Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence

by Michael W. Cole

Ambitious Form describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors--Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti--as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked.



Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published December 5, 2010

About the author

Michael W. Cole is professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Alessio]

This was a tough but enlightening read. The sculptural notion of Vielansichtigkeit might equally apply to Cole’s book, where he presents late sixteenth-century sculpture through a variety of interpretive lenses. I was particularly intrigued by the discussions of how sculptors‘ materials functioned as both medium and metaphor, the temporality of and conditions for motion (fascinating connection between Giambologna and Leonardo), and the abstraction of sculpture, amongst many other highly suggestive threads this book introduces.

Also, for the love of god, if the book's about sculpture, we need dimensions!