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Speaker: Carolina Mangone (I Tatti / Princeton University)
It is an art historical truism that deliberate unfinishedness in marble sculpture is a modernist phenomenon originating with Auguste Rodin’s unprecedented nineteenth-century imitation of Michelangelo’s non-finito as a discrete aesthetic. Despite the widespread imitation of the master’s oeuvre by artists active three centuries prior to Rodin, it was not possible—so conventional wisdom also goes—even for Michelangelo’s most ardent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century followers to perpetuate his lack of finish (whether intentional or not) in their own marble sculpture. Yet this early modern construction of exceptionality around Michelangelo’s non-finito is complicated by what I argue are intentional propagations of his unfinishedness by several imitators from about 1550 through 1650 (like Niccolò Tribolo, Vincenzo Danti, Pierino da Vinci and even Gianlorenzo Bernini). The curious picture that emerges is of sculptors grappling meaningfully and selectively with unfinishedness in their own work, in full recognition of the precarity and inimitability of the non-finito as a category of early modern sculpture in and of itself.
Carolina Mangone is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art and Architecture at Princeton University. Her scholarship explores concepts and practices of imitating, copying, and faking; the materials and techniques of art across medial and professional boundaries; the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic traffic in art theoretical concepts; and the afterlives of artists in text and image. In Bernini’s Michelangelo (2020), she examined the contentiousness of canon formation in its early modern foundations by studying how Bernini’s emulation of Michelangelo’s oeuvre constituted a newly relevant theory of Roman baroque art. She also co-edited with Evonne Levy, Material Bernini (2016), exploring Bernini’s sculptural production on paper and in clay, marble, and bronze, from material and intermedial perspectives.
Image: Photo Taken by Carolina Mangone, detail of Vincenzo Danti's Venus with Two Amorini, c. 1570, marble, at the Casa Buonarroti.
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