Multiples in Pre-Modern Art

Herausgegeben von

Walter Cupperi

diaphanes

Die Publikation wurde ermöglicht durch die Anschubfinanzierung im Rahmen

der Exzellenzinitiative der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Research Fellowship).

1. Auflage

ISBN 978-3-03734-374-6

© diaphanes Zürich-Berlin 2014

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Satz und Layout: 2edit, Zürich

Druck: Pustet, Regensburg

Inhalt

Walter Cupperi

Never Identical: Multiples in Pre-Modern Art 7

Miranda Marvin (edited posthumously by Rolf Michael Schneider)

In the Roman Empire an Aura was a Breeze 31

Andreas Grüner

Antike Reproduktionsmedien

Siegel und Münze zwischen Serialität und Authentizität 59

Joanna Olchawa

Die Magdeburger Aquamanilien des 12. Jahrhunderts als »Multiples« 95

Wolfgang Brassat

Die Tapisserie

Ein auratischer reproduzierender Bildträger 121

Claudia Kryza-Gersch

Über die Anfänge der Reproduzierbarkeit von Kleinbronzen in

der italienischen Renaissance 147

Walter Cupperi

»You Could Have Cast Two Hundred of Them«

Multiple Portrait Busts and Reliefs at the Court of Charles V of Habsburg 175

Susanne Kubersky-Piredda

»… Et sia ritratto nella forma medesima«

Das Florentiner Gnadenbild der SS. Annunziata und seine Repliken 203

Stefano Pierguidi

»A Certain Livelier Quality of Expression«

Bernini’s Two Versions of the Bust of Scipione Borghese 231

Marjorie Trusted

The Same but Different

Baroque Ivories and Reproduction 247

Malcolm C. Baker

Replication, Authorship and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust’s Aura 273

Autorenverzeichnis 301

Personenindex 303

Introduction Never Identical Multiples in Pre-Modern Art?

In the last fifteen years replicated objects have gained an increasingly central position in

the discourse about pre-modern art. Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft (editors of the

collection Sculpture and its Reproductions) observed in 1997 that »replication of sculptural

images has played a fundamental rather than a marginal role in the history of Western

art«, and that in the »applied arts the production of multiples is the norm rather than the

exception«.1 From a different perspective, Christopher Wood wrote in his Forgery, Replica,

Fiction that »the dialectical interplay between the handmade and the mechanically made

image is the basic though usually disguised plot-structure of European art« (2008).2

This introduction questions first why the study of works of art made in more than

one original currently piques the interest of very different scholarly traditions, such as

connoisseurship, Mediengeschichte, art theory, the study of political communication, the

history of archaeology and the geography of art. With this purpose, it also makes refer-

ence to related fields, such as those of copies, aftercasts and appropriations. Secondly,

these notes explain to what extent this collection of essays can claim to fill a gap in the

scholarship through its focus on the reception of pre-modern ›multiples‹ (a term whose

choice is also here discussed). Figure 1 illustrates what can be considered a famous pre-

modern ›multiple‹ and demonstrates its usual scholarly reception: a display case of

the exhibition Antico. The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes (Washington, D.C., National

Gallery of Art. November 6, 2011–April 8, 2012), in which three specimens of Antico’s

Hercules are displayed together with the same orientation. This presentation spurs com-

parisons of the three versions, allowing the viewer to appreciate their differences and

realize that they were made in a process that guaranteed a high degree of uniformity

among them. One of the goals in assembling this book is to understand the sixteenth-

century reception of a work like one of Antico’s small bronzes, after it had left the work-

shop and its ties to the other versions had become less evident than in the Washing-

ton cabinet. Finally, these pages introduce the case studies collected in this book and

1 Hughes, Anthony and Ranfft, Erich: Introduction, in: Id. (eds.): Sculpture and its Reproductions, London 1997, p. IX.

2 Wood, Christopher S.: Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art, New York 2008, p. 18.

7

highlight the fils rouges that tie them, suggesting thematic clusters. The contributions

have been selected in order to cover a broad chronological scope (spanning the first cen-

tury B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D.), represent diverse methodological approaches

and address media such as metal, wax, plaster, terracotta, textiles, marble, ivory, por-

celain, canvases and tables, in an attempt to re-assess the current identification of the

mediality of prints with that of pre-modern ›multiples‹ in general.

The fortuna critica of pre-modern ›multiples‹ can partially be considered an extension of the

scholarly interest for modern and contemporary ones. On one hand, the focus on photog-

raphy, cinema and digital media has brought new attention to issues such as the impact

of replication processes, the status of multiplied objects and the genesis of copyright laws

in previous historical periods. On the other hand, the emergence of the category of mul-

tiple in the art of the late 1950s and the reflections on repetition, appropriation and mass

reproduction processes developed by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Sher-

rie Levine, Mike Bidlo and Elaine Sturtevant, among others, spurred the reassessment of

previous notions of uniqueness in art production and suggested alternative proposals. In

close continuity with these experiences, during the 1980s scholars such as Rosalind Krauss

addressed nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, sculpture and photography in

the search for a genealogy of the contemporary critique of authenticity and uniqueness

in art. In her view, artists such as Rodin and Ingres demonstrated a different approach to

the issue of originality in art and a different understanding of the opportunities opened

up to visual artists by replication techniques, including traditional ones such as bronze

casting. Presenting a 1978 cast of Rodin’s Gates of Hell as a real original (according to the

artist’s intentions) and a legitimate work (according to French law), Krauss claimed in a

well-known essay that »authenticity empties out as a notion as one approaches mediums

which are inherently multiple«, such a Rodin’s bronzes and plasters.3 Krauss’ influential

dichotomy between »reproductive mediums« and non-reproductive media also fostered a

postmodern re-interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner

technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1935, translated into English and re-edited in New York in

3 Krauss, Rosalind E.: »The Originality of the Avant-Garde: a Postmodernist Repetition«, in: October 18 (1981), pp. 47–66, then in Ead.: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Post-modernist Myths, Cambridge (MA), London 1985, pp. 151–170, resp. pp. 155 and 152. While Krauss considered the »cul-ture of originals« (p. 156) as a false working assumption of the art history that engaged with formal and material issues, in the very same years other scholars highlighted the historical nature of the specific notion of originality addressed by Krauss: cfr. for instance Shiff, Richard E.: »The Original, the Imitation, the Copy, and the Spontaneous Classic: Theory and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France«, in: Yale French Studies 66, The Anxiety of Anticipation (1984), pp. 27–54, and Krauss, Rosalind E.: »Originality as Repetition: an Introduction«, in: October 37 (1986), pp.35–40.

