Originalveröffentlichung in: Source : notes in the history of art. Special issue "Superficial? Approaches to painted
sculpture", 30 (2011), Nr. 3, S. 47-55
COMING ALIVE: SOME REMARKS ON THE RISE OF
"MONOCHROME" SCULPTURE IN THE RENAISSANCE
Frank Fe hre nbach
In his dialogue on sculpture , written in Padua
shortly afte r 1500, the sculptor-humanist
Pomponius Gauricus touche d upon polychrome d me tal sculpture . He e xplaine d not
only how diffe re nt alloys produce diffe re nt
colorations in bronze , but also how "coloracione " of gold, silve r, yellow, gre e n, and
black is achieved during the finishing of the
statue . 1 Around the same time , howe ve r,
Le onardo da Vinci explicitly e xclude d color
from the discussion of sculpture . In his re ­
marks on the competition between sculpture
and painting, Leonard o boasted that sculp­
ture requires "meno d iscorso" because it
lacks the complications of color: "del colore
nulla."2 Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on
sculpture (actually, on the proportions of
man and the production of statues on differ­
ent scales) of about 1434­1435 contained
no reference to color, although sculpture,
accord ing to Alberti, aims at the perfect im­
itation of natural bod ies. 3 Similarly, more
than one hund red years later, in his Vite's
elaborate introduction to painting, sculpture,
and architecture, Giorgio Vasari did not men­
tion polychromed marble and metal sculp­
ture.
What appears, from the perspective of cen­
tral and northern Italian art theory, to have
been a divorce between color and sculpture
over the course of the fifteenth and early
sixteenth century was in reality a far more
complicated process. The rise of mono­
chrome sculpture is a fascinating back and
forth, marked by surprising transitions, for­
mal experiments, and increasing d ifferenti­
ation among sculptural materials. The or­
thod ox juxtaposition of monochromy versus
polychromy obstructs the view on far more
interesting transitional phenomena. By the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, ivory and
alabaster statuettes showed an entire range
of mono­, d uo­, and polychromed surfaces.
It is in this context that inventories ind icate
a new estimation of stone as material. Marble
Mad onnas are listed, for instance, as "ymag­
ine beate Marie lapid is alabastri." 4 Mono­
chrome hardwood statuettes and small ivory
altars became a specialty of Cologne at about
the same time. Toward the end of the fif­
teenth century, the "breakthrough" of mono­
chrome stone, bronze, limewood , and oak
sculpture was largely a question of scale. As
a general rule, we can say that the smaller
the sculpture, the more usual it was to leave
surfaces, especially of more precious mate­
rials, relatively untouched by color—though
not, to be sure, without protective varnishes
and glazes.
Around 1434, Donatello transformed the
gray sand stone Cavalcanti
Annunciation
(Santa Croce, Florence) into a fictitious
white­marble monument, carefully accentu­
ated by some gilding. In this case, coloration
is used foremost to create an almost mono­
chrome surface in imitation of a more pre­
cious material. Donatello was the first for
whom the application of color seemed to
hinge on the d istinction between noble and
less noble materials. He d id not hesitate to
48
produce polychromed works in wood, terra­
cotta, cartapesta (papier­mache), stucco, or
macigno (sandstone), but he was apparently
among the earliest artists to renounce color
on marble and bronze sculptures—a parallel
to Brunelleschi's emphasis on the mono­
lithic, unpainted columns in his Florentine
basilicas. In his Saint George, Donatello
seems to affirm monochromy's most crucial
dilemma. In order to represent the gaze, the
smooth surface of the eyes requires—in the
absence of paint—a chisel that hollows out
what is supposed to be flat and creates the
illusion of a dark pupil, a violation of surface
imitation in favor of an optical illusion. Even
in the fifteenth­century reliefs of the Delia
Robbia workshop, which are the most direct
predecessors to monochrome marble sculp­
ture, indication of the gaze—and, therefore,
the application of black color—was deemed
indispensable.
What, then, drove the emergence of large­
scale monochrome sculptures in Europe
around and after 1500? Evidently, the un­
earthing of spectacular monumental figures
such as the Laocoon group in 1506 or the
Apollo Belvedere in 1509 provided important
paradigms, since these statues had lost their
original colors during their long hibernation.5
However, this must already have been the
case for most of the ancient statues that in­
creasingly adorned Italian cities from the
thirteenth century onward. As early as the
ninth century, the Chludov Psalter promi­
nently features paradigmatic "pagan" idols
as monochrome statues on high columns (fol.
