude into the history

of Renaissance art and its aesthetic theory. As once recognized by Warburg and

articulated by others, the practice of the Annunziata ex-votos reveals an “aesthetic

hinge” ignored by contemporary scholars of Florentine sculpture who privilege

portraiture not produced by an impression and formally far from the integral
 4

naturalism displayed by the wax effigies.10 Following this approach, my paper

aims at blurring rigid functional and aesthetic categories pertaining to our modern

sensitivities that are in apparent contradiction with historical documents, thus

adding a further layer to Italian artistic and cultural phenomena all too often

relegated to condescending categories like the “vernacular”. Most important, the

focus of this essay is the affirmation of the power of wax as a medium and its

successful employment in the artistic rhetoric of mimesis; a power obscured by

strata of the excessively popular connotations wax has acquired in contemporary

visual culture that vacate the artistic import of verisimilitude.

Although coeval sources describe the now-forgotten practice of making life-size,

clothed mannequins for devotional purposes as a thriving industry in many cities,

in this essay I will use the votive effigies in the Annunziata as a phenomenon

whose documentary richness and relatively circumscribed nature render it a

unique case study in the artistic, religious, and cultural practices of early modern

Italy. The use of wax ex-votos had been popular in Florence at least since the

beginning of the thirteenth century, when Boccaccio mentions the popular custom

of offering one’s image in wax in the Decameron.11 In 1304 Dino Compagni

provides one of the first testimonies of the existence of “many wax images” in the

oratorio dell’Orto—the present Orsanmichele—where a popular icon of the

Virgin was painted.12 This miraculous image increased in popularity during the

great plague of 134813 and in 1365 the Virgin was declared “special advocate of

the Republic”. By this time it had become customary for members of the major

guilds—heirs to the political and social stature of the dismantled aristocracy—to

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send arms, crests, and standards to the newly rebuilt Orsanmichele and other

important churches14 once a year as a sign of public “presence” and devotion in

the name of the entire community.15 In Orsanmichele the privilege of placing

arms was later extended to members of the minor guilds, and then the popolo

minore—who had no right to arms—“invented a new offering, quite different

from the first, and introduced boti, votive figures portrayed al naturale, life size,

with heads and hands of painted wax, with hats, and clothes, and any other

ornament that was fashionable in those days [...] and many churches were filled

with these [...].”16 The tempting implication that the life-size effigies were a

spontaneous expression of the classes with no political power of representation

may simply reflect a popular use of wax offerings as opposed to more prestigious

and restricted votive and devotional forms. Wax images, long used as votive

offerings, appear in this context as extensions of the concept of public “presence”

in communal spaces, part of the network of non-verbal communication that

characterized much of civic life in the early modern city. Wax had long been

assimilated into Florentine civic rituals as representative of individuals and

political entities: coeval sources mention single offerings of wax in the form of

images, candles, “ribbons”, or in bulk, while public offerings (sometimes in the

form of gilt and sculpted “towers”) were given as tributes by the four quarters of

the city, the guilds, and subject city-states during religious rituals and holy

feasts.17 In literature, the similitude between wax and life form is conveyed both

as direct metaphor or conceptual construction of the material as a platonic

“mirror”. The use of wax in literature as a rhetorical figure for individuals si

 6

exemplified by Francesco Berni’s famous description of the Archbishop of

Florence, Andrea Buondelmonte, who appeared so “thin, light, yellow and

hollow” that he had to run away from wax-makers for fear of being mistaken for

an ex-voto.18 Probably attesting to a common similitude, Dante mentions wax in

several instances in his Divina Commedia, mostly as a malleable substance on

which one may impress a sign or features or even life force as in the terzine of the

Paradiso where he elevates wax to a platonic (and thus indexical) matter

impressed by an invisible essence.19

Wax ex-votos placed in front of the miraculous image in Orsanmichele included

objects, animals, anatomical fragments, and whole human figures. Sacchetti cites

the church of Orsanmichele as one of the five most prominent votive churches in

Florence and then tells us how, in the course of the Trecento, other churches lost

their popularity and were replaced by the church of the Annunziata, which

became the leading votive sanctuary and later also the center for the production of

wax.20 In the early Quattrocento the Florentine Signoria took steps to

accommodate the increasingly popular cult of the image into the civic tradition

and by the middle of the fifteenth century the Annunziata was so popular that, in

spite of the limitation that restricted life-size offerings, the church was full of

votive effigies—including an extraordinary amount of life-size wax figures [voti

in figura] which crowded the space and endangered the structural integrity of the

building.21 The increasing revenues from alms22 and new patronage supported an

ambitious building campaign to accommodate the votive donations: the program,

initially overseen by Michelozzo, lasted roughly seventy years and started in

 7

1445—the same year as Cosimo’s tenure as Gonfaloniere. That year the

Florentine Signoria declared the cult at the Santissima Annunziata a “matter of

great concern to the state” and appropriated the administration of the church,

retaining the right to nominate the operai23 and to maintain and manage the

income from “[the] many oblations and many gifts brought to that church and its

chapel.”24 The lay office of the operai was held by males over twenty-five who

had rights of patronage in the church, and Cosimo’s son Piero, who had been

appointed in the first group in 1445, was subsequently excluded from the office as

he lacked right of patronage. The privilege was acquired two years later, when

Piero, who was eventually appointed operaio in 1453, paid for a new marble

tabernacle housing the miraculous image of the Virgin, the neighboring Oratory,

and the side doorway that from the cloister leads into the nave of the church.25

[MAP??] The enterprise signals a new and conspicuous financial involvement for

the Medici in a church and for a cult that had rapidly grown to great civic import:

indeed Cosimo’s patronage at the Annunziata had originally been limited to 100

florins—an inconsequential sum compared to the figures invested in the same

years in a patronage network covering the Medicean areas of the city and of its

surroundings.26 Aside from direct patronage from Cosimo and his family, most of

the major contributions to the Annunziata project came from Medicean friends,

extended clansmen and political allies, including Giovan Francesco Gonzaga and

his son Ludovico, who paid for the High Altar and the tribuna built by

Michelozzo.27
 8

By the early sixteenth century the church had become central to Marian devotion

and thousands votive objects crowded the church.28 In addition to voti in papier-

mâché and precious metals,29 wax anatomical parts, and painted tablets, 600 full-

size figures occupied the nave, the side aisles, and the upper galleries and were

suspended from the ceiling. They were arranged chronologically and according to

a map of geographical identity, in descending order of importance starting with

those in close proximity to the altar, and dressed according to rank and social

“dignity”.30 On the one side were the effigies of the noble and notable Florentines

in lay clothes (con Lucchi e Vesti talari addosso alla Civile)31 from the ancient

glories of the city to contemporary citizens. On the other side were illustrious

foreigners: aristocrats, at least six popes with ricchi Piviali and Regni in capo,

cardinals with the purple (particularly those associated with the Servites),32

emperors, kings, and nobles.33 Eminent warriors were represented in full armor,

including Pippo Spano who was wearing a cuirasse with the black stripes of his

arms, and some even on horseback34; literary heroes, such as Dante, were also

among the glories of the city.35 There was also a Turkish pasha, who, in spite of

his different religion, had deemed it prudent to guarantee his safe return home

with the help of the votive offering.36

Together with portraits of political allies and religious personalities, the

Annunziata was thus housing an impressive three-dimensional gallery of the past

and present civic heroes of the city of Florence. Much of the contemporary

literature hints at the edifying nature of the spectacle, including Ferdinando

Leopoldo Del Migliore who articulated it in his seventeenth century description of

 9

the church and its contents: the effigies (particularly of the Florentines), organized

by class, political relevance and historical moment, were meant to inspire “first

devotion, then reverence and veneration” for the great men represented there.37

The display of the Florentine notables, included in the itinerary of every state

visitor in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,38 had great civic import as it

responded to a perceived desire for the descendents to know the appearance of

famous individuals.39 The monumental representation of characters from a recent

and historical past outside the framework of narrative action or reciprocal

interaction is the seminal idea behind the many cycles of Viri Illustres modeled on

ancient prototypes and popular in Florence and Italy at least since the Trecento.40

Although a linear genealogy between the cycles of Uomini Famosi—essentially

pictorial reinterpretations of ancient literary traditions—and the Annunziata

effigies is outside the scope of this work, the insertion of the votive figures within

the tradition of representation and celebration of civic heroes can better

contextualize the phenomenon and its impact on the viewers. Far from displaying

the taxonomic intents of the museum, the Annunziata interior was a stage

designed for the performance of the social ritual of historic memory and civic

conscience, a setting that inflected Lorenzo’s ex-voto with heavier political

connotations than those intrinsic in the image. Lorenzo’s Florentine effigies were

thus commissioned and placed to maximize their potential effect: the one with the

strongest votive consequence, with the stained clothes that represented the traces,

the “relics” of the failed attack, was placed in front of the miraculous crucifix of

Chiarito. The ex-voto with the abito civile, however, was not placed in front of
 10

the Annunciate Virgin among the other Florentines with the lucco, but outside the

space of the church proper, kneeling in prayer on a silver platform in front of the

small door commissioned by his father and above the stand that sold candles and

mass-produced wax voti.41 The physical proximity to familial commissions

invited direct associations with Piero, once operaio of the Annunziata, and with

Cosimo’s implicit influence in the cult and church of the Annunziata. The

positioning of Lorenzo’s effigy thus arguably meant to trace a symbolic lineage

with his family, whose political function and public offices defined the family’s

civic role. The association of the image to the traces of his father’s and

grandfather’s civic contributions staged Lorenzo’s civic status while his

lifelikeness and the lucco transposed him into the realm of the present and

associated him to the nearby Florentine glories. The mimetic resonance of the life

cast made by Orsino bespoke of the dignitas of full physiognomic representation

and, together with rank-specific clothes, enhanced the sense of presence of the

effigy and its role as simulacrum of the living.