8

Introduction

1968)4 and spurred other scholars to expand her »deconstruction« of the concept of origi-

nality in the direction indicated by Benjamin, whose essay on mass reproduction had

looked at Roman coinage, classical bronzes, and Renaissance prints as the predecessors

– to a certain extent – of photography and cinematography. Finally, Krauss’ faith in the

fact that historical artifacts could be perfectly and indistinguishably replicated through

artificial aging brought her to reject the notion that each artifact is time-specific: in her

view, the example of photographic prints demonstrated that it is possible »to recreate old

paper and old chemical compounds« to realize new prints identical to the vintage ones.

1997 saw the publication of Hughes and Ranfft’s collection of essays Sculpture and its

Reproductions (1997), a milestone for studies on sculptural replication. The authors took

a position on these issues by pointing out the militant character of Krauss’ statements

and the limits of her understanding of art as a semiotic system. According to Alexandra

Parigoris, Krauss’ approach marginalized whole areas of twentieth-century art produc-

tion (e.g., those of artists who fostered the notion of »the truth to material«) and gave

little account as to how Rodin’s posthumous casts could be considered »›historical tes-

timony‹ in their own right« with respect to the later generations and institutions that

had made such castings possible.5 It was chiefly in this historicist sense that Hughes

and Ranfft’s book extended and legitimated the use of the word ›multiple‹ in the field of

replicated sculptural works realized in pre-modern contexts.

Yet, Rosalind Krauss’ »deconstruction of originality« and her manifestos have since

inspired several scholars interested in the pre-modern period: George Didi-Huberman’s

La ressemblance par contact as well as Alexander Nagel’s and Christopher Wood’s Anach-

ronic Renaissance may be considered in her wake, as attempts to look at, respectively,

early modern impressions (including Donatello’s partial casts from life in the Judith and

Holophernes now in Palazzo Vecchio) as anachronic artifacts,6 and early modern »replicas«

4 Benjamin, Walter: »The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction«, in: Id.: Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, transl. by Harry Zohn, New York 1968, pp. 217–251. The last revised version of the text first appeared in Id., Schriften, I, Frankfurt a.M. 1955.

5 Parigoris, Alexandra: Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth, in: Hugues, Ranfft (eds..): Sculpture and its reproductions, cit., pp. 131–151, here p. 141; Krieger, Verena: »Der Blick der Postmod-erne durch die Moderne auf sich selbst: zur Originalitätskritik von Rosalind Krauss«, in: Ead. (ed.): Kunstgeschichte und Gegenwartskunst: vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Zeitgenossenschaft, Köln, Weimar, Wien 2008, pp. 143–161.

6 Didi-Huberman, Georges: La ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte, Paris 2008, p. 108: »Lorsque Donatello, dans sa Judith, procède au montage stupéfiant de morceaux hau-tement idéalisés et de morceaux directement prélevés sur la texture des choses, lorsqu’il associe libre-ment classicisme all’antica et cruauté gotique, il ne fait rien d’autre que réintroduire le ›noeud‹ de la mémoire dans la ›ligne‹, censément orientée, de l’histoire des styles«. In this passage, however, the con-servative criteria adopted by Didi-Huberman to classify the forms of Donatello’s Judith and Holophernes

Introduction

9

(a category that includes ›multiples‹ as well as other artifacts) as objects perceived as

tokens that link to a remote origin.7

Quite ironically, while »›multiples‹ without originals« have become the fetishes of

art narratives that aim toward a non-historicist and non-material understanding of

art reception in the pre-modern period, other fields of research are engaged in parallel

reconsiderations of processes of copying and replicating as a means to enact cultural

innovation and generate personal or collective identities. Studies of classical art have per-

haps most radically revised their notions of ›copy‹ and ›replica‹. Scholars such as Miranda

Marvin, Elaine Gazda and Ellen Perry (among others) have challenged the idea that a

part of Roman sculptural production can be considered as a reliable reflection of lost, but

philologically reconstructible, Greek masterpieces. As a consequence, they fostered a re-

assessment of Roman sculpture as a tradition of production in which the emulative rela-

tion established with previous models could bring about the realization of new creations

that were appreciated as such rather than as replicas of auratic masterpieces.8

In other areas, research seems to have rediscovered the potentials of replication in

its various forms (copies and fakes included) as a means to investigate issues such as

the genesis of image making, self-reflection and intentionality in art, as well as the For-

men der Überlieferung in the visual field. George Kubler had already focused on replicas

to account for the evolution of forms in his theoretical model.9 For Whitney Davis it is

and his interpretation of the master’s technique in terms of reaction to a much later »history of styles« seem much more anachronical and anachronistic than the sculptural group itself.

7 Krauss, Rosalind E.: »Retaining the Original? The state of the Question«, in: Center for Advanced Studies of Art , Washington (ed.): Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproduction (Studies in the History of Art 20), Washington D.C. 1989, pp. 7–11; Nagel, Alexander and Wood, Christopher S.: Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010.

8 Marvin, Miranda: »Copying in Roman Sculpture: the replica Series«, in: Center for Advanced Studies of Art, Washington (ed.): Retaining the Original, cit., pp. 29–45; Ead.: »Roman Sculptural Reproduc-tions or Polykleitos, the Sequel«, in: Hugues, Ranfft (eds.): Sculpture, cit., pp. 8–28; Ead. and Gazda, Elaine (eds.): The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, Ann Arbor 2002; Perry, Ellen: The aesthetics of emulation in the visual arts of ancient Rome, Cambridge et al. 2005; Barbanera, Marcello: Original und Kopie: Bedeutungs- und Wertewandel eines intellektuellen Begriffspaares seit dem 18. Jahrhundert in der klassischen Archäologie, Stendal 2006; Mar-vin, Miranda: The Language of the Muses: the Dialogue between Roman and Greek Sculpture, Los Angeles 2008; Stähli, Adrian: »Die Kopie. Überlegungen zu einem methodischen Leitkonzept der Plastik-forschung«, in: Id. and Junker, Klaus: Original und Kopie. Formen und Konzepte der Nachahmung in der antiken Kunst, Wiesbaden 2008, pp. 15–34; and Anguissola, Anna: Difficillima imitatio: immagine e lessico delle copie tra Grecia e Roma, Roma 2012. On a famous case of emulation in the early modern period see at least Cropper, Elizabeth: The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome, New Haven 2005.

