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David (detail), 1504.

Marble, height: 434 cm.

Galleria dell’Academia, Florence.

Copy of The Head of a Faun, attributed to Michelangelo, original disappeared.

Museo del Bargello, Florence.

Michelangelo not only outshines all his predecessors; he remains the only great sculptor of the Renaissance at its best. Sculpture flourished in the 15th century only to fade and die off in the next. Having progressed too far ahead of painting, it was only natural for sculpture to be the first to peak and decline.

What most Late Renaissance sculptors lacked was not talent, but the ability to use their own eyes and share a vision with either their contemporaries or posterity. We should immediately add that the era was unfavourable to them: Michelangelo’s extreme genius left little scope for works that escaped his influence, damning all his contemporaries to settle for aping him.

The decadence had yet another cause: Michelangelo had brilliantly solved every essential problem facing sculpture at the time, thus freeing fellow artists from research and inclining them towards carefree routine work where they soon found themselves copying readymade techniques, which is the death of all art.

Assuredly, the quest for character and movement was germinating in the works of Donatello, but it was tempered by a strong dose of naturalism; their matter invariably counterbalanced their spirit. Donatello made a major contribution up until the heart of the 16th century; his influence was in marked conflict with Michelangelo’s, especially when it came to low relief, a genre Buonarroti practiced little. But when it comes to Michelangelo’s successors, neurosis prevails: anything you would call bone structure, musculature, vitality, or health deteriorates. Who would still look at such eyesores? And nonetheless, it is the vanquished copycats who give power and flavour to the whole period.

Vasari detailed all the techniques of contemporary sculpture, reviewing the manufacture of wax and earthen models, scaling techniques, low and high relief, casting, stucco, and woodwork. For his part, Cellini offers a comprehensive body of practical information about working wood in his memoirs and a treatise on sculpture. Since the early Renaissance, only bronze and marble have found favour with the public. You would imagine Michelangelo’s preference for marble might tilt tastes his way but both continued to flourish, whether for low relief or in the round.

Giambologna’s biography gives insight into the set-up of a Florentine Renaissance sculptors’ workshop: artists would make smaller works of marble themselves from a model but brought in help for larger ones. For bronze statuettes, the artist does an easily fashioned model in wax or clay and turns over execution to helpers supplied by the grand duke. Marble sculpture happened then as it does now. It was wrongly claimed that Michelangelo used to rough-hew a marble right after finishing up the small-scale model.

Bertoldo di Giovanni, Bellerophon Taming Pegasus, 1481–1482.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Cellini adamantly declares that, though he used to settle for this shortcut, Michelangelo made a point of doing a preliminary full-scale clay model. As he says:

That’s what I saw with my own eyes in Florence. While working on the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, that’s what Michelangelo did, not only for the statues but also for the architectural works. He often realised the ornaments needed for his constructions through models built to the exact size of his intended sculptures. When the artist is satisfied with his model, he turns to charcoal and carefully sketches his statue from its principal angle. Failing this, he risks being easily fooled by his chisel. Until now, the best method is Buonarroti’s: after sketching the model from its principal angle, [the artist] starts producing from the drawing with a chisel, proceeding exactly as if sculpting a figure in semi-relief. This is how this marvellous artist gradually hewed his figures out of marble.

But while Michelangelo took all sorts of precautions at this level, he all too often neglected the finishing touches. Attacking the marble with his characteristically spirited fury, he often exposed himself to mishaps, as occurred with the literally atrophied right arm of the Medici Madonna in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo Church.

Although polychrome enthusiasts became ever fewer, works of coloured marble sustained a following for some time. Juxtaposing marbles of different colours, Vasari argued, enabled sculpture to compete with painting.

Terracotta had few faithful disciples left. As for Della Robbia’s style of enamelled terracotta, it was definitely relegated to the countryside. Bronze castings held many surprises and disappointments. We know how Benvenuto Cellini’s picturesque and dramatising description immortalised the misadventures of casting his Perseus. As for Giambologna, he subcontracted the door casting for the Dome of Pisa, sculptures for the Salviati Chapel, and statues of Cosimo I.

Wood and ivory sculptures were almost non-existent and stuccos were earning wider appeal. Pasteboard was commonly used for copies of greater works and execution of ornaments. And finally, wax sculpture blossomed brilliantly. In Vasari’s time, no goldsmith would model effigies without it.

Michelangelo dominated and even snuffed out the rest of Late Renaissance sculpture with his style, and even more so with his technique. Given this dazzling superiority, need we add that his influence was more harmful than fertile? The master focused on sobriety and concision while his imitators mostly delivered empty output of remarkable poverty. He sought out robustly rounded forms and palpable contours; his imitators fell for clumsiness and exaggerated swelling. He exalted and exasperated everyone’s feelings: what was emotion and eloquence to him became bombastic through other chisels. He uplifted the manifestation of brute force into moral statements: in his wake, people swore by only the former. If the Primitives approximated the slender, distinct forms of their Ancient Greek peers and if Michelangelo became one with Phidias through the Medici tombs, the last heroes of the Renaissance had apparently taken example from the Farnese Hercules and other examples of Roman decadence.