It is difficult to determine how many of the wax effigies were modeled after a life

(or even a death) mask, and how often the recognition of the votary may have

rested on physiognomic features rather than being constructed through physical

objects or popular perception. The literature is vague in describing the effigies,

although there are specific references that attest to diverse practices. While

Vasari’s description of the effigies “naturali e tanto ben fatti che rappresentano

non più omini di cera ma vivissimi” hints at a life mask and conformity to the

original, other testimonies prove a lack of physiognomic veracity. In 1464, for

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example, the Duke of Milan had asked his ambassador to verify whether his

father’s effigy in the Annunziata could be used as a model for a portrait and but

was told that it not to have “any conformity” to his features.42 It may thus be

inferred that the effigies in the Annunziata were of diverse artistic quality and

made with different techniques, spanning a wide range of mimetic intents: life and

death casts, waxes modelled from painted portraits or medals and even generic

types that may have acquired meaning through “physical objects implicated in the

votive crisis”.43 Indeed, the average image may have been undistinguished and

exchangable with others, as indicated by the anecdote of the Servite sacristan who

had sold an effigy from the church and taken money for it as though it were

new.44 The employment of a life cast and of the most celebrated artists—together

with the placement of the image—can demonstrably be considered as strategies to

maximize the effect of Lorenzo’s effigy, and the high degree of verisimilitude

certainly impacted the visual message.

Extremely realistic votive and commemorative effigies were popular in other

Italian cities but nowhere, it seems, did the phenomenon reach the magnitude,

artistic competence, and degree of verisimilitude of the wax effigies in the

Annunziata. The artistic primacy of the Florentine waxmakers—albeit short

lived—is attested in the sources and its later demise lamented as a civic loss.45

The few payment records we have—both from Florence and from the neighboring

sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato46—indicate that full size wax ex-

votos may have been rather pricey, particularly when they involved accomplished

artists to model and paint the three-dimensional portraits.47 While, on the one
 12

hand, mass-produced and low cost votive items were within the financial

possibility of most faithful, there is every indication that the life-size effigies

taken from life were not only exclusive but rather expensive, particularly when

individual artistic skills were involved in the decoration.48 Already in the late

Trecento, Cennino Cennini described the technique of making live “impressions”

or plaster casts and explained how to differentiate the gesso mixture, using rose

water for aristocrats, popes, kings, and emperors, and regular water for anybody

else. In this manner the artist could obtain la effigia o ver la fisionomia o vero

imprenta di ciascuno gran signore.49 Cennini describes the technique, which he

traced to ancient customs, for faces and for whole figures and the resulting

impression could be cast in metal or wax.50 He believed the cast al naturale to be

the true secret of ancient art, a conviction likely derived from Pliny’s Naturalis

Historia, accessible to him in the Paduan circle around Petrarca.51 Pliny had

complained about the decay of the image al naturale in his own time, a belief that

mirrored Cennini’s own and that the latter seems to have adopted it in its

theoretical stance as well as in technical details.52

After the destruction of the Annunziata waxes in the 1630s, there are few extant

examples that can be firmly anchored to the Renaissance practice of life

impression:53 one of these is the bust of Giovanni de’ Medici (son of Lorenzo and

later Pope Leo X) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. [fig X ca. 1512] The bust

has been recently attributed to Orsino’s son, Antonio de’ Benintendi,54 who is also

said to have produced votive images of Leo X for S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato

in 1515 and 1524 and a bust of the pope for Siena in 1526.55 Cleaning and
 13

restoration of the bust have revealed that the face was modeled after a life cast,56

perhaps the same life cast used for the wax immagine di Leone X con un breve in

mano placed in the Servite church in September 27, 1513,57 just six months after

Giovanni had been elected.58 The rendering of the Cardinal’s fleshy face, double

chin, and uncompromisingly stout features implies a desire for recognition and an

investment in physical accuracy easily achievable with cast techniques. The

casual stance, set mouth, and cast eyes bespeak of a desire for approximation to

life; the original coloring in egg tempera and oil applied in the “wet on wet”

technique allows for a subtle blending of colors that alludes to practices employed

for wax. Indeed, already in Vasari’s association of Orsino to the workshop of

Verrocchio we had found a suggestion that the wax maker and his trade had

surpassed artisanal status to attain the dignity of artist,59 probably also thanks to

the assimilation of cast techniques to the art of portraiture. It is thus not

coincidental that the emergence of the Florentine portrait bust should be

connected with the practice of reworked masks.60 The formal appearance of

Giovanni de’ Medici’s portrait hints at an interest in realism with no concession to

idealization but revealing great artistry and command of material and technique at

the service of physiognomic potency.61 The use of rank-specific clothes and the

cardinal cap situate him in his official ecclesiastical dignity and help identify

him.62 The slight forward bend of the Cardinal’s neck and lack of finish in the

back suggest that the bust may have been intended for a niche or a shelf against a

wall, in accordance to Florentine practices according to the ubiquitous Vasari; he

tells us that the cast technique was largely employed for effigies of dead family
 14

members, and that the heads could be seen “in every house on mantelpieces,

windowsills, doorways, windows, and moldings”. According to Vasari, the heads

were reworked and they were “so well done and life-like that they look[ed]

alive.”63 Similarly, the heads of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici and of his wife, once

displayed above two doorways in Piero’s room in Palazzo medici and seen by

Vasari in the guardaroba of Duke Cosimo, were described as al naturale and very

life-like.64 Although Vasari wrongly credits Verrocchio for the popularization of

the casts65— we know casts were used not only by Cennini, but also by Ghiberti,

Donatello, the Da Maino, the Della Robbia, Baccio da Montelupo and others66—

he prizes the “true portraits” by stressing their exact likeness and equating wax

masks to live presence. It is likely that the death masks, reworked as they were,

displayed in many cases a combination of physiognomic strategies and outside

referents similar to the portrait of Giovanni de’ Medici and already discussed for

the ex-votos in the Annunziata.

Masks were used to create sculptural galleries of family ancestors in the houses of

the Florentine oligarchy, a custom that mirrors the practice of displaying wax

ancestor portraits in Republican Rome.67 The Roman imagines possessed “no

connections with magic and the spirit world” but had a political function and a

public use.68 Modeled from life when a family member attained office69 they

functioned as reminders of the “social standing and influence of office-holding

families”. Normally displayed in the family atrium, where they were “an integral

part of everyday life in the household”, ancestor masks were occasionally worn

by actors with rank-specific clothes to impersonate the deceased during funerary

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rituals and were an essential part of political life as agents in the re-enactment of

the ancestors in the their office.70 In Florence, life and death masks have been

similarly connected to a new sense of history and dynastic importance, as well as

the emergence of portraiture and an intense love for realistic details.71 In his

moral dialogue De vera nobilitate (1440), the Florentine erudite Poggio

Bracciolini assigns to Lorenzo the Magnificent the statement that “the ancients

used to decorate their homes, villas, gardens, arcades and gymnasia with imagines

of their deceased ancestors to glorify their own name and their lineage”72. The

dialogue is set in Poggio’s villa at Terranova and the proclamation refers to the

collection of ancient fragments that decorated Poggio’s home and garden “as he

did not have any image of his ancestors”.73 Even though referring to marble in

the particolar context of the dialogue, the statement attests to the knowledge of

ancient customs, as well as to a connection between the possession of ancestral

portraits, nobility of lineage, and a concern with portraiture as a manifestation of

the pursuit of fame. A similar concept is expressed in Pomponius Gauricus’ De

Sculptura—printed in Florence in 1504—where the author cites the Roman use of

ancestral portraits in atria and processions as part of a discourse on the elevating

nature of portraits. The imagines of those who distinguished themselves with

great deeds attest to their nobility and inspire emulation; in Rome, continues

Gauricus, the number of private and public statues equalled that of real people,

and on library shelves there were more busts than books.74 Gauricus’ account of

the Roman effigies—based as it was on Sallust, Ovid, Pliny, Valerius Maximus,

and others75—was a liberal interpretation of ancient sources that do not describe

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the spectacle in such grand terms but rather emphasize the resemblance of the

imagines to the original and their ennobling examplarity. The appearance of these

ancient portraits76 is highly speculative although the survival of their principal

characteristics in commemorative marbles of the Empire is certain, as the latter

bear a combination of naturalistic, individualized features, and a format associated

with honorific sculpture. A similar phenomenon has been noticed in Florentine

Renaissance portrait busts, where the practice of life and death cast probably

helped artists develop new techniques at the aid of their intense fascination with

realism.