9 Kubler, Georg: The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven, London 2008 (1963), pp. 38–39.

10

Introduction

»the meaning of any image« that »is constructed cumulatively and recursively – a pro-

and retrospective ›activation‹ – in and through the history of its replication. On these

grounds, replicated images and artifacts can be treated as fossilized evidence of cognition

and, in narrower cases, of human consciousness«. In this case, replication is understood

as »the sequential production of similar material morphologies […] that are substitut-

able for one another in specific social contexts of use«.10

Interest in artists that realized

their works in many versions with minimal variants has also brought attention to the

potential of research on repetition as a way to document the working methods of an art-

ist (especially in the nineteenth century, but also for Titian, Jan Brueghel the Younger

and Giorgio De Chirico).11

In other fields, copies are seen as a way to qualify the impact of

earlier works of art and art literature on the culture of later periods.12

After all, »works of

art that are conceived of and openly displayed as replications of earlier works of art have

been characteristic elements of the self-conception of European cultures throughout

history«; furthermore, »transformative reproduction« has been »a fundamental cultural

technique« in the Western tradition.13

Of course, the study of casts from the antique has

10 Davis, Whitney: Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis, University Park (PA) 1996, resp. pp. 3 and 2.

11 See for instance Rosenberg, Pierre: »Répétitions et répliques dans l’oeuvre de Watteau«, in: Moureau, François and Morgan Grasselli, Margaret (eds.): Antoine Watteau (1684–1721): le peintre, son temps et sa légende, Paris et al. 1987, pp. 103–110; Brown, Beverly Louise: »Replication and the Art of Veronese«, in: Retaining the Original, cit., pp. 111–124; Joannides, Paul: »Titian’s Repetitions«, in: Woods-Marsden, Joanna (ed.): Titian: Materiality, Likeness, »Istoria«, Turnhout 2007, pp. 37–51; Falomir Faus, Miguel: »Titian’s Tityus«, ibid., pp. 29–36; Kahng, Eik and Bann, Stephen (eds.): The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore et al., pp. 11–26 (with previous bibliography). A special case of repetition (studied by Müller-Bechtel, Susanne: »Gleich, aber nicht identisch: zwei Zeichnungen einer ›Heiligen Nacht‹ von Mauro Gandolfi in Dresden und Stuttgart«, in: Dresdener Kunstblätter 56 (2012), pp. 206–215) is represented by the work of different art-ists that portray contemporarily the same model during an academic sitting.

12 Chamoux, François et al.: »Copies, répliques, faux«, in: Revue de l’art 21 (1973), pp. 5–30; Center for Advanced Studies of Art, Washington (ed.): Retaining the Original, cit.; Cuzin, Jean-Pierre and Dupuy, Anne-Marie (eds.): Copier Créer. De Turner à Picasso: 300 oeuvres inspirées par les maîtres du Louvre, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Paris 1993 (cat. exhib.); Mainardi, Patricia: »The Nineteenth-Century Art Trade: Copies, Variations, Replicas«, in: Van Gogh Museum Journal (2000), pp. 62–73; Mazzarelli, Carla (ed.): La copia: connoisseurship, storia del gusto e della conservazione, Roma, San Casciano Val di Pesa 2010; Augustyn, Wolfgang and Söding, Ulrich (eds.): Original – Kopie – Zitat: Kunstwerke des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Wege der Aneignung, Formen der Überlieferung, Passau 2010. See also: Ferretti, Mas-simo: »Falsi e tradizione artistica«, in Zeri, Federico (ed.), Storia dell’arte italiana, part III, Torino 1981, vol. X, pp. 113–195, esp. pp. 124–126; Mazzoni, Gianni (ed.): Falsi d’autore: Icilio Federico Joni e la cultura del falso tra Otto e Novecento, Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Siena 2004 (exhib. cat.).

13 Bartsch, Tatjana, Becker, Marcus and Schreiter, Charlotte: »The Originality of Copies. An Introduc-tion«, in: Bartsch, Tatjana, Becker, Marcus, Bredekamp, Horst and Schreiter, Charlotte (eds.): Das Ori-ginal der Kopie: Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike, Berlin et al. 2010, pp. 27–43, here pp. 27 and 39.

Introduction

11

played a central role in this trend.14

In particular, the collection Das Original der Kopie

asked »what features of the original are perpetuated in its copies and to what extent

the latter can be received only in relation to the original or whether they can generate

their own aesthetic value standards«15

– a question that has also clearly been seminal for

the present work on the reception of ›multiples‹. Das Original der Kopie also emphasized

that copies can be said to »constitute« the original in that they invest their model with a

cultural status that it did not have before, establishing a relationship of co-determinacy.

Copies, so runs the argument, not only document the historical period in which they

were made, but also transform the perception of their models by their engagement with

them. Yet, »repetition« has also been interpreted in Deleuzian terms as »a continuous

process of retrieval and projection« that can link different artists and generate questions

about the »intentionality and reception« of an artist’s work.16

In this perspective, works

such as Padovanino’s and Rubens’ copies after Titian have been considered as moments

marked by a double authorship rather than an absent one.17

In this lively debate it is astonishing to note how few contributions question the

specific status of pre-modern artifacts made in many originals. Indeed, connoisseur-

ship and conservation studies continue to advance our knowledge of the processes

through with artifacts could be replicated and, sometimes, produced in large quantities.

In addition, several scholars consider authored ›multiples‹ to cast a new light on the

artistic intention and working practices of their makers – yet chiefly for nineteenth-

and twentieth-century painters such Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Claude Monet,

Paul Cézanne and Giorgio De Chirico. The specific mediality of pre-modern ›multiples‹

has been addressed only occasionally – often under the assumption that the ›early mul-

tiples‹ had ›anticipated‹ phenomena that fully developed with nineteenth-century mass

production. Yet, the specific features of ›multiples‹ in terms of reception, distribution

14 Cuzin, Jean-Pierre and Gaborit, Jean-René (eds.): D’après l’antique, Musée National du Louvre, Paris, Paris 2000; Frederiksen, Rune and Echkart, Maquand (eds.): Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Dis-playing from Classical Antiquity to the Present, Berlin et. al. 2010; Schreiter, Charlotte (ed.): Gipsabgüsse und antike Skulpturen: Präsentation und Kontext, Berlin 2012.

15 Bartsch, Becker and Schreiter: »The Originality of Copies«, cit., p. 28.16 Loh, Maria H.: Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art, Los Angeles

2007, pp. 1–16, here p. 3, who explicitly quotes Gilles Deleuze (in part. Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Paris 1988; Différence et répétition, Paris 1989). In this perspective, every form of artistic creation can be considered »repetition« in that it implies the construction of a »historical identity« through the confrontation with a cultural tradition and »compels a spectator to view the image through his or her memory of other images« (p. 12).