117r). In a French Boccaccio manuscript of
the 1470s, the famous ancient painter­sculp­
tress Marcia produces monochrome sculp­
tures and polychrome paintings.6 Was it only
a more orthodox classisizing current that
prompted late fifteenth­century sculptors to
renounce colors?
In reality, the "invention" of large­scale
monochrome marble sculpture dates to an
earlier period. Its birthplace was central Italy,
its birth date was circa 1300, and the artists
involved were not sculptors, but painters. In
the fresco cycles of the Upper Church of
San Francesco in Assisi, here attributed to
Giotto, monochrome statues on an implicitly
large scale and in equally large numbers
populate the pediments of Christian (!) build­
ings (Fig. 1). Shortly after 1300, Giotto dec­
orated the lower register of the Cappella
degli Scrovegni in Padua with fourteen mon­
umental personifications of Virtues and
Vices. T hese are grisaille paintings repre­
senting nearly monochrome marble sculp­
tures, evidently referring to large­scale clas­
sical reliefs in Rome, 7 but also competing
with the spare polychromy in the workshop
of Giovanni Pisano. What makes some of
Giotto's personifications in Padua particu­
larly significant is the delicacy of their skin
tones—e.g., Fides (Faith)—and their inven­
tiveness or, better, their surreal nature. For
example, Inconstantia (Inconstancy), a fig­
ure that appears to slip from its spherical
support, provides an almost ironic contrast
to the incarnation of sculptural firmness in
its counterpart, Fortitudo (Fortitude). Incon­
stantia is an impossible sculpture, a contra­
diction in terms. The contradictory character
is a dominant trait of Giotto's allegories,
such as Invidia (Envy), a statue standing on
fire, or Spes (Hope), a marble sculpture hov­
ering midair, weightless and without sup­
port.
Giotto's monochrome sculptures appear
as bravura demonstrations of the painter's
skills, as do the fictitious niches (coretti) at
the arch of the presbytery, with their eye­
catching linear perspective. Monochrome
statues in painting were transmitted from
trecento Italy to the north toward the end of
49
vs
1 I
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Fig. 1
Giotto (?), Vision of'Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assist, c. 1295. San Frances co,
As s is i. (Photo: copyright Stephan Diller, Wiirzburg)
50
the cent ury. In his Flight into Egy pt ( M u s e e
des Beaux-Art s, Dijon, 1 3 9 3 - 1 3 9 9 ) , Melchior Broederlam elabora t ed t he genre, in­
troducing a new and highly influential type:
the broken m o n o c h r o m e (pagan) statue on a
c o l u m n of a different color. In his m o n o ­
c h r o m e panel Throne of Mercy in Frankfurt,
Robert C a m p i n went even further. This life­
sized figure group provokes a direct c o m p e ­
tition with contemporary virtuoso sculptures.
Following a hypothesis by Molly Teasdale
Smith, paintings such as this could be related
to m o n o c h r o m e grisaille textiles covering
altarpieces during Lent, a tradition mirrored
in the d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n b e t w e e n the outer,
m o n o c h r o m e wings of triptychs, visible dur­
ing workdays, and the brilliant colors of the
three inner sides that were only exposed dur­
ing feast days. 8
Jan van E y c k ' s late Annunciation
diptych
in the T h y s s e n Collection offers a spectacu­
lar c o m p a r i s o n with G i o t t o ' s p a r a d o x i c a l
sculptures, perhaps as the only survivor of a
larger group. T h e latter possibility is sug­
gested by Jean, Due de Berry's 1 4 1 3 ­ 1 4 1 6
inventory, in w h i c h o n e entry m e n t i o n s a
diptych "faiz de noir et de blanc." 9 Since its
f e a s t day is c e l e b r a t e d d u r i n g L e n t , the
Annunciation is an obvious choice for mono­
c h r o m e painting. But this does not explain
t h e i m i t a t i o n — o r , rather, a n t i c i p a t i o n —
of m o n o c h r o m e statues in an a m b i e n c e
that was still d o m i n a t e d by p o l y c h r o m e d
sculpture.