As argued recently, the destruction of the wax effigies has prevented art historians

from capturing the effective value of works appreciated by their contemporaries

as the apex of illusionistic naturalism integral to the aspirations of large part of

Renaissance plastic production.77 Dim but legible traces of their appearance can

be discerned in Quattrocento and Cinquecento portraiture produced in Florence or

under its artistic influence and demonstrably derived from a mold. The tradition

may have initiated with Donatello, whose bust of Niccolò da Uzzano (1433) is the

first known three-dimensional portrait to incorporate a reworked mask.78 The

protruding cheek and jaw bones, the sunken eyes, pronounced nose bridge and

slightly open mouth of the famous Florentine have been alternatively read as signs

of a death or life mask.79 It is impossible to ascertain on the base of current

documentation if Donatello used a death mask; its signs—detectable in the visible

stiffening of the muscles and in relaxation of the flesh now effected by the force

of gravity without nervous stimuli—would in any case be erased by Donatello’s

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genial manipulation of the head and bust. The impression of animation pivots on

the intervention of the artist on the mask and on the lateral, upturned twist of

Niccolò’s head and the rise of the left shoulder. Donatello’s understanding of

anatomy and of the muscular frame of the face allowed for a natural intervention

on the facial features and a smooth transition of the neck and shoulder, to the

point that it is difficult to determine where “the cast ends and the artist’s creation

of the neck begins”.80 The impression of life is enhanced by the heavy lidded

eyes, carved open by the artist who also added the iris and pupil. As one of the

most active defenders of the Florentine republic, Niccolò da Uzzano is portrayed

by Donatello in a fashion that imitates the Roman republican formats, including a

garment made of “gesso-stiffened real cloth drapery” at the service of naturalism.

Once mounted an a high base that modified the viewing angle favoring the

drapery,81 the portrait once again reveals the civic undertones of Florentine

portraiture and an interest in realism enhanced by skilled coloring into the

compelling image of a seventy-three year old man, whose facial texture even

reveals signs of slight stubble under the skin.82

The terracotta bust of Henry VII in the Victoria and Albert Museum [fig. X ca.

1509] and his effigy in Westminster [fig X 1509]—nearly identical and probably

both by Pietro Torrigiani—are two further examples of portraits by a Florentine

artist derived from a mold.83 In this case, the use of a death masks is almost

certain, as the expense for an effigy was recorded for the funeral of the king; the

effigy was dressed in regalia and used in the ritual as customary part of the pomp

that the crown displayed for the support of its own dynastic continuation vis-à-vis
 18

any eventual usurpers or pretenders.84 Henry’s death mask, whose resemblance to

the deceased would have been enhanced by a wig of real hair and clothes, was

partially reworked to minimize the characteristics of death. Nevertheless the

effigy’s “sunken upper lip, the lopsided mouth, the hollow cheeks and and tightly

set jaw, are all the features of a cadaver,”85 an impression compounded by the

projecting cheekbones and the stiffness of the neck muscles. These features

appear “fleshed out” in the terracotta bust in the Victoria and Albert Museum:

here the artist has successfully enlivened the funerary effigy. The graceful turn of

the head and slightly downward glance, together with a softening of the facial

features, remove the bust one step further from the impression of death and

consigns it to the artistry of sculptural portraiture. The difference between the two

busts is subtle but noticeable, and likely to be a result of the different

circumstances of reception. The Bust of a scholar or prelate, (1545) FIG XX]

attributed to an anonymous pupil of Torrigiani on the very basis of the death mask

technique,86 allows for a comparison with a death mask that has not been carefully

reworked, or whose maker did not possess the skills to render the impression of

movement and of liveliness as Donatello and Torrigiani had done. The face of the

prelate is drawn back by the loss of muscle tone and the now prominent bone

structure is clumsily concealed by overly padded cheeks hardly consistent with

the underlining bone structure. As a result of the unrealistic widening of the face

the eyes appear too close, and the intervention of the artist and the coloring of the

pupils fail to convey the impression of a live gaze.

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Similar to the Florentine portraits in terms of “integral realism” and known votive

and honorific connotations are Guido Mazzoni’s portraits inserted in his

sculptural tableaux, particularly in the Bewailing Groups in Ferrara and Naples.87

The Ferrara tableau, executed around 1485 for the church of Santa Maria della

Rosa,88 portrays the donor, Ercole I d’Este, and his wife Eleonora of Aragon as

Joseph of Arimatea and Mary of Cleofa. The group was commissioned at a time

of political uncertainty in Ferrara when the health of its duke was failing. Thus, it

is to be understood as a votive presentation in the religious context of suffering

and passion, and a public display of the duke’s portrait at the service of dynastic

stability. This commission actually followed ducal offerings of wax votive

effigies: an ex-voto of the Duke in hawking costume and a votive group

portraying Duchess Eleonora with the infant daughter Isabella at her feet.89 Guido

Mazzoni, who had previously worked as a mask maker and who was thus perhaps

familiar with life-casting techniques, incorporating the wax effigy with the genre

of Lamentation over the Dead Christ, which was acquiring increasing popularity

in northern Italy at the end of the fifteenth century.90 The physiognomic accuracy

of Ercole and Eleonora’s portraits and the individuality of their every-day

clothing set the couple apart from the other characters, while their size, coloring,

position and expression make them active participants in the religious drama.91

A few years later (1489-92) Mazzoni created a similar tableau for the Monastery

Church of Santa Maria di Monteoliveto in Naples (now known as Sant’Anna ai

Lombardi). The group was commissioned by Ercole’s brother-in-law, Alfonso of

Aragon, Duke of Calabria and heir to the Neapolitan throne. Alfonso, like Ercole
 20

in Ferrara, is represented as Joseph of Arimatea, while either his father King

Ferrante I or his brother Federigo is portrayed as Nicodemus.92 Although

typologically similar to the Ferrara tableau, the Bewailing group in Naples (once

brightly painted) carries Guido Mazzoni’s ultra-realistic tendency to new dramatic

levels more closely approaching the waxwork of votive simulacra. In his Life of

Giuliano da Majano Vasari discusses the rivalry between Mazzoni and Benedetto

da Majano in Naples, and mentions Alfonso’s portrait in the group of Santa Maria

di Monteoliveto:

[...] nella quale opera è ritratto il detto re in ginocchioni, il quale

pare veramente più che vivo [...] — [...] in this work the said king

is portrayed on his knees and he appears truly more than alive

[...]93

As we have seen, both in the description of the Florentine wax effigies and

portrait masks and in the commentary of Guido Mazzoni’s terracottas, Vasari uses

the topos of art simulating nature, a convention that, in the course of the sixteenth

century, will fix and codify the idea of mimesis. The tradition, inherited from

ancient writers and re-established in the fifteenth century with Villani, Ghiberti

and Alberti, stemmed from the idea that the highest achievement for art was the

perfect imitation—and the improvement—of nature. The topos was applied as a

qualitative comparison to describe the ability of the artist and the value of his

work, much as the comparison with ancient works assumed the role of parameter

of perfection.94 Imitation is indeed a most opaque and remarkable term in Vasari’s

 21

artistic vocabulary; he uses imitazione often, and with varying degrees of

signification. Imitation of life, imitation of reality, imitation of nature, but also

imitation of the antique and thus imitation that surpasses nature: these are the

tropes most frequently present in his work. Although in Vasari the imitation of

nature and the imitation of the antique are never expressly connected, they appear

equivalent as he applies the two to both painters and sculptors, and seemingly

without distinction between sculptural media. Vasari’s language, although full of

commonplaces and seemingly uncritical topoi, reveals a lack of media

hierarchization and a priori categorization, as he treats wax and terracotta exactly

like other media, thus confirming an association between the artistic elite and the

art of the ceraioli. In his Life of Masaccio, Vasari comments on the frescos of the

Brancacci chapel, where Masaccio made his figures life-like and real, as much

like Nature as possible, and painted his own portrait, in the guise of an Apostle,

“with the aid of a mirror, [...] so well done that it appears truly alive.”95 Almost

the same words are used for a St. Anthony by Spinello Aretino “tanto bello che

par vivo”96 and a portrait by Andrea del Castagno of “Messer Bernardo di

Domenico della Volta, “inginocchioni che par vivo.”97 At times Vasari goes a step

further in his rhetoric, as if mere stereotypes and laconic comments were not

enough to express the importance of that particular quality of art that gives the

illusion of life. Conformity to reality is taken a step further as he switches from

imitation of nature to imitation of life itself. Commenting on Masaccio’s San Paul

in the Brancacci chapel, portrayed al naturale after a civic officer, he declares the

head is so formidable that “it seems that the only thing missing is the power of
 22

speech.”98 Andrea del Sarto’s figures are “so alive that they appear truly to have

spirit and soul”, 99 and Filippino Lippi portrayed “Francesco [del Pugliese] from

life so well that all that appears to be missing is the ability to speak”.100 In the