17 Ibid., p. 11.

12

Introduction

and cultural connotations remain blurred and understudied.18

Issues as to what extent

authorship, provenance, production process, circulation and display may have shaped

the reception of pre-modern ›multiples‹ are addressed quite generically, partially

because of the lack of specific studies, and partially under the assumption that these

artifacts were perceived as undifferentiated. Yet, assuming that the dissemination of

relatively undifferentiated and relatively inexpensive media such as prints on paper

can best exemplify how pre-modern replicated artifacts were received risks offering a

reductive representation of the complex mediality, high differentiation and refined col-

lectorship of pre-modern ›multiples‹. Were they really perceived as identical, or rather

as subtly differentiated objects? Were their owners aware they possessed objects that

were not unique? Was the character of replicated objects a plus or a minus in the eyes of

their beholder? Were these artifacts the object of a specific reception and evaluation in

comparison with the works of art made in a unique specimen? In what measure were

multiplicity and processes of production significant in shaping the cultural status of

the artifacts made in more than one original?

The papers collected in this book are a first attempt to address these and similar

issues of reception through case studies and without prejudicial opinions. Several con-

tributions question the process through which the making, origin and context of the

pre-modern ›multiples‹ influenced their reception, as well as the cultural models and

forms of distribution that shaped that reception. Particular emphasis has been given

to cases in which the audience was aware that a specific artifact was a ›multiple‹ and in

which the reasons for replicating the object do not seem merely utilitarian. This book

can also be seen as an effort to ground the study of ›multiples‹ on new keywords and to

dislodge the centrality of concepts such as ›aura‹ in the scholarship on this topic.

Horizontal relationships

Summarizing what has been discussed up to this point, we can say that this book focuses

on artifacts that were made in virtually identical multiple versions using procedures

that conferred a high degree of uniformity and a similar authorship on them. Therefore,

it does not consider the rich field of »reproductions« or »translations« – also addressed

18 A seminal study in this direction is Colantuono, Anthony: Guido Reni’s Abduction of Helen: the Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe, Cambridge 1997, esp. pp. 50–51. See also Spear, Richard E.: »›Di sua mano‹«, in: Marvin, Gazda (eds.): The Ancient Art of Emulation, cit., pp. 79–98 (with lit.).

Introduction

13

recently in seminal essays19

– but only that of »replications« – processes of repetition

whose unity is the production of two or more artifacts with the same dimensions,

mediality, form and origin, even if the material employed may change, the technique

adopted is not fully mechanical and the appearance is only virtually identical.

One of the first problems in dealing with such objects is the lack of a neutral term

to designate them. All the categories available for this purpose have particular meth-

odological and cultural connotations. In art historical research, the word employed to

indicate the multiple versions stemming from a prototype is »replica«. Undoubtedly, its

use offers several advantages: it links several versions of an artifact to the same ›author‹

(often a workshop or the production of a specific place) and, to a certain extent, gives

them a similar status in terms of authorship.20

Yet, this category also implies a high

degree of conformity to the prototype (defined as the first finalized version or one of the

working models). The variance of a replica with respect to its prototype must be mini-

mal; otherwise the word »variant« is preferred. Moreover, the realization of a replica is

usually presented in passive terms. The use of this word tends to confer all the signifi-

cant features (skill, autography, cultural significance) on the prototype; the execution of

further versions cannot contribute to improve these qualities, but only possibly dimin-

ish them.

Instead, the word »copy« describes a relation of significant distance in time, space

and/or authorship from a pre-existing work. The ›author‹ of the copy is so distant from

that of the model, that his or her copy must be considered as an interpretation or a re-

creation rather than a replication. Thus, the pattern of relations implied by this term

stresses the agency of the copyist and the context of the further versions. Nevertheless,

the concept of a copy, although more inclusive and flexible than that of replica, postu-

lates the pre-existence of a model and is therefore inappropriate to describe processes in

which more originals are made at almost the same time. The bipolarity »copy/original«

19 See for instance Schmidt, Peter: »Die Erfindung des vervielfältigten Bildes: Reproduktion und Wahr-heit im 15. Jahrhundert«, in: Bredekamp, Horst, Kruse, Christiane and Schneider, Pablo (eds.): Imagi-nation und Repräsentation. Zwei Bildsphären der Frühen Neuzeit, Berlin 2010, pp. 119–147.

20 Useful discussions of the vocabulary used by art historians to designate replicated images can be found in: Chamoux et al.: »Copies«, cit., pp. 5–30; Mund, Hélène: »Approche d’une terminologie relative à l’étude le la copie«, in: Annales d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie 5 (1983), pp. 19–31; Augustyn, Wolfgang: »Original – Kopie – Zitat: Versuch einer begrifflichen Annäherung«, in: Id. and Söding (eds.): Original – Kopie – Zitat, cit., pp. 1–14. Chamoux et al., Copies, cit., first proposed to limit the use of the word replica »aux copies les plus proches dans le temps de l’original, et surtout à celles qui semblent sorties de l’atelier du maître«. This local and temporal limitation may be seen as a first attempt to connect the word ›replica‹ to circumstances that allow considering two versions that are similar in terms of authorship.

14

Introduction

does not always correspond to the historical circumstances of the making and reception

of a pre-modern work of art.21

A better candidate to designate this form of production could be the word »repeti-

tion«, which is often preferred because of its apparent neutrality. However, the scope of

this concept in our discipline usually ranges from variants realized by the same author

to that of copies, studies and forgeries made by other authors. Sometimes, it also encom-

passes the re-use of iconographical schemes, the notion of replica series (as defined by

Georg Kubler) and looser formal relations implying seriality or modularity. Not only is

the spectrum of this category extremely wide, but its methodological framework is also

too heterogeneous to make it a useful conceptual tool for our purposes, namely, draw-

ing further distinctions in the production and reception of virtually identical works of

art.22

Finally, the word »serial« must also be excluded because it refers to the rationalization

of the production process through a particular distribution of work, rather than the

result of this activity. Several types of artifacts made in multiple originals cannot be

defined as serial.

This situation explains why the term ›multiple‹ has become increasingly attractive

in sculpture scholarship even for pre-modern artifacts (at least in English-language lit-

erature). However, the word ›multiple‹ also brings specific implications connected with

the historical context in which it originated. First, it is often associated with the false

belief that an unlimited number of specimens of the same artifact could be produced.

