(C) Brepols Publishers

INTRODUCTORY NOTE 7 Eliseo Aprile produced the diagrams. Michael W. Cole and Richard Schofield read the manuscript, made important editorial suggestions, and corrected several errors. Pierangelo Bellettini, Cristina Bersani, Tiziano Costa, Dorothea Diemer, Manuela Faustini Fustini, Corinna Guidici, Lars Olof Larsson, Anna Manfron, Massimo Medica, Daniela Schiavina, Suzy Taraba, and Patricia Wengraf gave invaluable help with the images. Andrea Bacchi, Carla Bernardini, Mark Gregory D’Apuzzo, Marzia Faietti, Emanuela Ferretti, Sergio Fusai, Davide Righini, Roberto Terra, Cecilia Ugolini, and Louis Waldman answered many questions, generously sharing their expertise. David Schorr’s brilliant graphic ideas were crucial for the design of the front cover. Richard Tuttle’s papers contain an early list of people (some now deceased) and institutions he wanted to thank. We join him in acknowledging: Nicholas Adams, Charles Avery, Franco Bergonzoni, Agostino Borromeo, Malcolm Campbell, John D’Amico, Bernice Davidson, Mario Fanti, Kurt W. Forster, Helmut Friedl, Cesare Gnudi, Richard Harprath, Christina Hermann- Fiore, Herbert Keutner, Richard Krautheimer, P. O. Kristeller, Manfred Leithe-Jasper, Wolfgang Lotz, Giovanni Morigi, Andrew Morrogh, J. Graham Pollard, Paolo Prodi, Anthony Radcliffe, Giancarlo Roversi, Joseph Victor, and the staffs of the Archivio di Stato, Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, and Biblioteca Universitaria in Bologna; Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan; the State Archives in Florence, Mantua, and Rome; the Library and Archives of the Vatican; and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Our deepest and most sincere thanks go to Richard Tuttle’s family, Marcia E. Vetrocq and Grace Vetrocq Tuttle, whose unconditional support of our efforts was instrumental for their successful realization. This book is dedicated to them.Publishers Brepols (c) Publishers Brepols (c) FOREWORD Michael W. Cole ichard Tuttle’s The Neptune Fountain in Bologna: Bronze, Marble, and Water in the Making of Ra Papal City offers two distinctive contributions to the understanding of late Renaissance sculpture. The first is that it gathers a documentary register that has few parallels in the study of other monuments from the period. The records relating to the fountain include correspondence to and from its chief patron, the papal vice legate Pier Donato Cesi; contracts with the artists involved; account books that allow a detailed chronology of the fountain’s production; legal proceedings that reveal the quarrels that the artists collaborating on the fountain fell into; Cesi’s summary of the state of the fountain in 1565 and his later description of the fountain as executed (his “interpretation,” as Tuttle puts it, “of what the artists had given him”); letters from the artists involved and from other observers of the project that was underway; and a handbook on the engineering that allowed the water display. Some of these documents would be of interest whatever work they concerned: the specificity of the handbook, for example, makes it one of the most important texts on hydraulics written anywhere in Renaissance Italy. But the cumulative picture is what makes Tuttle’sPublishers book most exceptional. With other major Giambologna sculptures, there is debate about just what the works represent, who was involved in their making, and when they were produced: this gives some sense of how comparatively extraordinary the Bolognese documentary record is, how rare the window it gives us onto the conception and execution of Renaissance sculpture. The second thing that sets the book apart is a matter not of foundations but of perspective. Tuttle was largely known not as a sculpture specialist but as an architectural historian; his most widely read publicationsBrepols include two books on Vignola and a volume he co-edited in the important Electa series Storia dell’architettura italiana. What he brought to the sculptural monument was a kind(c) of attention that we seldom encounter, one that concerned itself not just with matters of site and scale, but also with such topics as corner treatments, moldings, supports, and ornament. Tuttle uses comparative drawings to demonstrate that the fountain’s inventors looked carefully at buildings. He considers how the fountain project extended the architectural transformation of the surrounding buildings and how it fit into a larger, coordinated group of monuments. He examines the consequences of the fountain’s completion for the appearance of the piazza as a whole and the further renovations that resulted from this. He considers approaches, streets, and sightlines, and he demonstrates that Cardinal Cesi brought to Bologna a sense of urbanism cultivated in papal Rome. The Neptune Fountain is common enough as a sculptural type; after the late sixteenth-century, many major cities had large sculptural monuments in one or more of their squares. Yet the book exemplifies a kind of question that the literature on these works rarely poses. It also recalibrates our sense of Giambologna’s career. Most recent scholarship on the sculptor concerns his smaller-scale works, but Giambologna B Detail of Neptune, Neptune Fountain, Bologna. 