Following a hint f r o m Erwin P anofsky,
Rudolf P reimesberger interpreted van Eyck's
p a i n t i n g as a d o c u m e n t of the u n w r i t t e n
paragone, the competition of the arts, in the
N o r t h . 1 0 C o n c e a l i n g its true n a t u r e — a
painted s u r f a c e — t h e diptych demonstrates
the o v e r c o m i n g of a particular difficulty. It
could also refer to ancient paradigms. Ac­
cording to P liny the Elder, Zeuxis produced
highly e s t e e m e d black­and­white paintings
("pinxit et m o n o c h r o m a t a ex a l b o " ) . " With
the mirror effect of the white marble statues
on the black touchstone (pietra di paragone)
slab, van Eyck seems to have anticipated the
later topos of the Italian
paragone—chal­
lenged by Venetian painters after 1 5 0 0 —
that painters are only able to show a single
viewpoint.
With the detached flying dove of the Holy
Spirit, van Eyck produced another paradox­
ical sculpture. Shortly thereafter, Rogier van
der Weyden e m p h a s i z e d the " i m p o s s i b l e "
virtuosity of his fictitious sculptures in the
Beaune Altarpiece, where he actually painted
the small sculptural supports for the Virgin's
delicate vase of lilies. However, with the
protagonists' smooth, white eyes, van Eyck
takes from the painting in terms of animation
what he adds in terms of materiality. T h e
diptych demonstrates marvelously and
painfully that something is missing, that the
sculptures are only about to unleash the dy­
namic impact of the sacred story, only about
to see, move, and speak. With all their over­
w h e l m i n g Active presence as marble bodies
s u r r o u n d e d by d i f f e r e n t fictitious stones,
these statues long for the m o m e n t of anima­
tion. In short, they bear testimony, ex negativo, to the true miracle of painting: its en­
livening t h r o u g h color. 1 2 B e s i d e s the
representation of completely m o n o c h r o m e
stone statues, experiments with all grades
of their enlivening through subtle additions
of color b e c a m e a specialty of Early Nether­
landish painting.
It is not the Living Stones of the Gospel,
but P ygmalion w h o is the true paradigm of
t h e s e e x p e r i m e n t s . In f o u r t e e n t h ­ c e n t u r y
manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose, the
strokes of the sculptor in l o v e — e v e n the
most explicit s t r o k e s — f a i l to a n i m a t e his
statue. 1 3 It is a late thirteenth­century manu­
51
script in the Vatican that demonstrates the
basic requirements for enlivening and re­
sponse: the veiling of the white statue with
colorful vestments.14 Consequently, in many
early modern descriptions of paintings, the
vivacita (enlivening) of images relies upon
color. Following the paradigm of Leonardo
da Vinci, many painters, in Vasari's words,
"gave life to their figures through color."15
The cinquecento hero of enlivening
through color was Titian. In a letter describ­
ing Titian's Venus and Adonis, Ludovico
Dolce states: "It is not sufficient to form the
figure by an excellent design, if the colors
that should imitate flesh have a tone of por­
phyry or soil (terreno), and if they lack that
union and delicacy and vivacity that nature
produces in living bodies.""' In the face of
these remarks, the trompe l'oeil of mono­
chrome sculpture by painters provides a vis­
ible argument. This argument is about the
power of painting to enliven the dead
through color. The painted monochrome
sculptures of Giotto and his followers
demonstrate the ironic formula of a diffi­
culty, the representation of stone sculpture,
which could only be enlivened by overcom­
ing a second difficulty, color. Through his
imitative skills, the painter of monochrome
sculptures produces a nonpainting that longs
for painting.
It is exciting to see how sculptors turned
the argument around yet again. They did, in
fact, accept the limitations that painters im­
posed upon the sculptor's art, trying to be­
come true magistri lapidum viventium, mas­
ters of the living stones. Sculptors attempted,
in short, to turn a handicap into a triumph.
The overcoming of self­imposed limitations
is an important feature in the differentiation
of the arts during the Renaissance. In one of
his most famous sonnets, Michelangelo ac­
cepts the factual lifelessness of his marble
None and has it paradoxically say: "I am
glad to sleep, and even more to be of stone,
while turmoil and shame continue; not to
see, not to hear is my consolation [. . .]"
(Rime 247).
Monochrome sculpture tends to radiate a
more mysterious life than its polychromed
counterpart. We could call this effect the
"emergence of life," a parallel to the tradi­
tional, Aristotelian view on the colors white
and black as the "origins" of all color. This
provides a powerful model not only for white
marble, but also for dark bronze statues.