Yet, while a single copper plate could usually produce virtually identical prints in con-

siderable numbers, the potential of other replication technologies was much lower

21 The exhibition catalogue Déjà vu: Die Kunst der Wiederholung von Dürer bis Youtube, Staatliche Kunst-halle – Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, ed. by Ariane Mensger, Berlin 2012 – perhaps the most complete and generous attempt to give account of the variety of cultural functions that the act of copying can assume – is a good example of this overextension of the category of »copy«. On one hand, it classifies pre-modern multiples such as Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of Philip Melanchton (Munich, Alte Pinakothek; Dresden, Gemäldegalerie; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle; Bremen, Museum im Roselius-Haus, 1532–1551) as »Selbstkopien« (like De Chirico’s repetitions of Le Piazze d’Italia in the 1950s). On the other hand, the author of the relevant entries (Mensger, Ari-ane: ibidem, pp. 178–179, nos. 18–21) also employs the category »Vervielfätigung« and recognizes that among these »Serienbilder« »keine Erstfassung im Sinn eines klassischen Originals erhalten [ist], es sei denn die ursprüngliche Porträtzeichnung Cranachs als original definiert wird«. Evonne A. Levy also prefers the notion of »autograph copies« to that of »multiples« in her contribution »Repeated Performances: Bernini, the Portrait and its Copy«, in: The Sculpture Journal 20 (2011), pp. 239–249.

22 For a recent discussion of concepts such as seriality, modularity and mass production before the seventeenth century, see: Tomasi, Michele: »L’art multiplié: matériaux et problèmes pour une réflexion«, in: Id. (ed.): L’art multiplié: production de masse, en série, pour le marché dans les arts entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, Rome 2011, pp. 7–24.

Introduction

15

than is usually believed. In a letter of 1550, the painter Francesco Primaticcio – a pioneer

of the replication of ancient statues – expressed his doubts that his plaster moulds of

the Belvedere Apollo could be employed safely after being used twice, because they had

become extremely fragile.23

As a matter of fact, his workshop and that of his pupil Luca

Lancia never realized bronze and plaster casts after the antique in more than two or

three specimens from the same moulds.

Second, the word ›multiple‹ establishes an implicit comparison with works of art

that were conceived and realized in many originals from the very start. Such an inten-

tional adoption of replication processes, however, cannot be assumed in the complex

world of pre-modern ›multiples‹. For several of them, further versions were planned

only after the first one had been conceived and made as a unique object. Moreover, many

classical, medieval and early modern forms of replicated sculptures were not intended

to be recognized as such. Likely, they simply aimed to be good works and conform to

successful precedents.24

Finally, objects that now seem to have been realized in multiple

versions may simply stem from different phases of the production process: they reflect

stages of realization that were never intended as independent works of art, but were

later considered as such by artists and collectors. The so-called memorie (copies of plas-

tic inventions that were originally modeled in fragile materials and later replicated in

metal, usually with the goal to preserve them) are good examples of these cases of post-

humous seriality, which is also frequent in the case of medals and plaquettes. Last, but

not least, pre-modern ›multiples‹ (unlike the multiples of the 1950–1960s) were hardly

identical to each other.

Therefore, the word ›multiples‹ has been adopted for the title of this collection in a

provocative way. By using it, we aim to emphasize the great differences that existed in

the adoption and reception of replication techniques and focus on the specific character

of the artifacts made in virtually identical versions in the period spanning 100 B.C. to

1800 A.D. However, in the symposium that laid the groundwork for this book (Munich,

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, November 7–8, 2011) a further terminological dis-

tinction proved to be very useful in discussing ›multiples‹. If we try to define the wide

23 Letter of Francesco Primaticcio to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle of 1 November 1550, in: Cupperi, Walter: »Arredi statuari nelle regge dei Paesi Bassi asburgici meridionali (1549–56). Parte II: Un nuovo Laocoonte in gesso, i calchi dall’antico di Maria d’Ungheria e quelli della Casa degli Omenoni a Milano«, in: Prospettiva 115 (2004), pp. 159–176, here p. 169, no. 3.

24 See for instance Beck, Herbert and Bredekamp, Horst: »Die Mittelrheinische Kunst um 1400«, in: Beck, Herbert, Beeh, Wolfgang and Bredekamp, Horst (eds.): Kunst um 1400 am Mittelrhein. Ein Teil der Wirklichkeit, Liebieghaus Museum Alter Plastik, Frankfurt a.M., Frankfurt a.M. 1975 (exhib. cat.), pp. 30–109, in part. pp. 79–82.

16

Introduction

spectrum of relations that can connect two replicated objects, these relations can be rep-

resented in two main ways. If we establish a vertical relation between artifacts A and B,

we assume that A was made before B and exerted a role in the realization of B (of course,

the making of B also changed the status of A). For reasons that may not depend entirely

on their distance in time, the creation of A appears qualitatively different from that of B

in that the latter presupposes the existence of A and its accessibility. B is, metaphorically

speaking, a ›child‹ of A: they have a different status. Instead, if we identify a horizontal

relation, we do not give such importance to chronological priority (which may however

subsist) and we give A and B a similar status. The creation of A appears comparable to

that of B in process and result: they are ›siblings‹ and have the same ›parent‹ (an artist, a

collective author, the same provenance or the same fictive origin).

However simple, the nature of this distinction should awaken us to the criticality

of ›multiples‹ as a field of research: as we cannot establish the ›kinship‹ among objects

through DNA analyses (as we do with living beings) and technical analyses can seldom

answer such a kind of question, our interpretation of the similarity between A and B

strongly depends on our conceptualization of their authorship and our reconstruction

of their production process (or, more correctly, on our reconstruction as of how these

aspects were conceptualized in a specific situation of reception). It is also important to

stress that vertical and horizontal relations often co-exist in the very same group of arti-

facts and intersect with each other in complex ways. A typical example is that of a copy

that is replicated in several identical versions. These versions are tied to each other by a

horizontal relation, but each of them has a vertical connection to the common model.

Another example of this ambivalence is the status of prototypes in clay, wax or stone

that are realized only to be subsequently replicated and modified. These models have in

theory a vertical relation with the works of art that originate from them, yet the hori-

zontal relation among the latter may be stronger in the eyes of their owners. The status

of the working model is strongly conditioned by the epoch, culture and background of

the viewer.

Interpreting ›multiples‹ in terms of vertical and horizontal relationships can also

help to describe how the links between their production and their reception changed

over the time. For instance, an artifact that was realized on the basis of a vertical rela-

tion with another artifact can be later perceived horizontally with respect to its model,

or vice versa. As Miranda Marvin points out in her contribution, several Roman statues

may have been seen by their owners as unique pieces of art or as ›multiples‹ created

in a contemporary workshop. Yet, until a few decades ago archaeological scholarship

considered them chiefly as copies of earlier Greek sculptures, emphasizing their possible

vertical relations.

Introduction

17

In general, while reading multiple versions of a work of art (e.g., of a poesia by Tit-

ian) as moments of a vertical process of self-copying may help in understanding them in

terms of authorial intention, personal development and physical process, a horizontal

focus on the same series may better highlight issues such as the status of the paintings

proceeding from the artist’s workshop, the role of patrons and the market in orienting

the artist’s production, as well as other phenomena connected with the reception and

circulation of an artist’s works.