1568 introduction on sculpture, Vasari describes the use of polychrome wax in

much the same terms: “modern artists [...] make complexions, hair, clothes and all

other things in a way so similar to the real that those figures really only lack, in a

certain sense, the breath of life and words.”101

Extremely realistic polychrome sculpture, particularly if produced from a mold,

occupies a very ambiguous position in art history and criticism. While to many

contemporary art historians polychrome statuary is only a form of “popular” art or

quasi-art,102 it demonstrably formed an integral part of Renaissance artistic

culture, praised by artists and writers as the apex of naturalism. Renaissance art

writings seemingly applied the same topos to painting and sculpture, and, when

describing painted wax and clay, stressed the capacity to imitate nature and the

intended effect upon the public. Polychrome sculpture derived from a mold was

used proficiently to stimulate a type of reception that necessitated conformity to

the original and appearance of life-likeness: in the church, the formidable

combination of wax, oil, hair and clothing provided a powerful impression of

physical presence carried almost to the point of deception. The medium of wax

assumes in this case a heavy import in the votive sculptures and in their role as

simulacra of the living.103 Wax as a material has a long tradition of “standing for”

a live model, a relationship that has complex anthropological, etymological, and

ontological implications; for millennia it was used to lift accurate physiognomic

 23

traits from the living and the dead and its intricate connections with funerary and

votive rituals are unanimously recognized by scholars. Wax was used as an

equivalent for a living person in ways that are not immediately evident and that

appear connected to the intrinsic characteristics of the material.104 The organic

qualities and artistic flexibility of wax have indubitably contributed to its

“anthropological equivalence” with the living and augmented the indexical nature

of portraiture by impression. As noted recently, the “metaphor of imprinting and

impressing wax” was used often both in religious discourse and as a metaphysical

simile for the essence of mortal nature impressed by divinity with human

qualities.105 The metaphore is assimilated, for example, to the authorizing stamp

of seals where the receptivity of the material allowed conformity to the referent.

Wax ex-votos thus carried a perceived mimetic ability that identified it with the

donor, and this “strengthened the relationship between the perceived anatomical

ex-voto and the body of the votary”.106 In the medieval and early modern period,

wax ex-votos seemed to possess the same “value” of the votary whether by virtue

of resemblance or equivalence. Sources constantly refer to offers of wax of the

same height as the donor [ad mensura corporis or secundum longitudinem].

Sometimes, particularly in the case of small infants, shapeless bricks of wax

[pani] of equivalent weight to the donor’s were offered to miraculous images.

Books of miracles refer to measurements to be taken to make the voto

commensurate to the donor, or list numerous wax objects with weight or height

similar to the supplicant.107

 24

These associations are further corroborated by etymological connections between

the word cera and facial appearance in Latin languages; the Vocabolario

dell’Accademia della Crusca defines wax (cera) as sembianza di volto, a

definition echoed in French (aspect du visage), Spanish, Portuguese and

Provençal. Sembianza as appearance, but also resemblance.108 Wax thus

epitomizes a type of verisimilitude that does not merely portray or illustrate the

image of the living, but re-produces it, “doubles” it, performing the donor

according to conventions in the artistic vocabulary which are a pre-condition to

shared social and visual practices. Wax, associated with complexion—albeit with

connotations of paleness and emotional or physical consumption109—could then

render the appearance of skin to a degree unsurpassed by any other media and

carried unique associations of conformity to the donor. The polychrome wax

effigies in the Annunziata, viewed in the mystical darkness of the church, lit by

flickering candlelight, gave an illusion of reality so potent that it surprised the

viewer that the praying figures were not alive, but simply uncanny simulacra. The

living presence of the images added to their existence in real time and real space

and created a mode of spectatorship in which viewers experienced a momentary

feeling of disconcern, of intellectual uncertainty, the tension of doubting whether

the apparently inanimate effigies were alive. The impression of life created a

momentary gap, the fleeting ambiguity that exists before visual and intellectual

perception realign into the recognition that the effigy is just an inanimate

object,110 the resolution of the contradiction latent in the appearance of wax as a

simulacrum of the living but not a living thing.111 A similar effect is reported in
 25

Filippo Baldinucci’s Life of Pietro Tacca, where the author narrates that Tacca

“delighted himself with making portraits of colored wax, and among others he

made one from life, and life-size, a head and bust of Granduke Cosimo II, with

eyelashes, real beard and real hair, and glass eyes so vivid that they looked as if

they were his, and the portrait really seemed not a fake person, but real and alive.”

The resemblance of the portrait was so strong and so unsettling that after the

Granduke’s death ”[...] his mother Christine of Lorraine ordered the portrait to be

hidden every time she went to visit Tacca, as “her heart could not bear to see her

son alive, but trapped in a silent statue.”112

 26

*
I wish to thank Kristina Dietrich and Hannah Miller whose indispensable research skills helped

the writing of this text. My heart-felt gratitude to [Gail, Tom, Leadership team???] for seeing the

potential of a long neglected field and to Julia Bloomfield and [??] for their support and hard

work. At several stages of the project I was stimulated by discussions with [....]
1
Harold Acton, The Pazzi Conspiracy: The Plot against the Medici, (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1979): 71.

2
Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti,ed. G. Milanesi (Firenze,

G.C. Sansoni, 1906): 3: 373-375.

3
In 1787 the convent of the nuns of Chiarito (of the order of the Agostiniane) [I would remove

the parenthesis] was given to the Mantellate to which it still belongs. Elizabeth and Walter Paatz,

Kirchen von Florenz: ein kunstgeschichtliches Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann,

1940-): 462-463. The ex-votos in Assisi, occasionally mentioned in coeval writings, have

disappeared and are not documented in modern literature. The two Marian churches seem to have

been connected by cult: Isabella d’Este, for example, left an effigy for the SS. Annunziata and one

in Assisi, as had done her grandmother before her. According to sources, the effigy in Florence

was molded by another member of the Benintendi family, Filippo [in 1507]. Brown, Clifford M.,

“Little Known and Unpublished Documents Concerning Andrea Mantegna, Bernardino Parentino,

Pietro Lombardo, Leonardo da Vinci and Felippo Benintendi. (Part Two),” L’Arte, no. 7-8 (1969):

182-213. Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, Mantova e Urbino: Isabella d'Este ed Elisabetta

Gonzaga nelle relazioni famigliari e nelle vicende politiche (Torino-Roma, L. Roux e C., 1893):

72, 122 and nn. – I requested this book and will take a look at it when it arrives; Bulman, Louisa

M. Connor, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520 (London: Courtauld Institute [u.a.],

1971), chap. IV: 2-4.

4
In the 1555 edition of the Vite, Vasari does not mention Lorenzo’s effigies, nor does he discuss

wax sculpture in the introduction. Vasari, Le Vite, III, pp. 374-375; Migliore, Ferdinando
 27

Leopoldo del, Firenze città nobilissima: illustrata da Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore (Firenze:

Nella stamp. della Stella, 1684): 285-286.

5
Varchi, Benedetto, Storia fiorentina di Messer Benedetto Varchi: nella quale principalmente si

contengono l’ultime revoluzioni della Repubblica fiorentina, e lo stabilimento del principato nella

casa de’ Medici: colla tavola in fine delle cose più notabili, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Firenze:

successori Le Monier, 1888): 123-24.

6
Two payments were made to Orsino di Niccolò Benintendi for wax images: in 1470 he received

fiorini 8, soldi 18, denari 5 and eight years later fiorini 12. C. M. Brown in L’Arte, pp.????
7
“Onde Orsino, fra l’altre, con l’aiuto ed ordine d’Andrea, ne condusse tre di cera grandi quanto il

vivo facendo dentro l’ossatura di legno, [come altrove si è detto,] ed intessuta di canne spaccate,

ricoperte poi di panno incerato, con bellissime pieghe e tanto acconciamente, che non si può veder

meglio e cosa più simile al naturale. Le teste, poi, mani e piedi fece di cera più grossa, ma vote

dentro, e ritratte dal vivo e dipinte a olio con quelli ornamenti di capelli ed altre cose, secondo che

bisognava, naturali e tanto ben fatti, che rappresentano non più omini di cera ma vivissimi, come

si può vedere in ciascuna delle dette tre [...]”. Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori,

scultori e architetti, ed. G. Milanesi (Firenze, G.C. Sansoni, 1906), 3: 373-375. Unless otherwise

noted, translations from the Italian are mine.

8
Such proclamation of Lorenzo’s survival, through the wax ex-votos and medals, is briefly

discussed in Luchs, Alison, “Lorenzo from Life? Renaissance Portrait Busts of Lorenzo de’

Medici”, The Sculpture Journal, IV (2000): p. 7 and passim.

9
Warburg, Aby, Gesammelte Schriften: Studienausgabe, eds. Horst Bredekamp (Berlin:

Akademie Verlag, 1998-): passim; Warburg, Aby, The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions

to the cultural history of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles, CA : Getty Research Institute

for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999): passim.

10
Parronchi, Alessandro, Donatello e il potere (Bologna: Cappelli; Firenze: Il portolano, 1980): 35

also cited in Georges D-H, “Viscosities” [it’s the manuscript of the paper he gave. Let’s wait for

English translation. Page 5 in ms] Gentilini, Giancarlo, “Il Beato Sorore di Santa Maria della

Scala,” Antologia di Belle Arti, no. 52-55 (1996): 17-31.

 28

11
“Poi, la vegnente notte, in una arca di marmo sepellito fu onorevolmente in una cappella, ed a

mano a mano il dì seguente vi cominciarono le genti ad andare e ad accender lumi e ad adorarlo, e

per conseguente a botarsi e ad appiccarvi le imagini della cera secondo la promession fatta.”

Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, Mario Marti and Elena Ceva Valla, (Milano: Rizzoli, 1993): I,

I, 39.
12
“In Orto San Michele era una gran loggia con uno oratorio di Nostra Donna, nel quale per

divozione eran molte immagini di cera: nelle quali appreso il fuoco, aggiugnendovisi la caldeza

dell'aria, arsono tutte le case erano intorno a quel luogo, e i fondachi di Calimala e tutte le

botteghe erano intorno a Mercato Vecchio fino in Mercato Nuovo e le case de' Cavalcanti, e in

Vacchereccia e in Porta Santa Maria fino al Ponte Vecchio; ché si disse arsono più che 1900

magioni: e niuno rimedio vi si poté fare.” Dino Compagni, Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne' tempi

suoi, pp. ; cfr. Del Migliore, p. 532ff.

13
Del Migliore incredulously comments on Villani’s assessment that the revenues from alms

during the plague had amounted to an “incredible treasure” corresponding to more than 60,000

scudi. Del Migliore, p. 535.

14
The Baptistery and the church of S. Croce are mentioned by Andreucci: Andreucci, Ottavio, Il

fiorentino istruito nella Chiesa della Nunziata di Firenze: memoria storica del Segretario Ottavio Andreucci

(Firenze: M. Cellini, 1857), 11.

15
“[...] offerire per il buon governo della Repubblica, bastava, che solamente i principali

facessero quella esterna, e pubblica dimostrazione a nome di tutti”. Arms were so inextricably

connected with the identity and good fame of family and clan that severe fines were imposed on

those who allowed for the defacement of family crests in public spaces. Del Migliore, p. 534.
16
Del Migliore, Ferdinando Leopoldo, Firenze, città nobilissima: illustrata da Ferdinando

Leopoldo Del Migliore, unveränderter Nachdruck der Aufl. Firenze 1684, (Sala Bolognese: Forni,

1976), p. 535.
17
“La mattina di S. Giovanni chi va a vedere la piaza de Signiorj gli pare vedere una coxa grande

trionfale magnificha maravigliosa [...] intorno alla gran piaza de Signiorj ciento torrj che parano

doro [sic] portate qual torcha charetta e qual i chonportatori [sic] chessi chiamano cierj fatti di
 29

legniame e di charita e dj cera e doro e dj cholorj con fighure rileuante e di voti dientro e entro un

stanno huomini che fanno volgiere e di continovo girare e dintorno quelle figure qualj sono

huomini a chavallo harmati correndo l’uno direto all’altro qualj sono giovannj a chavallo [...]

Guasti, Cesare, Feste di S. Giovanni Batista in Firenze, descritte in prosa e in rima da

contemporanei, Florence, 1884. pp. 6-8 and 18-19. Cfr. Gino Capponi, Commentari delle cose

d’Italia dal 1419-53, passim. Bulman, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520,

chapter IV, p.5, and note 19; cfr. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 59-60.
18
Francesco Berni, Rime, per cura di A Virgili, Firenze, Le Monnier 1885, p. 121. The episode

described by Berni occurred around 1533 and is mentioned by Mazzoni I boti, p. 13 and M.

Holmes, Megan, “Ex-votos: Materiality, Memory, and Cult”, The Idol in the Age of Art, Michael

Cole and Rebecca Zorach, eds, forthcoming, p. 15.

19
La Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, Canto X, 45 “e avea in atto impressa esta favella / 'Ecce

ancilla Dei, propriamente / come figura in cera si suggella”; Canto XVIII, 39-42: “Or ti puote

apparer quant' è nascosa / la veritate a la gente ch'avvera / ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa; / però

che forse appar la sua matera / sempre esser buona, ma non ciascun segno / è buono, ancor che

buona sia la cera”; Canto XXXIII, 79-81 “E io: «Sì come cera da suggello, / che la figura

impressa non trasmuta, / segnato è or da voi lo mio cervello..”; Paradiso: Canto I, 39-42 “con

miglior corso e con migliore stella / esce congiunta, e la mondana cera / più a suo modo tempera e

suggella”; Canto VIII, 69 “Se fosse a punto la cera dedutta / e fosse il cielo in sua virtù supprema,

/ la luce del suggel parrebbe tutta”; Canto VIII, 129, “La circular natura, ch'è suggello / a la cera

mortal, fa ben sua arte, / ma non distingue l'un da l'altro ostello”; Canto VIII, 75 “La cera di

costoro e chi la duce / non sta d'un modo; e però sotto 'l segno / idëale poi più e men traluce.” See

Alighieri, Dante, La Divina Commedia, Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, eds (Firenze, Le

Monnier, 1979).
20
Sacchetti suggests the switch in popularity of the cults in the story of a man who promised an

image of himself “to the [Virgin] of the Nunziata” and, after having the effigy made in the

workshops near Orsanmichele, brought it to the Servite church where it was placed in the upper

gallery. Sacchetti, who allegedly saw the wax figure, also provides one of the earliest articulations of
 30

the suggestive power of mimesis in the reception of these images: “[...]e 'l dí tre di novembre s'andò

in Orto San Michele, facendosi fare di cera; e dopo alquanti dí compiuta la immagine, la fece portare

alla chiesa de' Servi, e là alla Nunziata la presentò. La quale poi fu messa a' ballatoi del legname che

sono di sopra; e insino al dí d'oggi si vede, ch'ella somiglia propio Pero Foraboschi.” Sacchetti,

Franco, Le novelle di F. Sacchetti. Pubblicate secondo la lezione del codice Borghiniano con note

inedite di Vincenzio Borghini e Vincenzio Follini, per O. Gigli (Firenze, F. Le Monnier, 1860-61):

185 – is this the edition that you are talking about – I am unsure because it only has two volumes

YES
21
“[...] per un modo o per un’altro [sic] sono state poste e appiccate tante immagini che se le

mura non fossero poco tempo fa state incatenate a pericolo erano col tetto insieme di non dare in

terra.” Sacchetti, Novelle, CLXXXV pp. 125-126.

22
Ex-votos were often accompanied by “offerings,” even large sums. Beside votaries, sources of

revenue were testamentary donations, alms from pilgrims and from local faithfuls coming to the

sanctuary from the countryside for Marian celebrations. Del Migliore, passim.
23
Kent, D.V., Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: the patrons’s oeuvre, (New Haven: Yale

University Press, c2000), 207, n. 279. There were only five churches in Florence “whose operai were

appointed by the Signoria”. In addition to the SS. Annunziata, they were the Cathedral, Santa

Croce, Santa Trinita, and S. Lorenzo, all churches with special civic and political significance for

the city. The cult of the Annunziata, and the church where it is centered, have maintained a

special place in Florentine religious life to this day. It is also worth mentioning that March 25th,

the feast of the Annunciation, was the beginning of the Florentine calendar year from the VII to

the middle of the XVIII century. The date of the annunciation was established in the seventh

century as nine months prior to December 25th, the designated date of the birth of Christ. In

Florence the custom persisted beyond the creation of the Gregorian calendar in 1568, when

January 1st became the universal beginning of the solar year. In 1749 Granduke Francis II of

Lorena decreeted that Florence should follow the custom and the Gregoraian calendar was finally

adopted in Florence on January 1st, 1750.

24
Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, (note 10), 204, n. 266.
 31

25
Bulman, Louisa M. Connor, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520, (London:

Courtauld Institute [u.a.], 1971) chapters II and V; cfr. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 59ff.
26
165,000 florins for patronage at S. Lorenzo, 40,000 at S. Marco, and 47,000 at the Badia.

Bulman, Artistic patronage, chapter II, pp. 6-7.

27
Brown, Clifford M., “Little Known and Unpublished Documents Concerning Andrea

Mantegna, Bernardino Parentino, Pietro Lombardo, Leonardo da Vinci and Filippo Benintendi.

(Part Two),” L’Arte, no. 7-8 (1969): 182-213. In discussing a silver effigy donated by Francesco II

Gonzaga to the church of the Annunziata after the Battle of Fornovo, brown writes: “The only

documentation that has thus far come to light concerning Francesco II’s ex-voto is found in a letter

written him by Eleonora Duchessa di Catanzaro e Marchesa di Crotone who saw and admired it

during her stay in Florence as guest of Angelo Tovaglia.” Busta 1104 – dated May 30, 1502.

LUZIO, “Emporium XI, 1900, p. 355. While Francesco’s effigy was cast in silver, that of his wife

were perhaps fashioned in wax although “correspondence regarding the commission is silent

concerning the medium used.” We know, however that Isabella’s image was placed in front of the

Virgin rather than in the tribune. Cfr. Bulman, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520,

chapter II, pp. 8-15 and passim and chapter VI, p. 1.

28
Bulman cites an inventory drafted before the 1630 fire that listed 600 life size wax images,

2200 votives in papier mâché, 3600 small pictures of miracles and other gifts, totaling 262.000

voti. Bulman, chapter IV, p. 7 and note 37.

29
In the fifteenthcentury silver effigies were as much as 3 braccia tall, often in kneeling posture.

Sometimes the images were produced in mixed metals, as, for example, the effigy of Gattamelata

in silver on a brass base with chains for suspension. Bulman, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata:

1440 – 1520, chapter IV, pp. 12ff and note 52.