Monochrome white and dark surfaces mark
a point of departure for, rather than the ab­
sence of, enlivening. For Vincenzo Giustin­
iani, writing around 1630, the disadvantage
of monochrome sculpture becomes its major
advantage, especially with regard to ancient
sculpture that sometimes, "with so many un­
speakable signs of life [• . .] appears to
breathe, although he [the Meleager of the
Vatican] is only of marble like the others."17
S ome thirty years later, Gianlorenzo Bernini
makes the important statement, recalled in
Paul Freart de Chantelou's diary, that sculp­
tors have to find equivalents of color in their
monochrome sculptures—a major difficulty
requiring more skill than the painter's. 18
There is perhaps no more impressive an­
ticipation of this statement than that provided
by fifteenth­ and sixteenth­century Italian
marble reliefs and portrait busts. Again, the
juxtaposition of monochrome versus poly­
chrome sculpture appears as an oversimpli­
fication. After all. what does the term mono­
chrome actually mean, considering changing
conditions of illumination (flickering can­
dles, different phases of daylight) and the
reality of materials? We do not know exactly
how Donatello's rilievi schiacciati ("flat re­
liefs"), Mino da Fiesole's busts, or Antonio
Rossellino's Madonnas were polychromed
52
y
Fig. 2
Donatello, Pazzi Madonna, c. 1422. Bode-Museum, Ber lin. (Photo: author , by permission of
the Staatliche Museen zu Ber lin, Stiftung Preussischer Kultur besitz)
53
^J9--
inB&^r'i
Fig. 3
Workshop of Giovan n i An ton io Amadeo, Emperor Marcianus. c. 1490. Certosa di Pavia.
(Photo: author)
or if an d how delicately patin a was added
through varn ish. But we can still see how
these sculptors achieved the most marvelous
effects of hue merely by differentiating more
and less polished areas an d by usin g the ir­
regularly speckled marble block (Figs. 2 and
3).' 9
Bernini h inted at the astonish ing effect of
time on th e surface of a marble statue; after
nine to ten years, it begins to resemble th e
skin of a body. We do not really know
wh eth er th e effect of skin provided by wax
applications on some of h is sculptures is a
result of later interventions or wh eth er th ey
document an older, scarcely reflected tradi­
tion (Vitruvius's "ganosis" or Daniele da
Barbara's "causis"), a tradition elaborated,
for example, in Raffaele Borgh ini's "Modi
di dar colore al marmore, accio sia simile
all'antico." 20 Sometimes th e highly polish ed
areas of skin reveal a deeper tone th an th e
coarser surfaces of hair and garment, treated
with a file, wh ich appear much brigh ter. Be­
fore any pigment was added, th ese sculptors
unleash ed th e virtual colors of th e stone it­
self, and we witness with astonish ment th e
marble's transformation into skin and
flesh —soft, transitional, pulsating. In bronze
casting, Pomponius Gauricus similarly al­
luded to th e possibilities of subtly colored
54
alloys to "shine through" the surface, thus
providing the effect of living flesh.21 "Monochromy" thereby became another experi­
mental field for the Western exploration of
artistic enlivening as an oscillation between
"dead" material and the fiction of an ani­
mated body, or of the emergence of the signs
of life in art.
NOTES
1. Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura , ed. Heinrich
Brockhaus (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1886), pp. 224,
236, 240, 242.
2. Leonardo da Vinci, Tra tta to della pittura 36.
3. Leon Battista Alberti, De sta tua 2: "[. . .] veris
naturae corporibus persimilima [sic] esse intuentibus
appareant."
4. Anton Legner, "Polychrome und monochrome
Skulptur in der Realitat und im Abbild," in Vor Stefa n
Lochner: Die Kolner Ma ler von 1300 bis 1430, exh.
cat. (Cologne: Wallraf­Richartz­Museum, 1977), p.
158.
5. See Patrik Reutersward, "The Breakthrough of
Monochrome Sculpture during the Renaissance,"
Konsthistorisk tidskrift 69, nos. 3/4 (2000): 125­149;
Marco Collareta, "From Color to Black and White,
and Back Again: The Early Middle Ages and Early
Modern Times," in The Color of Life: Polychromy in
Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Roberta
Panzanelli, Elke Schmidt, and K enneth Lapatin (Los
Angeles: Getty Museum, 2008), pp. 62­77.