Finally, the fact that the relations between virtually identical ›multiples‹ can be

seen differently over time does not imply that the circumstances of their making »were

not routinely taken as components of their meaning and function«.25

Several pre-mod-

ern ›multiples‹ were distributed in ways that provided information or even guarantees

about their production process, provenance and real (or fictive) origin. The point is that

the connotations provided by this origin cannot be described by means of categories

such as »authenticity« or »authorship« alone.

Substitutability and Other Post-Modern Myths

This collection of essays focuses chiefly on virtually identical works of art whose recep-

tion was characterized by significant horizontal relations. The reason for this concen-

tration is double. On one hand, horizontal relations have been understudied: categories

such as »copy« or »replica« (often both understood in the ›vertical‹ sense) have absorbed,

homogenized and downplayed a much more complex scenario. On the other hand, the

pre-modern objects that exist in multiple versions are often considered from biased

perspectives. Many connoisseurs limit themselves to establishing which versions are

authentic and which one is the best among them. The theory of substitutability – in its

formulation by Wood and Nagel – overemphasizes a unique paradigm (the conceptual

link of »replicas« to the prime object) and neglects a broad variety of further possibilities.

In many replicated artifacts this indexical relation (a vertical form of semantic reference

to the prime object) may be quite secondary, absent or even posthumous. A discussion

25 Nagel, Wood: Anachronic Renaissance, cit., p. 29: »The literal circumstances and the historical moment of an artifact’s material execution were not routinely taken as components of its meaning and func-tion. Instead, such facts were seen as accidental rather than as constitutive features«. The passage significantly refers to modern copies of painted icons and new buildings over prior structures. Yet, in other chapters the paradigm of substitutability that this describes is applied to Roman sculptural copies and casts after the antique, artifacts that fall under the category of ›multiple‹.

18

Introduction

of problematic aspects of this interpretation of replication may be useful in defining by

contrast the approach of this book.

1. Authorship. Wood’s understanding of Renaissance art is based on an opposition

between the »authored, event-like artwork« and »replicas«, that is »mutually substitut-

able artifacts«. The former model considers art objects as autonomous originals, the lat-

ter looks only at their referential target, »a prior chain of artifacts that linked up with a

distant point of origin«.26

In this dichotomy, replication is chiefly seen as a potentiation

of the substitutional model in that it provides perfectly exchangeable artifacts.27

Yet,

this model underplays the fact that the status of ›authored‹ works of art and that of

replicated, potentially interchangeable objects were not necessarily in conflict with each

other. ›Multiples‹ are a good example to highlight this point. In this book, for instance,

Susanne Kubersky-Piredda analyzes several virtually identical copies of a fresco, the Flo-

rentine Annunziata. The copies were all made on canvas by Alessandro Allori, the only

painter who had access to the tabernacle in which the holy image was enclosed. As a

consequence, the reference of each copy to the original and (potentially) to the other

copies was enhanced by Allori’s authorship, as his authorship ensured the link to the

tabernacle fresco.

Moreover, the sixteenth-century development of a few replication techniques does

not always imply that the distinction between original and copy was insignificant for

their owners. An interesting example thereof can be found among the same works of art

that Wood and Nagel discuss to support their theory. In 2008 Chris Wood mentioned

the Youth of Magdalensberg (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, fig. 2), a sixteenth-cen-

tury aftercast of a first-century bronze found in Carinthia in 1502, as »a good example of

antiquarian insouciance about copying bronzes«.28

Misindentified with the lost original

ancient statue until 1980, the early modern cast had substituted it in the decoration of

the Fortress of Salzburg around 1551. In 2010 Wood and Nagel’s Anachronic Renaissance

pointed to the same Renaissance aftercast to argue, in more general terms, that such

»copies were antiquities« for their early modern collectors »just as most photographs by

Walker Evans in the collections of major museums are photographs by Walker Evans,

even if they were printed from negatives after Evans’ death in 1975«.29

Yet, a closer look

at the documentation published by Robert Hedicke in 1904 demonstrates that Mary of

26 Wood: Replica, Forgery, cit., resp. pp. 16, 18 and 19. 27 Nagel, Wood: Anachronic Renaissance, cit., p. 281: »The reliable mechanical replication of images by

woodcut, engraving, or bronze casting, which promised to eliminate the element of drift in the copy chain by virtue of their indexicality«.

28 Wood: Replica, Forgery, cit., pp. 309–310.29 Nagel, Wood: Anachronic Renaissance, cit., p. 279.

Introduction

19

Hungary, who received the original Youth of Magdalensberg from Ernest of Bayern as a

present in 1552, paid her architect Jacques Dubroeucq to ascertain if the statue sent to

her was the ancient one or a modern copy.30

Moreover, in a recently discovered letter

of November 16, 1551 Mary reminded Ernest of his promise to send her »das recht alt

gegossen bildt«, the authentic statue, the bronze cast in Antiquity. In the meantime the

aftercast could be left in Salzburg as a substitution for the loss of the Roman bronze,

according to Ernest’s proposal.31

The point of the episode is that, even if Mary had not

paid for this diplomatic gift, its authenticity (so emphatically stressed in her letter) did

matter in her and Ernest’s eyes: her high position as Dowager Queen of Hungary had

to be reflected by her possession of the most precious example of the Youth. In Nagel

and Wood’s approach, sixteenth-century replication techniques are understood through

the filter of a postmodern sensibility that emphasizes their continuity with mass pro-

duction. A late modern notion »of original« (as their parallel between pre-modern plas-

ter casts and Walker Evans eloquently demonstrates) is rejected and the existence of a

distinct early modern notion of prototype (»das recht alt gegossen bildt«) is denied. Of

course, the application of a late modern category such as »original« to the study of early

modern artifacts is itself misleading. Significantly, the notion of authenticity that has

emerged from the study of the history of early modern collections since the late 1960s is

quite different.

Wood’s and Nagel’s opposition between the reception of artifacts as »authorial«

(referring back to the artist as their creator) and their consideration of replicas in

terms of »tokens« of an absent »original« risks making a linear range of black-to-

white nuances out of what is in fact a much broader and more colorful spectrum of

articulations: the perception of the time-specific, »event-like« quality of an artifact

does not always coincide with the perception of its authorship (especially when this

authorship is defined in the terms of a nineteenth-century critic). Contextual factors

such as provenance, production process, materiality and display may also play a role,

when the final recipient of an artifact is aware of them. A lexical search on the use of the

word »original« (and the related noun »principale«, »prototype«) before the seventeenth

century could easily demonstrate that originality was also understood in different terms

than those that became familiar from the New York scene of the 1980s.

