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Reviews Estelle Lingo, Mochi’s Edge and Bernini’s Florentine, which leads her to investigate Baroque how sculpture was being considered Harvey Miller Studies in Baroque Art, London and in Florence during the second half of Turnhout, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2017, 328 pp., £100. ISBN 978-1-9094-00801 the sixteenth century. She notes, as others have, that its critical fortunes were in a state of decline, which she Between the late 1980s and the early 2010s, attributes to various constraints being the annual list of PhD dissertations in put on sculptors, both political and progress in the United States included one religious, that were preventing them being written at Columbia University on from practising their art like Michel- the sculptor Francesco Mochi, born in the angelo – that is to say, with the freedom Tuscan town of Montevarchi in 1580 and to embrace the idea of monumental who was one of the outstanding talents sculpture, to revel in the heroics of of the seventeenth century. Belief that it sculpture-making and to celebrate the was well advanced kept many graduate nude body. Lingo is undoubtedly correct students – including this reviewer – that Mochi’s sculptures demonstrate from tackling the subject for their own fiorentinità in their consistently large dissertation. We can now be thankful that scale, technical daring and ways of this particular study went uncompleted revealing the human form. and that it had the discouraging effect it The title of Chapter 2, ‘Draping did, since it preserved Mochi as a wide Michelangelo’, prepares the reader for open field of enquiry for Estelle Lingo, Lingo’s interpretation of how Mochi whose new book on the artist is possibly managed to pay respect to Michelan- the most important contribution to gelo’s exaltation of the nude in an age the study of Roman Baroque sculpture of extreme religious modesty, where produced this century. the new normal in sculpture was to The book is more than a monograph turn attention away from the body by on Mochi – and herein lies its signif- concealing it beneath heavy layers of icance. As the title establishes, it is distracting drapery. Mochi’s Angel of also focused on the larger situation of the Annunciation in Orvieto Cathedral early seventeenth-century sculpture in – his first major commission – is used Rome, whose chief protagonist was the to demonstrate his innovative solution much younger Gian Lorenzo Bernini. to the dilemma. It amounted to a new By restoring to Mochi’s sculpture its language of drapery, in which drapery historical specificity and intricacy, was allowed to be as expressive as Lingo helps us see Bernini’s art with possible provided that it allowed the new clarity. Before reaching Bernini, body to be seen. As the angel’s cloak the reader is led through Mochi’s career lifts up in a dramatic cyclone of cloth, from his beginnings in Rome during we are left with views of the bare the late 1590s until his return from left leg, as well as the right hip and Piacenza in 1629, when he became thigh, revealed through the skin-tight involved with Bernini on the statues for undergarment. Drapery is not the the crossing piers of St Peter’s Basilica. chapter’s only concern. Lingo also Each of the major monuments Mochi investigates how Mochi, in his quest for created over those roughly thirty years fiorentinità, drew inspiration from other is interpreted according to a critical icons of Florentine sculpture, including framework that Lingo outlines in Donatello and Giovanni Pisano. With her first chapter, entitled ‘Sculpture’s Pisano, her argument centres on the Shame’. The key point of reference is a striking similarities she sees between statement by Mochi’s only seventeenth- his Sibyl on the pulpit in Sant’Andrea in century biographer, Giovanni Battista Pistoia and Mochi’s Virgin Annunciate Passeri, about Mochi’s relationship with in Orvieto Cathedral. Can it be possible, Florence. Passeri writes that Mochi, however, that as Mochi started work ‘who was born in the state of Florence on his statue, he thought a pilgrimage […] always wanted to show himself a to Pistoia was the only way forward? rigorous imitator of the Florentine This is not to deny that an element of manner’ (p. 7). Lingo asks what it means thirteenth-century archaism may have that Mochi was committed to a style of entered into his solution that was born sculpture that he saw as being distinctly out of a respect for Pisano. 375 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2018.27.3.9 Francesco Mochi, Angel of the Annunciation, 1603–05, detail. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Orvieto. (photo: courtesy of Mauro Coen) Between 1612 and 1629 Mochi was virtue. There are other visual features, occupied with the bronze equestrian such as the horses’ rapid gaits and the statues of Ranuccio Farnese and his apparent strength needed to control father, Alessandro, in front of the the animals, that seem to be part of Palazzo Comunale in Piacenza. In the same subversive message. But it Chapter 3, ‘Power and the Grotesque’, cannot be the case that Mochi was using Lingo first looks at the statues through the grotesque to offend the Farnese, the lens of technique. As documents as it is an art form that the family had make clear, Mochi insisted that the helped popularize and with which they sculptures be cast in a single pour, which were still associated. This leads back reflects his adherence to earlier ideals to the likelihood that Mochi was most of bronze casting in Florence. Lingo interested in using the grotesque to observes that he calculated elements assert his singularity as an artist. As of the design to celebrate his feat of the Lingo concludes, Mochi appreciated how single pour. The electrified manes and the grotesque could play different ways tails of the horses, as well as the twisting depending on the audience. fringes and tassels on the saddles and Mochi received final payment for riders’ skirts, are among the details the bronzes in April 1629 and returned that allow the viewer to appreciate how to Rome, the setting of Chapter 4, the molten metal had coursed with ‘Crossings’. The principal subject is energy as it flowed through the mould Mochi’s Saint Veronica in the crossing of while being poured. In the rest of the St Peter’s. Lingo reviews this sculpture’s chapter Lingo focuses on understanding complicated history, emphasizing the implications of the fact that the the essential fact that Mochi was not statues were not commissioned by the working under the thumb of Bernini rulers they celebrate but by the people like the two other sculptors represented being ruled, the Piacentines, through in the crossing, Andrea Bolgi and their governing body. The appearance François Duquesnoy. Mochi reported of grotesque ornament on the base directly to Pope Urban VIII and the is interpreted as a kind of rebellious Congregazione della Fabbrica, which language that Mochi used to address gave him a certain licence to pursue his his patrons’ difficult situation. She also own approach, one grounded in fioren- sees it as Mochi’s way of demonstrating tinità. Lingo interprets the Veronica as the power of the artist to invent without a ‘Nympha’, an ancient figure type that constraint – a traditionally Florentine was part of the Florentine revival of 376 | Sculpture Journal 27.3 [2018] antiquity in the fifteenth century. As completion of the Veronica in 1640 and Lingo observes, the Veronica is like a his death in 1654. Traditionally, these Nympha in the way she rushes forward works have been seen in a negative with her garments swept back. Lingo light, understood as the bizarre failings reasons that Mochi’s use of the Nympha of an ageing artist. Lingo shows that was designed to allow him to project the heterogeneous character of the his fiorentinità in a more essential way. group is a reflection of Mochi’s respect The drapery, as it catches in the wind, for the unique circumstances of blows against the saint’s body, which each commission. Her most effective it reveals sensually, while also being demonstration is with his colossal a source of visual wonder in itself – marble statues of Saints Peter and Paul the same strategy he had developed a in the Museo di Roma. When they are quarter of a century earlier in Orvieto. considered in relation to their intended The observation serves as a pivot to setting in the Basilica of San Paolo Bernini’s Saint Longinus, which Lingo fuori le Mura, where they would have sees as existing in opposition to the been seen against a backdrop of Early Veronica. Whereas the Veronica brings Christian mosaics, the stylized quality the Renaissance into the seventeenth of the faces and hair makes better century, the Longinus breaks with it, and sense. Mochi was trying to create works the reason is because of the disconnect that meshed visually with their Early between body and drapery. As Lingo Christian environment. concludes, it is the ‘rebellion’ of the Throughout the book Lingo is to be drapery that becomes the essence of commended for the superb photographs, the ‘baroque’ style that Bernini helped which help her drive her points with spread to all corners of Catholic Europe. particular effectiveness. Lingo made Here, the reader is treated to as cogent it a condition of publishing the book an analysis of Bernini’s style as is to be that a new campaign of photography be found anywhere in the vast literature on undertaken, and she was unrelenting the artist. in her hunt for the requisite funds.

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