30
Masi, Gino, “La ceroplastica in Firenze nei secoli XV-XVI e la famiglia Benintendi” pp. ??;

cfr. Del Migliore, Firenze, città nobilissima, pp. 285ff.

31
Del Migliore, Firenze, città nobilissima, p. 286.
32
Sometimes devotees left the image of a blessed Servite or a saint instead of their own effigy.

Bulman, Artistic Patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520, chapter IV, pp. 17-18 and passim.
 32

33
The literature lists the kings of Denmark, Hungary and Dacia, of France and Navarre, Aragon

and Portugal, and the Dukes of Burgundy and Lorraine. Del Migliore, Firenze, città nobilissima,

pp. 286ff.; Bulman, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520 (note 1), 4: 7-8 and nn.
34
Lottini, Giovanni Angelo, Scelta d’alcuni miracoli e grazie della Santissima Nunziata di

Firenze, (Firenze, Nella stamperia de Landini, 1636.

35
Busini, Lettere, (Florence: Le Monnier, 1861)pp. 32-33 and note 5.
36
Del Migliore, Ferdinando Leopoldo, Firenze, città nobilissima: illustrata da Del Migliore:

Prima, seconda e terza parte del primo libro, (Firenze: Nella Stamperia della Stella, 1684): 286-

287 GRI COPY 1684

37
Del Migliore, Firenze, città nobilissima, pp. 285-286.
38
Bulman, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520 , chapter IV: 27-29.
39
Meller, Peter, “Physiognomical Theory in Renaissance Heroic Portraits”, Renaissance and

Mannerism: Acts of the twentieth International Congress in the Hitory of Art, Princeton, 1963, p.

53.
40
Donato, Maria Monica, “Gli eroi romani tra storia ed exemplum,” Memoria dell'antico nell'arte italiana,

vol. 2, I generi e i temi ritrovati (Torino: Einaudi, 1985), 97-152. Donato, Maria Monica, “Famosi Cives:

testi, frammenti e cicli perduti a Firenze fra Tre e Quattrocento,” Ricerche di storia dell'arte, no. 30 (1986):

27-42.
41
Bulman cites two payment records: “per dipintura di dua pidistalli messi chonoro e chon ariento

e quali si dono una a Lorenzo de Medici e l’altra a Antonio Pucci” and “Tomaso di Francesco

dipintore per parte di dipintura del palchetto sopra el bancho dele chandele” Bulman, Artistic

Patronage, chapter Vi, 10 and notes 49 and 50. Vasari confirms the position of the effigy: “La

seconda figura del medesimo è in lucco, abito civile e proprio dei fiorentini; e questa è nella chiesa

dei Servi alla Nunziata, sopra la porta minore, la quale è accanto al desco dove si vende le

candele.” Vasari, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (note 3), p. 374.

The chiostrino dei voti, as the cloister is still called, had housed votive images since the late 14th

century, probably following an ancient association with temple porticos that were the traditional
 33

pagan setting for effigies. Bulman, Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520 (note 1), 4:

10, n. 45. Cfr. Alberti De Re Aedificatoria, trans. Leoni 1726, VII, X.

42
Welch, Evelyn, “Sforza Portraiture and SS. Annunziata in Florence”, Florence and Italy:

Studies in Honor of Nicholai Rubinstein, Caroline Elam and Peter Denley, eds. (London:

Westfield College , Universtity of London, 1988), p. 240.

43
Holmes, “Ex-votos” ms page 15.
44
A sixtenth century work, Caprici del Bottaio, illustrates votaries’ gullability by narrating of a

dishonest sacristan who took an old image from the wall and sold it as if it were as “efficacious as

if a new one had been placed on the altar of the Shrine.” Gelli, Opere, 1952, p. 288, “I capricci del

Bottaio” 1546-8 cited in Bulman, IV, 23 note 124.

45
“30 botteghe di battiloro e d’argento filato: e maestrj solennj di magine di ciera al parj: di tutto l

mondo essa paraone di queste arti [...] e qual fummaj al modo [sic] non si trovera ne truover possi

Maestrj di magine di ciera al parj di qesti chessono oggi nella citta d Fiorenza e a nunciata”

Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ms. 119, 1492 c32v. quoted in Bulman, IV, 16 and note 81; cfr.

Vasari, III, 373-375; Dei, Benedetto, Cronica Fiorentina, cited in Romby, Giuseppina Carla,

Descrizione e rappresentazione della città di Firenze nel XV secolo; con la trascrizione inedita

dei manoscritti di Benedetto Dei e un indice ragionato dei manoscritti utili per la storia della

città, (Firenze, Libreria editrice fiorentina, 1976): 41-53; Gentilini, “Il beato Sorore” p. 25 and

note 51.
46
It bears mentioning that the sanctuary in Prato, under the patronage of the Medici, acquired

enormous devotional importance in the fifteenth century, second only to the SS. Annunziata, and

that many Florentines had their votive wax images in both places.
47
Painters—such as Lorenzo di Credi, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and members of the Rosselli

family—moved in the circle of the wax makers and were sometimes engaged to paint the images,

decorate candles, and even paint the cross-bars where the images hung. Bulman, Artistic

patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520, chapter IV, pp. 14ff, pp. 22ff. and notes 120-121.
48
Payments records for wax are scarce, but they seem to distinguish between refined “white” wax

(cera bianca) and unrefined yellow wax (cera gialla). The former was used for portraits and when
 34

paint was applied. As an example we can compare the cost of a cero bianco dipinto coming from

Florence (twentytwo lire) to the thirty lire of a silver cup or of a silver crown. Franchi, Franco, La

madonna e la chiesa delle Carceri: raccolta di memorie storiche, (Pistoia, Tipografia Grazzini,

1926) passim.

[CHECK VASARI ON LINE]

49
Cennini, Cennino, Il libro dell’arte, Chapters 83 to 88.
50
On Cennini’s knowledge of Pliny and his methods of casting from nature: Gramaccini, “Natur

und Antike”; on life and death masks see also Pohl, J. “Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses in der

italienischen Porträtplastik der Renaissance”, PhD Dissertation, Rheinischen Freidrich-Wilhelms-

Universität zu Bonn, 1938; Schuyler, J. “Death Masks in Quattrocento Florence” Sources. Notes

in the History of Art, V, 1986, 4, pp.1-6. [MAREK AND POPE-HENNESSY, CITED LUCHS

“TULLIO LOMBARDO” NOTE 90]

51
Cennini wrote his treatise in Padua, at the Carrara court. For a discussion of Pliny’s influence on

Cennini and the cast, see Gramaccini, Norberto, “Das genaue Abbild der Natur - Riccios Tiere und

die Theorie des Naturabgusses seit Cennino Cennini”, Natur und Antike in der Renaissance

(Frankfurt am Main: Liebighaus Museum alter Plastik, 1985): 198-225.

52
From Pliny Cennini apparently derived the name of the ancient inventor of the life cast as well

as the method of making the cast after a lost mold: “the first of all who took it upon himself to re-

create the image of a human being in plaster and to pour wax into a mold made of plaster was

Lysistratos of [from] Sylion, brother of the already mentioned Lysippos.” Cennini dedicates

several chapters of his Libro d’arte to life casting. Cfr. Gramaccini, “Das genaue Abbild der

Natur”, pp. 198-225.

53
Warburg had suggested that traces of the waxes can be found in Renaissance portraits, for

example the bust of Lorenzo in Berlin—later determined to be a nineteeth century cast of the bust

in Washington. Cleaning and restoration have however shown that the bust cannot have been cast

from a life or death mask, so any associations are purely conjectural. See Luchs, “Lorenzo from

Life?” pp. 12-13 and notes 29-34. The author includes very useful references to literature

discussing technical probelms in terracotta sculpture and casting methods.

 35

54
The bust is now convincingly attributed to Antonio de' Benintendi, son of Orsino, whose artistic

activity is still scantly documented. Antonio is not listed in Pyke’s Dictionary of Wax modellers

among the many members of the extended family of fallimmagini, nor in other studies on the

family or dictionary entries. An “Antonio d’Orsino Benintendi” is mentioned by Varchi: in 1529

he was attacked by members of the anti-Medicean faction as Medici sympathizer. Varchi, Storia

Fiorentina, Libro X, Firenze 1858, Vol II p. 123-4, dicussed in Mazzoni, I boti, pp. 12-13. [CITE

EARTH AND FIRE AND GIANCARLO’S ARTICLE]

For a discussion of the extended Benintendi family—documented as the reigning dynasty in the

wax business well into the 16th century, see G. Masi, “La ceroplastica in Firenze nei secc. XV e

XVI, e la famiglia Benintendi”, Rivista d’Arte, IX(1916), pp. 124-142; E. J. Pyke, A

Bibliographical Dictionary of Wax Modellers, Oxford 1973, pp. 12ff. and Pyke, A

Bibliographical Dictionary of Wax Modellers (Supplement), Oxford 1981, pp. 6ff.; s.v.