30 Hedicke, Robert: Jacques Dubroeucq von Mons, Strassburg 1904, p. 267, no. 55. 31 Cupperi, Walter: »›Giving away the moulds will cause no damage to his Majesty’s casts‹: New Docu-

ments on the Vienna Jüngling and the Sixteenth-Century Dissemination of Casts after the Antique in the Holy Roman Empire«, in: Marchand, Eckart and Frederiksen, Rune (eds.): Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Antiquity to the Present, Berlin 2010, pp. 81–98.

20

Introduction

2. Effect of identity. In Wood’s and Nagel’s view, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century

handmade replicas often aim to reach maximum conformity to their model, as mechan-

ically-made replicas do. Mechanically-made artifacts are inextricably associated with

the effect of perfect replication: »Substitution is a kind of magic, in that one object takes

the place of another and denies difference, creating an effect of identity. This is the effect

that replication technologies tried to exploit, not only ink on paper but also the copy-

ing of three-dimensional form in clay or in bronze, involving casting from molds by

complex procedures repeatable in principle though not always in practice«.32

The two

authors hardly consider the possibility that a replication technique may be employed

to create the opposite effect, a significant differentiation among ›multiples‹. Yet, tech-

niques such as mould casting and die stamping can be intentionally used to realize dif-

ferent objects: the waxes modeled from the moulds can be reworked (as Miranda Mar-

vin’s and the present author’s essays argue). The »effect of identity« and the reference to

a distant model were only two of the many possible goals that artists and patrons could

achieve through replication. The very approach of artists and owners often transformed

pre-modern ›multiples‹ in Unikate by emphasizing difference and autography, instead

of identity. As pre-modern ›multiples‹ were never identical, their »effect of identity«

depends strictly on the attitude of the single viewers and owners and, more crucially, on

our capacity to document those attitudes convincingly. My point here is not to challenge

the claim that under specific circumstances, a relation of substitutability may be estab-

lished between objects in the early modern period. I question rather whether that sub-

stitutability was a cultural practice as extended, canonical and largely shared as Wood

and Nagel profess it to be. Its impact in secular contexts, for instance, was likely less

significant: as we will see, other attitudes of reception developed through the diplomacy

of the courts and the market of luxury goods. As Whitney Davis thoughtfully puts it,

»similarity itself, the condition of any judgment of substitutability or nonsubstitutabil-

ity, is entirely relative to a particular perceptual standard or to a conventional metric«.33

It seems likely that the perceptual standards that ruled the exchange and reception of

32 Wood: Replica, Forgery, cit., p. 40. On the ambivalence of the concept of »substitutability« (whose definition still ambiguously oscillates among linguistics, psychoanalysis and the history of the arti-facts according to their functions) see Fehrenbach, Frank: »[Rezension von:] Nagel, Alexander; Wood, Christopher S.: Anachronic Renaissance. – New York: Zone Books, 2010«, In: Kunstform 12 (2011), http://www.arthistoricum.net/kunstform/rezension/ausgabe/0/2011_03/18816. An overemphasis on the impact of replication techniques in the late-medieval and early modern periods also charac-terizes the approach of Didi-Huberman: La ressemblance, cit., pp. 93–111.

33 Davis: Replications, cit., p. 2. »Equally important, the production of substitutable morphology, ›rep-lication‹, is always accompanied by the production (sometimes deliberate) of nonsubstitutable mor-phology« (p. 2).

Introduction

21

pre-modern »replicas« were more numerous and differentiated than those suggested by

the copies of icons alone.

Artifacts in Multiple Versions: An Itinerary

This collection of essays stems from a symposium held at the Center for Advanced Stud-

ies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich on November 7–8, 2011. That pilot

experiment made it possible to identify the main themes of this book and to sharpen its

focus with respect to the current critical debate. As a consequence, the list of the papers

presented in 2011 also underwent significant changes and integrations for this publica-

tion. In its current structure, this collection reflects the attempt to exemplify the status,

mediality and reception of ›multiples‹ made in diverse media until the eighteenth cen-

tury. This main (and yet not exclusive) focus on horizontal relations among ›multiples‹

aims to compensate for the current predominance of critical approaches that look at

these artifacts in purely vertical terms – in the wake of Georg Kubler34

– or with a prin-

cipal interest in the artists’ intentions.

Miranda Marvin’s contribution opens the path by discussing an essay, Walter Ben-

jamin’s Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, which has unwill-

ingly become a classic reference in the literature concerning ›originals‹ and ›multiples‹

in very different periods, in spite of its programmatic nature, political goals, and chief

focus on nineteenth-and twentieth-century mass media in terms of reproduction,

rather than of simple replication.35

Marvin’s paper, eloquently titled »In the Roman

Empire an Aura was a Breeze«,36

rejects Benjamin’s category of ›aura‹ as part of a mode

of perception that is unable to account for how the Roman world conceived of art and,

34 Kubler: The Shape of Time, cit., pp. 38–39.35 Benjamin: Das Kunstwerk, cit. Further suggestions on how to discuss and historicize Benjamin’s essay

have been provided by: Bredekamp, Horst: »Der simulierte Benjamin: mittelalterliche Bemerkun-gen zu seiner Aktualität«, in: Berndt, Andreas et al. (eds.): Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 1992, pp. 117–140; Freedberg, David: The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago 1989, pp. 177–178; Gumbrecht, Hans U. and Marrinan, Michael (eds.): Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age, Stanford 2003.

36 Miranda Marvin delivered her paper on November 5, 2011 and authorized its reading at the Munich conference, although she was unable to present it herself due to the health issues that led to her sudden death in July 2012. Even if she could not provide her text with the very last touches, her heirs (who graciously authorized its publication), Prof. Rolf M. Schneider (who provided it with footnotes and illustrations) and myself decided to include it in this book and integrate into the text the corre-spondence in which Miranda further discussed the topic. We are sure that our readers will appreci-ate her intellectual generosity and her brilliant prose.

22

Introduction

specifically, the production and display of statues made in large scale and in multiple

versions.37

The ›aura‹, she argues, is not an intrinsic quality of the work of art; the mod-

ern viewer projects such a cultic quality onto its tradition: »Benjamin and his contem-

poraries saw Roman purchasers as, in a sense, analogous to those of twenty-century

Europe who bought prints and photographs«. Miranda Marvin does not envision the

impact of multiple heads, busts and statues in the Roman Empire as an effect of the

aura that stemmed from the Greek originals or as a response to the Romans’ longing to

own reproductions of such masterpieces. Rather, she argues that they were (although

not only) the pervasive, recognizable landmark of a conquest state that had adopted a

visual language based on repetition. Such an authoritarian scenario is ironically very

distant from the democratization that Benjamin wished to associate with reproducibil-

ity.