6. New York Public Library. Spencer Coll., Ms 33,
fol. 37v; see Hermann Ulrich Asemissen and Gunter
Schweikhart, Malerei a ls Thema der Ma lerei (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1994), pp. 57­62.
7. Selma Pfeiffenberger, "The Iconology of Giotto's
Virtues and Vices at Padua" (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr
College, 1966); Serena Romano, La O di Giotto (Mi­
lan: Electa, 2008), pp. 217­228.
8. Molly Teasdale Smith, "The Use of Grisaille As
a Lenten Observance," Ma rsya s 8 (1957/1959):43­
54; cf. Marion Grams­Thieme, Lebendige Steine: Studien zur niederla ndischen
Gris
a illem
a lerei des 15.
undfruhen 16. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Bohlau, 1988);
Dagmar R. Taube, Monochrome gem
a lte
a
Pl stik:
Entwicklung,
Verbreitung und Bedeutung
eines
a
Ph nomens niederldndischer M
a lerei der Gotik (Es­
sen: Die Blaue Eule, 1991).
9. Rudolf Preimesberger, "Zu Jan van Eycks Dip­
tychon der Sammlung Thyssen­Bornemisza," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 54, no. 4 (1991 ):459­489
(cit. 460).
10. Ibid.; Erwin Panofsky, Ga lileo As a Critic of
the Arts (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1954), p. 3. Hans
Belting distinguishes between "physical" seeing (mo­
nochromy) and "imaginative" seeing (polychromy);
see Hans Belting and Christiane K ruse, Die Erfindung
des Gemdldes: Da s erste Ja hrhundert der nieder­
al ndischen Ma lerei (Munich: Hirmer, 1994), pp. 6 0 ­
62.
I I. Pliny, Na tura lis Historic! 35.64.
12. See Frank Fehrenbach, "Calor nativus—Color
vitale: Prolegomena zu einer Asthetik des 'Lebendigen
Bildes' in der friihen Neuzeit," in Visuelle Topoi:
Erfindung und tra diertes Wissen in den Kiinsten der
ita lienischen Rena issa nce, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and
Max Seidel (Munich: Deutscher K unstverlag, 2003),
pp. 151­170.
13. Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygma lion Effect: From
Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008), pp. 29­44 (fig. 17).
14. Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 376,
fol. 124v; see Eberhard K iinig, Die Liebe im Zeichen
der Rose: Die Ha ndschriften des Rosenroma ns in der
Va tika nischen Bibliothek (Stuttgart: Belser, 1992), p.
47; on the necessity to veil "naked truth" with colorful
textures in poetry, see Petrarch. Epistolae Seniles 12.2.
15. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de'piu
eccellentipittori,
scultori e architettori, nelle reda zioni del 1550 e 1568,
ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 6 vols.
(Florence: Sansoni, 1966­1987), IV, p. 10.
16. Luigi Grassi and Mario Pepe, Diziona rio dei
termini a rtistici (Milan: TEA, 1994), pp. 1065­1066.
17. Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorsi sulle a rti e sui
mestieri, ed. Anna Banti (Florence: Sansoni, 1981),
p. 70; cf. Rudolf Preimesberger, "Motivi del 'para­
gone' e concetti teorici nel 'Discorso sopra la Scultura"
di Vincenzo Giustiniani." in Ca ra va ggio e i Gius­
tinia ni: tocca r con mono una collezione del Seicento,
ed. Silvia Danesi Squarzina (Milan: Electa, 2001), pp.
50­56.
18. Paul Freart de Chantelou, Journa l de voya ge
du Ca vcdier Bernin en Fra nce, ed. Milovan Stanic
(Paris: Macula, L'Insulaire, 2001), p. 47.
55
19. For later examples of what I would call a refined
"Marsyas effect" (the use of irregularly colored
stones), see E. D. Schmidt's entries in Color of Life,
pp. 143-144, 149-150.
20. See Kristina Herrmann-Fiore, '"Osservazioni
sull'epidermide di 'Apollo e Dafne' del Bernini," in
OPD Restauro 8 (1996 [1997]):40-47 (esp. 43).
21. P omponius Gauricus (p. 224): " [ . . . ] Aristonidas
[.. .J ferrum et aes miscuit, ut eius rubigine per nitorem
aeris relucente, rubor exprimeretur verecundiae."