Benintendi, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, XXXX, Vol. XXX pp. 540-541. Thieme-Becker
55
Earth and Fire, pp. 162-164.
56
“The cast clay is dryer and less plastic than the modeled clay to which it is attached. [...] The

rest of the bust has been modeled and tool and finger marks are clarly evident in the hollow

interior.” [EARTH AND FIRE, P. 162]

57
The image was placed in the church on the feast day of Saints Cosmas and Damian, patrons of

the Medici family, venerated in the neighboring church of St. Mark. Giovanni was elected the

following March and made his triumphal entry in Florence on November 30, 1515. According to

sources, the effigy of Leo X holding a papal brief was destroyed in 1529 by anti-Mediecean

fanatics together with that of Clement VII and was “remade” in 1532 by Montorsoli. Montorsoli

restored and partially “remade” both papal effigies as well as those of Matthias Corvino, Giacomo

Appiani, Cecco de Bolsena and in 1534 made a “beautiful one” of Alessandro de’ Medici.

Laschke, B. Fra Giovanni Angelo da Montorsoli, Berlin 1993, pp. 13-14, 34 and 166.

Luca Landucci, Diario Fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, a cura di I. del Badia, Florence, 1883. p. 342.

[NAME OF DEL BADIA?] Cfr. Mazzoni, I boti, pp. 27-28, Gentilini, “Il Beato Sorore” pp.

XXX?
 36

58
Bulman relates Giovanni’s election to the Medici’s expansion of political power and notes that

it “closely followed the recognition of the family as the aknowledged rulers of Florence.” Bulman,

Artistic patronage at SS. Annunziata: 1440 – 1520, chapter II, p. 6.

59
The relationship between painters and sculptors still remains to be investigated not only for the

art of waxmaking but also for what concerns polychrome sculpture at large.
60
Schuyler cites Brunelleschi’s death mask (April 1446) as one of the examples attesting to the

practice. Schuyler, Florentine Busts, pp. 20ff.

61
The life mask of Giovanni de’ Medici covers a large area of the cardinal’s face from beneath

the fleshy chin to well above the forehead, and it amply demonstrates the artist’s ability in the

technique. Bruce Boucher and Peta Motture, Earth and fire: Italian terracotta sculpture from

Donatello to Canova, exh. Cat. (New Haven; London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 62-164. [p. 162]
62
The bust is believed to predate Giovanni’s election as he is wearing a biretta, the cap typically

worn by cardinals. [EARTH AND FIRE, P. 162]

63
Vasari Milanesi, Life of Verrocchio, Vol. III pp. 372-373.
64
Vasari, III, p. 123. Schuyler disputes Vasari’s attribution of the bust to Mino da Fiesole on the

basis of dating. Schuyler, Florentine Busts, pp. 24ff.

Schuyler cites the Nurture and Marriage of the Foundlings by Domenico di Bartolo and the

Triumph of Mordecai and the Feast of Ahasuerus by Jacopo del Sellaio as contemporary

testimonies of bust displays in Florentine cortili. Schuyler, pp. 25ff. Cfr. Schiapparelli, A. La

casa fiorentina e i suoi arredi nei secoli VIX e XV (1908), M. Sfranneli (?) an L. Pagnotta,eds.,

(Florence: 1983); Lyndecker, The domestic setting of the arts in Renaissance Florence, (Ann

Arbor, 1989).
65
“Andrea dunque usò di formare con forme così fatte le cose naturali, per poterle con più

comodità tenere innanzi e imitarle; cioè mani, piedi, ginocchia, gambe, braccia e torsi.” We also

know that, on his death, Verrocchio left 200 pounds of wax as teaching equipment. These sources

attest to an aspect of Renasissance workshop practices, and to a technique particular to sculptors.

Cfr. Vasari, III, pp. 272-273; Bulman, Artistic Patronage at the SS. Annunziata, chapter IV, pp.

14ff. and notes 72 and 73.

 37

66
Cfr. Schiapparelli, Schuyler, Lydecker, Didi-Huberman, Lugli. Gentilini, “Beato Sorore” p. 27

note 60] Cfr. Gatteschi, R. Baccio da Montelupo, (Florence, 1993) p. 79; Guidotti, Alessandro,

“Le botteghe dei Da Maino” (unpublished conference paper) cited in Gentilini, “Beato Sorore” p.

26 note 59).
67
Although the connection between the ancient custom and the Florentine production of portrait

busts has been generally recognized for decades, no study has explored the phenomena in detail.

The first to do so is Harriet Flower, whose study traces the history and use of the imagines from

republican Rome to the Late Empire, including the incorporation of the images and rituals into

Imperial cult. The Appendix comprises a vast selection of ancient authors mentioning the wax

images and stressing verisimilitude in their description. Flower, Harriet, Ancestor Masks and

Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999). Cfr. Schuyler,

Florentine Busts, passim.

68
Schuyler, on the other hand, believes the masks to have been cult objects with magical

significance. Schuyler, Florentine Busts, p. 54.

69
Masks portrayed men who had held at least the office of aedile. The privilege seems to have

been extended to progressively lower classes even in antiquity. Flower, Ancestor Masks, pp. 271

and note 1.
70
Flower, Ancestor Masks, pp. 270ff and passim.
71
On the display of Florentine masks, their connection to fame and the ensuing rising in

potraiture, see Schuyler, Jane, Florentine busts: sculpted portaiture in the fifteenth century, New

York: Garland Pub. 1976; Schuyler, “Death Masks” pp. ???; for a useful bibliography on

Renaissance busts see Luchs, Tullio Lombardo, pp. 17-20 and notes, particularly 103 and 109.
72
Poggio Bracciolini, who studied in Florence with Manuel Chrysoloras, was a superlative

Latinist and translated many works from Greek. He devoted his life to the recovery of manuscripts

by Latin authors, and wrote (only in Latin) treatises and satirical works, commentaries and even a

collection of lascivious facetiae and a history of Florence. Bracciolini, Poggio, De vera nobilitate.

Davide Canfora, ed., (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2002), pp. XX-XXI and 7. The

passage is also discussed in Luchs, Tullio Lombardo, pp. 18-19 AND NOTE 106. [Cfr. LAVIN]
 38

73
“Hic cum essent in hortulo, quem peregrinis quibusdam marmoribus celebrem reddere parvule

suppellectilis inditio, ridens, cum oculos circumtulisset, Laurentius: ‘Hic hospes noster’ inquit

‘cum legerit fuisse moris antiqui apud priscos illos excellentis viros, ut domos, villas, hortos,

porticus, gymnasia variis signis tabulisque maiorum quoque statuis exornarent ad gloriam et

nobilitandum genus, voluit, cum progenitorum imagines deessent, hunc locum et se insuper his

pusillis et confractis marmorum reliquiis nobilem reddere, ut rei novitate aliqua eius ad posteros

istis rebus gloria emanaret.” Bracciolini, De vera nobilitate, pp. 6-7.

74
“Atqui quod egregiam civium virtutem signi ficare potest, Tantus Romae Statuarum et

Privatarum et Publicarum numerus, ut non minor fictus quam verus populus fuisse tradatur, Prin

cipes ipsi longo ordine suorum imagines, tanquam insigne nobilitatis unicum, Pompa et Atriis

praeferebant, Docti uero atque eruditi non minus et ipsi, Statuis signisque refertas bibliothecasa

suas esse studebant quam libris [...]”. Gauricus, Pomponius, De Sculptura (1504), André Chastel

and Robert Klein, eds., (Geneva: Librairie Droz), pp. 52-53 and notes 51-53.

75
Gauricus, De Sculptura, p. 52 note 52.
76
[Schuyler, Luchs, Flower] Lavin, Irvin, “On the Renaissance Portrait Bust”, Looking at

Renaissance Sculpture, Sarah Blake McHam, ed., (Cambridge and Melboune, Cambridge

University Press, 1998).

77
Gentilini, Giancarlo, “Il beato Sorore di Santa Maria della Scala,” Antologia di belle arti, ns.

52-55, La scultura (1996): 17-31, 26.

78
While Donatello’s attribution is only rarely challenged, there is generally little consensus

among scholars as to the technique used for the bust. Cfr. Schuyler, Florentine busts, pp. 114ff;

John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, (London, Phaidon Press, 1996): 181-187;

Barocchi, Paola, Niccolò da Uzzano, [Check Didi-Huberman’s article on Donatello and drapery

in Judith and Holophernes]

79
Cfr. Barocchi, Niccolò da Uzzano, p. 12 and Schuyler, Florentine Busts, pp. 115-119.
80
Schuyler, Florentine Busts, 114-119.
 39

81
Barocchi, Paola, Niccolò da Uzzano, p. 12.
82
Barocchi, Paola, Niccolò da Uzzano, p. 12.
83
Pietro Torrigiani was a pupil of Bertoldo di Giovanni, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household sculptor

and author of his portrait medal. Torrigiani was trained at the Academy of Lorenzo de’ Medici

with Michelangelo, but was exiled from Florence after his famed aggression against the young

Buonarroti that left the latter with a broken nose. After working in Rome at the decoration of the

Borgia apartments in the Vatican and then in Flanders at the court of Marguerite of Austria,

Torrigiani moved to England, where Henry VIII commissioned him with the funerary monument

for himself and Catherine of Aragon. For the identification and attribution of the bust, see Galvin,

Carol and Phillip Lindley, “Pietro Torrigiano’s bust of king Henry VII”, The Burlington

Magazine, Vol. 130, No. 1029 (Dec., 1988) : 892-902, 892 and notes 1-3.
84
The custome initiated in the fourteeth century, after the funeral of the murdered Edward II—

whose body had been mutilated during and after death—had been delayed three months to allow

delicate adjustments to be made at court. In those days, a wooden image “in the likeness of the

king” was used. Litten, Julian, “The Funerary Effigy: Its Function and Purpose” The Funerary

Effigies of Westminster Abbey, Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, eds., pp. 3-7 and pp. 51-

54. [CHECK: TWO DIFFERENT AUTHORS?]