10 FOREWORD eventually became an architect, designing buildings no less than figures. Tuttle’s book explains a key early moment in that transition. In working on this project, Tuttle came to believe that, “Scholars are so accustomed to viewing Renaissance artists in constant competition with one another … and to exercising the principles of connoisseurship to delineate distinct personalities through the separation of hands, that genuine creative collaboration is seldom seriously considered.” And indeed, the story he tells is from beginning to end one of collaboration. The book offers a particularly clear and subtle description of how papal patronage functioned through his representatives in distant cities, and of the kind of negotiation that happened between patron and artist. It shows us that the economics of sculpture had much to do with the teamwork involved. And it reminds us that teams changed: even when adequately funded, efficiently supervised, and expertly carried out, it was the nature of ambitious projects to outlast the reigns or available time of the key actors. One of the book’s fundamental claims is that the Neptune Fountain had two primary authors: Giambologna was responsible for much of the modeling and casting, but he worked with an invention that the painter and hydraulic engineer Tommaso Laureti had provided, establishing the fountain’s basic imagery and architectural form. The book gives us a new understanding of Giambologna, but in some ways more surprising is its portrait of Laureti, an original and important artist who has yet to receive a monograph in any language. Beyond this, the book serves as a welcome reminder that very few Renaissance sculptures have a single “author,” despite our perennial temptation to put a single name on our captions and wall labels. Tuttle largely completed this book in 1991; though he published essays from it in the years that followed and began revising the presentPublishers text before his lamentably premature death in 2009, the bibliography that the editors had to work needed to be updated. Nevertheless, little that Tuttle writes about the Neptune Fountain feels anachronistic. Much of the book comprises a systematic review of an archival record that he himself painstakingly assembled through two decades of research. No one writing before knew nearly as much as Tuttle did about the fountain, and those writing since have depended largely on the articles he developed from his unpublished manuscript. And where the book moves from evidence to analysis, Tuttle’s thinking stands far enough outside theBrepols norms of the field that the text seems fresh even today. This is a book that should have changed the way scholars approached Renaissance sculpture twenty years ago. And while(c) Tuttle’s will not be the last word on the documents or the sculpture, his book will be unavoidable for all future students of Giambologna, Laureti, and the Renaissance fountain. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ASB Archivio di Stato, Bologna ASF Archivio di Stato, Florence ASM Archivio di Stato, Modena BAM Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana BCA Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna Publishers Brepols (c) Publishers Brepols (c) INTRODUCTION he Neptune Fountain in Bologna (1563–67) is a distinguished member of an elite corps Tof large-scale sixteenth-century public fountains. Like its cousins in Florence, Messina, and Genoa, as well as its descendants in Rome, Naples, Augsburg, Munich, Fredriksborg, and elsewhere, it satisfied an appetite for civic monuments that brought the imagery, artistry, and material splendor of aristocratic garden fountains into the public domain. For the most part, earlier city fountains had been stolidly utilitarian in scope and design. As representative works intended to memorialize the aspirations and achievements of absolutist regimes, the new fountains taxed municipal coffers and challenged the skills of various specialized work forces—artisans, sculptors, architects, engineers—in efforts to bring popular and lasting glory to the sovereign. Given the limited number of autonomous and wealthy Italian city states during the later sixteenth century— not to mention the difficulties of obtaining the artistic talent, engineering expertise, and money that such undertakings required—it is not too surprising that the Neptune Fountain

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