by Jon Lackman | 2 April 2008 | Museums, Renaissance
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviews the “Baccio Bandinelli 1493-1560, Dessins et sculptures du Louvre” exhibition now on view at the Louvre. It notes that this is a rare opportunity to reassess the artist, who’s been in disrepute since the Renaissance. His contemporaries starting things off by leaving to posterity “ein Negativbild” of the artist, which is putting it mildly. In his autobiography, Cellini wrote:
… how many thousand ducats had recently been squandered upon ugly pieces of bad sculpture turned out by that beast … Baccio Bandinello is made up of everything bad, and thus has he ever been … Bandinello writhed and made the most ugly faces—his face itself being by nature hideous beyond measure—which could be imagined by the mind of man …
Of one Bandinelli sculpture, Cellini wrote:
… if one were to shave the hair of your Hercules, there would not be skull enough left to hold his brain; it says that it is impossible to distinguish whether his features are those of a man or of something between a lion and an ox; the face too is turned away from the action of the figure, and is so badly set upon the neck, with such poverty of art and so ill a grace, that nothing worse was ever seen; his sprawling shoulders are like the two pommels of an ass’ pack-saddle; his breasts and all the muscles of the body are not portrayed from a man, but from a big sack full of melons set upright against a wall. The loins seem to be modelled from a bag of lanky pumpkins; nobody can tell how his two legs are attached to that vile trunk; it is impossible to say on which leg he stands, or which he uses to exert his strength; nor does he seem to be resting upon both, as sculptors who know something of their art have occasionally set the figure. It is obvious that the body is leaning forward more than one-third of a cubit, which alone is the greatest and most insupportable fault committed by vulgar commonplace pretenders. Concerning the arms, they say that these are both stretched out without one touch of grace or one real spark of artistic talents, just as if you had never seen a naked model. Again, the right leg of Hercules and that of Cacus have got one mass of flesh between them, so that if they were to be separated, not only one of them, but both together, would be left without a calf at the point where they are touching. They say, too, that Hercules has one of his feet underground, while the other seems to be resting on hot coals.