Madonna of the Stairs, c. 1490.

Marble, 56.7 × 40.1 cm.

Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

Battle of the Centaurs, 1490–1492.

Marble, 80.5 × 88 cm.

Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

With such high moral ambitions, such moving emotional hang-ups, and all the morbid melancholic expression of Christian passion, the master pursued; the Slaves in the Louvre (pp. 60, 63), the Pensieroso and Moses were more beautiful for the feelings they capture than for their technique and none inspired a single attempt at imitation. It is as if, in the eyes of the Bandinellis, Ammannatis, Tribolos, and Benvenuto Cellinis, Michelangelo had never sculpted anything except his Bacchus (p. 48, 50), Adonis, and Cupid – in short, it is as if all his themes had been pagan. Here, the influences of antiquity and of Michelangelo combined to finish off the destruction of Italian art. Instead of drawing inspiration from modern feelings, the epigones worried only about representing the gods of Mount Olympus and heroes of Rome or Greece; in short, they depicted a dead world. So if the technique of these statues is so mannered and empty, and if expressiveness is totally absent, what remains? Nothing. Except maybe invincible boredom.

Moreover, the exaggerated quest for suppleness and movement, backed by a passion for dazzling feats gave fatal impetus into Mannerism. What can be more pretentious and less monumental than these statues: Giuliano da Sangallo’s Julius II in St Peter’s Basilica, the Paolo Giovio or the Piero de’ Medici amongst others. They may have been completed in an extraordinarily short amount of time, but what jerky, graceless lines and what dearth of elegance! Better than anywhere else, funerary art nicely reflects all the struggles, conflicts, and excesses of the Renaissance. Let us briefly review examples of the output.

In northern Italy, traditional architectural values still had followers such as Sansovino, San Micheli, and the sculptor of the tomb of Soriano da Rimini at the Santo Stefano Church in Venice (1535) – it is a sort of funerary niche inhabited by a sarcophagus supporting a statue of the deceased between two columns.

In central Italy, the tombs of Julius and the Medici, where architecture abdicates entirely before sculpture, were the rule. These monuments contain Michelangelo’s chief innovations: in the 15th century, allegorical figures of almost invariably small size were entirely subordinated to a statue of the deceased but became preponderant in Michelangelo’s works because they stimulated his imagination. For Italy, this was a new way of handling funerary art. Michelangelo’s colossuses contain high spiritualistic aspirations that incarnate a universe of abstract impressions. Need it be said that this is no longer the cold banal allegory of the 15th century, these are no longer the Theological Virtues, Cardinal Virtues, Arts, or Sciences in relaxed poses or, it must be said, somehow parasitical motifs placidly lined up next to each other. Michelangelo liked to penetrate deeper into the conception of a subject: to him all the allegorical characters bond intimately to the deceased whose virtues they celebrate. Indignant or humiliated prisoners, victors savouring the full joy of triumph and personifications of natural forces such as Rivers, Day, Night, Dusk, and Dawn are all so many chords plucked by the soul of the deceased; each rings out its own sound in memory of his noble qualities, of the splendour of his victories and of the pain triggered by his premature death. In short, they are the actors of a tragedy whose hero is Julius II, Giuliano de’ Medici, or his brother Lorenzo. How can such a conception not be more dramatic than that of the Primitives?

The need for movement soon made it impossible to settle for representing the deceased in a posture of eternal rest: the dead are now rubbing elbows, chatting, or doing something else.

As to the themes of the last Renaissance sculptors, the theory of art for art’s sake prevailed increasingly over art as a statement of great ideas and noble sentiments. Here, no example is more edifying than a comparison between sculptures commissioned by the Medici with those of the Florentine Republic for the Piazza dei’ Signori or the Loggia de’ Lanzi. The Republic displayed Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes only after adding an inscription reminding viewers that the Jewish heroine’s exploit stood as a warning to all tyrants. In addition, it essentially commissioned Michelangelo to do a David because it saw the latter as an example of a young herdsman who had saved his country from the yoke of Philistine rule. But the concerns of the Medici lay elsewhere: they sought only to embellish the piazzas with beautiful sculptures free of any signification; in short, they were essentially platonic, i.e. Hercules and Cacus, Neptune, Perseus and the Rape of the Sabine Women. Official art must have singularly annihilated all patriotism for 16th-century Florence to have so hastily accepted compositions based merely on artistic merit instead of on the glorification of a saint, folk hero or military victory. When art becomes that contrived, what breathing space survives for emotions, inspiration, or even personal conviction?

St Proculus, 1494.

Marble, height: 58.5 cm (with base).

Church of San Domenico, Bologna.

Angel Holding a Candelabra, 1495.

Marble, height: 51.5 cm.

Church of San Domenico, Bologna.