Florentine sculptor Desiderio da Settignano rediscovered (Exhibit/Wash.DC)
Reputation is the strangest thing. An artist is celebrated; he’s on top of the world. He dies, and his work is forgotten, or misremembered, or misunderstood as fashions change and canons form. Then suddenly he’s back in the spotlight, or what survives of him is, with scholars scrambling to make up for lost attention and time.
This is the basic story of the 15th-century Florentine sculptor Desiderio da Settignano. He was a star in his day, and his name continues to hold a firm place in the history books. But the record of precisely what he did, and how and why, has grown dim since his death in 1464. He has had to wait almost 600 years for the career retrospective now at the National Gallery of Art.
The survey is minute: 28 pieces, only 15 of which can confidently be assigned to him. Picasso fills museums. Desiderio fits into two little rooms. True, his chief monuments — a tabernacle in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in Santa Croce — are absent because untransportable. But still, two little rooms. Better to get the catalog, you decide, and skip the trip.
Don’t skip the trip. Traveling exhibitions of Renaissance sculpture are rare events. And “Desiderio da Settignano: Sculptor of Renaissance Florence” is proof that perfection cannot be quantified. It would be entirely true to Desiderio’s spirit to think of the show as a sonnet — a sonnetto, “a little sound” — rather than an epic, an intimate study in precise rhythms, interior rhymes, energy concentrated rather than unfurled. And just as these qualities make their full effect when a sonnet is read aloud, so Desiderio’s art, which is about light, touch and modesty of scale, makes most sense when seen live.
Read entire article at NYT
This is the basic story of the 15th-century Florentine sculptor Desiderio da Settignano. He was a star in his day, and his name continues to hold a firm place in the history books. But the record of precisely what he did, and how and why, has grown dim since his death in 1464. He has had to wait almost 600 years for the career retrospective now at the National Gallery of Art.
The survey is minute: 28 pieces, only 15 of which can confidently be assigned to him. Picasso fills museums. Desiderio fits into two little rooms. True, his chief monuments — a tabernacle in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in Santa Croce — are absent because untransportable. But still, two little rooms. Better to get the catalog, you decide, and skip the trip.
Don’t skip the trip. Traveling exhibitions of Renaissance sculpture are rare events. And “Desiderio da Settignano: Sculptor of Renaissance Florence” is proof that perfection cannot be quantified. It would be entirely true to Desiderio’s spirit to think of the show as a sonnet — a sonnetto, “a little sound” — rather than an epic, an intimate study in precise rhythms, interior rhymes, energy concentrated rather than unfurled. And just as these qualities make their full effect when a sonnet is read aloud, so Desiderio’s art, which is about light, touch and modesty of scale, makes most sense when seen live.