Bozzetto
A bozzetto ( Italian for sketch , draft ) is a first, sketchy model for a figure or a sculpture . Bozzetti are made of easy-to-work material, usually clay , plaster or wax , less often wood. Due to the difficult-to-work materials of the final work, the bozzetto was an important preliminary stage for testing changes and work steps. But it also served to give the client the opportunity to make change requests. Often a bozzetto reveals more of the original intention of the artist than the art object made afterwards due to the client's change requests.
Bozzetti were mainly used as designs in sculpture . But Italian painters also used three-dimensional models to test the incidence of light and the casting of shadows or to examine the arrangement of the figures in a planned painting.
Oil sketches, for example as drafts for baroque ceiling frescoes, are also called bozzetto in Italian . In German one uses the terms sketch , draft or study for this .
Word origin
The Italian word bozzetto is a diminutive to bozza , which means "draft" or "sketch". The verbs abbozzare and sbozzare are derived from the same stem bozza and also generally mean “to make a draft” or “to sketch”, for example abbozzare also for drafting plans or letters. From abbozzare , in turn, abbozzo (“draft”, “sketch”) is derived.
The first documented use of the word bozza in sculpture can be found in 1482 for Verrocchio's small clay sketch for his Christ-Thomas group in San Michele (“la boza et principio di si bella cosa”). In the 16th century, the use of the term bozzetto increased, with the terms modello or Latin modelum and exemplum being used, more rarely forma .
Use of bozzetti
Designs for sculptures
The bozzetto as a specially made work sketch made of easily malleable fabric for a certain work of art is a new creation of the Italian, especially the Florentine early Renaissance . The first artist in whose life's work the bozzetto can be proven as the most important preliminary stage from order to order is Verrocchio .
A distinction must be made between bozzetti, which are intended as a working model for the artist workshop, and contract bozzetti, which correspond to the contract drawings and were presented to the client when the contract was concluded. The two oldest surviving contract bozzetti are Donatello's Forzori altar and Pollajuolo's competition design for the Forteguerri tomb in Pistoja from 1477 (both can be seen today in London's Victoria and Albert Museum ), both made of terracotta.
The artists often had little time to execute these bozzetti. For example, when the contract for the Zenobius Shrine in the Florentine Cathedral was awarded in 1432, there were only five days between the announcement of the work and the deadline for submitting a bozzetto.
The bozzetti experienced a heyday in the baroque era . The significant role of the designs in the workshop can be derived from the amount of preserved bozzetti from the individual masters. In addition, there is a shift in the meaning of the term: The medieval “pattern” or “exemplum” was a true model of the work to be carried out later. The concept of the bozzetto as a study, coined in the Renaissance , is based on a dynamic understanding. It is no longer just the final work, but increasingly also the artistic process that comes into focus. Accordingly, the new value of the baroque bozzetto lies precisely in the sketchiness, in the rapid three-dimensional design: it reveals the artistic conception of the work, which is precisely why the bozzetto was valued in the baroque era.
Studies in painting
Since the 15th century, painters have also been using small figures made of clay (“clay sketches”) or wax to study the incidence of light and the resulting shadows, or to test the arrangement of a group of figures, or to study clothing. The best-known example is Tintoretto , of which dozen of drawings based on models have been preserved, particularly those of Michelangelo's reclining figures from the Medici Chapel . Bozzetti are attested by Correggio , Tizian , El Greco and Barocci . Also by Perugino and Andrea del Sarto is known that they used full plastic models. Of the numerous bozzetti ascribed to Michelangelo , only the Hercules and Kakus group of the Casa Buonarroti stand up to a more detailed criticism of the provenance . In Italy the tradition lasted until the 18th century, in Germany, however, the use of bozzetti has not been proven.
Extended word meaning in Italian
Based on the sculptural design and the use as a model in painting, the term bozzetto in Italian was also transferred to designs for paintings and especially frescoes . This shows - analogous to the role of the studies in sculpture - that a work that is difficult to change due to the materials used is not only roughly sketched in advance in different steps, but completely designed. The draft is worked on until it has developed so far that a transfer into the stone or onto the walls appears almost only as a copy. In this respect, the actual artistic work takes place on the bozzetto, the finished work is a resulting implementation.
In Italian painting, drafts are also referred to as macchia (actually “stain”) or schizzo (literally, for example, “the splashed in”). The Italian art philosopher Benedetto Croce writes in his theory of macchia about the importance of design in art that it is the crux of the matter at which the characteristic of the work of art emerges. For Croce, the actual artistic process is a step-by-step approach from the first impression to the finished work:
“Carrying out, completing a picture means nothing but a closer inner approach to the object, making it clear and consolidating what has penetrated our eyes as a blinding ray. If, however, that first harmonic accord - the macchia - is missing , execution and perfection will never manage to move us inwardly, whereas the mere naked macchia , without any further objective definition, is quite capable of awakening this sensation. "
Bozzetto in literature
The novel Bozzetto by Hermann Alexander Beyeler and Gerd J. Schneeweis (published at the beginning of October 2014 by the Frankfurt publishing house weissbooks.w ) is about Michelangelo's Bozzetto for his fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel .
Web links
- Real Lexicon on German Art History: Bozzetto
- Side with bozzetti
- Example from the Bozzetti collection of the Frankfurt Liebieghaus
Individual evidence
- ^ Duden online: Bozzetto
- ^ Large art lexicon by PW Hartmann: Bozzetto
- ↑ Cf. online dictionary LEO: bozzetto
- ^ Real Lexicon on German Art History Bozzetto
- ↑ Benedetto Croce: On the theory of Macchia , in: the same, Small writings on aesthetics , Volume 1, Tübingen 1929.
- ^ Official website of the novel. Retrieved October 29, 2014 .