85
Galvin, and Lindley, “Pietro Torrigiano’s bust”, 892.

86
Torrigiani’s terracotta bust was the first of its kind in England and the technique is believed to

have been introduced by him and other Florentine sculptors who followed him to the Tudor court.

“Bust of scholar or prelate”, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Detroit Art Institute, (???

2002): 203-205.
87
Guido Mazzoni’s polychrome terracotta tableaux have been discussed by Timothy Verdon and

Adalgisa Lugli. Verdon, Timothy, The Art of Guido Mazzoni, PhD Dissertation, (Garland Press,

Outstanding dissertations in the fine arts, New York and London, 1978); cfr. Lugli, Adalgisa,

Guido Mazzoni e la rinascita della terracotta nel quattrocento, Turin, 1990.

 40

88
The group was moved to the Chiesa del Gesù after World War II. The attribution of the group to

Guido Mazzoni has been confirmed by a document describing a gift of precious fabric from

Eleonora d’Este to Mazzoni’s wife. The document, dated 1485, explicitly declares that Mazzoni

had executed “il sepolcro di Santa Maria della Roxa.” It is interesting to note that Mazzoni’s wife

is mentioned by Pomponius Gauricus in 1504 as a sculptor, together with their daughter: “Uxor

etiam eius finxit et filia”. Lugli, Guido Mazzoni, pp. 325-326.

89
Verdon, The art of Guido Mazzoni,
90
The iconography of the Lamentation is originally derived from the “heilige Grab” which

developed in Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Mostly placed in church chapels,

the “holy tombs” were shaped as open aedicole, with sculptures representing the dead Christ and

the major characters of the mysteries of the Entombment and of the Resurrection. From these

derived the monumental mise au tombeau which developed in France in the fifteenth and early

sixteenth century, located in chapels, on private altars and altars of confraternities, in hospitals

and in cemeteries. The French mise au tombeau was usually placed in an open arcosolium

(“enfeu”) and composed of a series of characters usually positioned in U-shaped fashion behind

the “sepulcher”: the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, the three Marys, Joseph of Arimatea and

Nicodemus, and sometimes two angels carrying the instruments of the Passion. The Tomb was

sometimes shaped as a sarcophagus, and sometimes as a simple marble slab referring to the Holy

Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Similar compositions appeared in Northern Italy (Venetian area) in the

fourteenth century, and later spread to the entire sub-Alpine area, often in churches that possessed

copies of the Holy Sepulcher. In Italy, the groups presented slight variations of the French

Entombment typology, and acquired elements of the Lamentation, with the Christ sometimes laid

in the Virgin’s arm, or most often placed on the ground with or without a shroud. The early

Lamentation groups—particularly in the mountains and valleys of the present eastern Lombardy-

Piedmont-Valle d’Aosta area—were made of polychrome wood, while later versions usually

adopted the increasingly popular terracotta. Cf. Lugli, Guido Mazzoni, pp. 330-341 and passim;

Verdon, The Art of Guido Mazzoni, passim; Guido Gentile, “Il gruppo del «Sepolcro» in Santa

Maria di Castello ad Alessandria e il teatro della Pietà tra il Quattro e il Cinquecento.” Bollettino
 41

della Società Piemontese di Archeologia e Belle Arti. Antichità ed Arte nell’Alessandrino, Atti del

Convegno, (Alessandria, 15-16 Ottobre 1988) edited by Francesco Malaguzzi, Turin, 1988; idem,

“Testi di devozione e iconografia del Compianto.” Niccolò dell’Arca. Seminario di Studi. Atti del

convegno. (26-27 maggio 1987) edited by Grazia Agostini e Luisa Ciammitti, Bologna, 1989;

Gustav Dalman, Das Grab Christi in Deutschland, Leipzig, 1922; W. H. Forsyth, The entombment

of Christ. French Sculptures of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Cambridge (Mass.) 1970;

Emile Mâle, “Le renouvellement de l’art par le MystPres B la fin du moyen âge,” Gazette des

Beaux Arts, XXXI (1904):89-106 and 213-230; idem, “Influence des Mysteres sur l’art italien du

XV siécle,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, XXXV(1906):89-94; idem, L’art religieux de la fin du moyen

âge en France: étude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, Paris,

1949; Frederick Antal, “The Maenad under the Cross,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld

Institute, I(1937-38):70-73.
91
Verdon, The art of Guido Mazzoni, p. 49.
92
The identity of the portrait figures in the Naples Bewailing has been controversial for centuries;

most contemporary scholars recognize Alfonso in the figure of Joseph of Arimatea, and possibly

King Ferrante as Nicodemus, while the possible effigies of other personages, such as the two

courtiers Giovanni Pontano and Jacomo Sannazzaro, is almost unanimously rejected. Cf. Verdon,

The art of Guido Mazzoni, pp. 79-81; Lugli, Guido Mazzoni, 328-329; George L. Hersey, Alfonso

II and the Artistic Renewal of Naples 1485-1495, New Haven and London, 1969, pp. 118-124.
93
Vasari, II. 474.
94
Martin Warnke, “Il bello e il naturale. Un incontro letale,” I Greci. Storia Cultura Arte Societ,

edited by Salvatore Settis. Vol. I, Turin 1996, pp. 343-368. Cf. also Jan Bialostocki, “The

Renaissance Concept of Nature and Antiquity,” The Message of Images. Studies in the History of

Art, edited by Jan Bialostocki, Vienna, 1988; Erwin Panofsky, Idea. A Concept in Art Theory.

Columbia, 1968; Art, the Ape of Nature. Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, edited by Moshe

Barash and Lucy Freeman, New York, 1981. For a specific study of the topos in Vasari: Paola

Barocchi, “Il valore dell’antico nelle storiografia vasariana,” Atti del V Convegno Internazionale

di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence, 1957.

 42

95
“[...] fatto da lui medesimo allo specchio tanto bene che par vivo vivo” Vasari, II, 297.
96
Vasari, I, 686.
97
Vasari, II, 678.
98
“di una terribilita’ tanto grande che pare che la sola parola manchi a questa figura” The head

of St. Paul was made after Bartolo di Angiolino Angiolini, “magistrato del gonfalone Ferza.”

Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, ed. G. Milanesi, (Firenze,

G.C. Sansoni, 1906), 2: 294-95.

99
“figure tanto vive, che pare ch’elle abbiano veramente lo spirito e l’anima”
100
“ritrasse esso Francesco di naturale tanto bene che non pare che gli manchi se non la parola”.

Vasari, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, (note 5), 294-95. ?? The passage

refers to Francesco del Pugliese alle Campora – Badia fuori FI

101
i moderni artefici [...] fanno le carnagioni, i capegli, i panni e tutte l’altre cose in modo simili

al vero che a cotali figure non manca, in un certo modo, se non lo spirito e le parole Vasari, Le

vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, (note 5), 294-95. ??
102
One only needs to cite the reluctance of traditional art historians to attribute Niccolò da

Uzzano to Donatello. Janson and Pope-Hennessy found it unworthy of the attribution, of poor

quality and, owing to its hyper-realistic aestetics, outside the interests of Donatello. Pope-

Hennessy even questions Donatello’s interests in sculptural portraiture at large. Janson, Horst

Woldemor, The Sculpture of Donatello, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 239ff.;

cfr. Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, 181-187;

103
Within the recent art historical trend that examines the materiality of media, scholars are

turning their attention to the physical and psychological qualities of wax artworks and ex-votos.

See for example the recent contribution by Holmes, who also briefly traces a history of wax votos

and refers to the indexicality of the material. Holmes, “Ex-votos”.

104
Didi-Hubermann, Georges, “Image, organe, temps,” Le fait de l’analyse, no. 5, Les Organes

(c.1998): pages ??
105
Megan Holmes cites the example of St. Francis, who received the stigmata “impressed upon

the body [...] by the royal signet as if in wax” (“Regis signacula per modum sigilli corpori eius
 43

impressa” Saint Bonaventure, Legenda maior beatissimi patris Francisci, Cap. XII, 12, The life of

the holie father S. Francis Writen by Saint Bonaventure, and it is ralated by the Reverend Father

Aloysius Lipomanus Bishop of Verona. (Doway: Laurence Kellam, 1610); Cfr. Holmes, “Ex-

votos”.
106
Holmes, “Ex-votos”, p. 4.
107
Fabio Bisogni, “Ex voto e la scultura in cera nel tardo medioevo”, Visions of Holyness. Art and

Devotion in Renaissance Italy. [FINISH FULL REFERENCE] pp. 69-71.

108
Von Schlosser [CITE PAGES IN GRI TRANSLATION WHEN DONE]
109
[See, for example, Battaglia, Dizionario della lingua italiana, pp...]
110
Jentsch, Ernst, Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen. (Halle an der Saale, 1906), pages ????
111
[Freud here.]
112
[BALDINUCCI]