Andreas Grüner’s paper considers two other forms of classical ›multiples‹, coins

and seal impressions. Grüner redefines the ambivalent concept of ›aura‹ as a »surplus an

Bedetung« that is accorded to an object by virtue of specific conditions and is tied with

emotions and subjective forms of evaluation. Under these conditions, the presence of

an ›aura‹ can be instrumentalized in processes of authentication based on mechanical

replication. By comparing the function and iconography of impressions on bricks,

currency and juridical acts, Grüner highlights the issues of mediality connected with the

use of impression as a means of rationalization and authentication in the Hellenistic-

Roman Mediterranean. Moreover, rituals such as the recognition of seal impressions,

which was ruled by law in the Roman world, provide very interesting insights into the

reception of this form of ›multiple‹.

The attempt to reassess a misleading opposition between handmade and mechani-

cally made is a Leitmotiv that links several contributions to each other. Miranda Marvin

reminds us that the use of the same casting moulds could lead to the realization of sig-

nificantly different bronze statues, because each wax replica of the master mould could

be extensively reworked before being cast in metal. The adoption of partially mechani-

cal procedures often mattered less than the way in which the audience evaluated the

similarity of the result (if this similarity was perceptible) and conceptualized the use of

replication procedures (if these were declared).

Claudia Kryza-Gersch’s essay further challenges the distinction between

Reproduktionsmedien and other media by demonstrating that many fifteenth- and

sixteenth-century small bronzes were not intended as multiple objects, but rather as

37 On the topic see also: Marvin: The Language of the Muses, cit.

Introduction

23

unique pieces. In the secular genre of the bronzetto the indirect casting process required

to cast bronzes in several versions seems to have been first adopted by Jacopo Bonacolsi

(l’Antico). Yet, Antico likely preferred this process because it enhanced the quality of the

cast and made it possible to save metal and preserve a model of the small sculpture in

case the first casting was not satisfactory. Hence, the choice of bronze as the principal

medium for this genre can be traced back to cultural reasons and artistic goals

that originally had little to do with the intention to replicate an invention in many

specimens. Moreover, Kryza-Gersch questions why several sixteenth-century workshops

(such as Severo da Ravenna’s) intentionally produced small bronzes in many specimens,

while others (such as Riccio’s) never did and others again (such as Antico’s) started to

replicate their creations only in a second moment, likely under the pressure of their

patrons. Antico’s bronzettos, however, were likely circulated only within the circle of

their patrons’ friends.

Another cluster of essays emphasizes the specificity of pre-modern ›multiples‹ by

further exploring their role in visualizing forms of membership and acquaintance as

well as in expressing aristocratic values such as loyalty, privilege and hierarchy through

their distribution. Susanne Kubersky-Piredda examines a series of late sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century copies after a fourteenth-century Annunciation frescoed in the

Basilica of SS. Annunziata in Florence. The copies were exact replicas on canvas of an

authoritative, but slightly modernized copy of the fresco realized by the Medici court

painter, Alessandro Allori, who had exclusive access to the Trecento painting. The Medici

exerted strong control on the distribution of these autograph ›multiples‹, which were

realized only by Allori’s workshop and conceded as diplomatic gifts to key personalities

of the Italian and Iberian political scene. Philip II’s refusal to accept a middle-format

version of the painting and his insistence on a 1:1 copy (the format adopted for Carlo

Borromeo’s specimen) reveals to what extent the uniformity of a ›multiple‹ to previous

versions and the hierarchization of their formats were expected to reflect the social posi-

tion of their owners.

The present writer’s paper addresses the casting of multiple portraits of Charles V of

Habsburg and the particular forms of distribution that could be reserved for the autho-

rized medals, busts and portrait reliefs of a ruler in the mid sixteenth century. In courtly

milieus, the authorization of a portrait, its replication by the court sculptor, its vertical

relation with the features of the sitter and its horizontal relations with other versions of

the portrait and their owners were guaranteed, controlled and emphasized in different

ways, each of which could influence the reception of these prestigious ›multiples‹. In this

field, the distinction between authorized (and authored) replicas and non-authorized

ones appears much stronger than the distance between unique and multiple works of

24

Introduction

art. The essay also explores the possibility that collectors were aware that more versions

of the same prestigious portrait existed: under specific circumstances, this awareness

could enact forms of co-determinacy involving the social significance, economic value

and Sammlungsgeschichte of each specimen of the portrait.38

Tapestries could also reveal cultural identity and social hierarchies through their

distribution and differentiation, as Wolfgang Brassat argues in his survey of the history

of this medium. By sending replicas of the tapestries produced by the Grenier work-

shops on his request, Philip the Good made his diplomatic ties tangible in the courts

of half of Europe and fostered the role of Burgundy as a culturally leading country. Few

other replicated media could be differentiated as extensively as tapestries: they could

vary in the format, materials and pattern of the weaving, and be personalized through

frames, coat of arms and iconographical adaptations. They could reveal the function and

importance of the room that they decorated and reflect the personal ambitions, social

status and financial possibilities of their owners. Yet, the mediality of this auratic form

of ›multiple‹ was not shaped only by the etiquette of aristocratic culture: its characteris-

tics – a restless compromise between exclusivity and large-scale production, prestigious

authorship and collective execution, rationalization of the process and differentiation of

the artifacts – also responded to the entrepreneurial logic of an »industry« whose prod-

ucts could be sold in advance in art fairs and purchased on the market. Therefore, the

making of tapestries could also create controversies about the possession of the copy-

right on a cartoon or the opportunity to limit the ›edition‹ of a set of tapestries.

Marjorie Trusted’s essay also addresses a genre of ›multiples‹ – seventeenth-century

ivory carvings with mythological and devotional subjects – whose appraisal as »treasured

works of art« does not seem to have been diminished by their repetition. The demand of

patrons and consumers for »same, but different« artifacts in this medium often spurred

their production in several versions. Additionally, it was not uncommon that ivories

produced as ›multiples‹ in a workshop were further copied and replicated by other

workshops in the same as well as in other media (such as Fürstenberg porcelain). By

exemplifying to what extent vertical and horizontal relations could intersect each other,

Marjorie Trusted suggests that »ivory carvings can be considered at the very heart of the

subject of multiples«, in spite of the fact that their replication was not mechanical.

Joanna Olchawa studies brass aquamaniles of the twelfth century that present

almost identical forms and can be considered as a prestigious form of ›multiple‹. Brass

38 Loh: Titian Remade, cit., p. 9, explained this concept with very eloquent words: »Possessing a Venus and Adonis by Titian and possessing a Venus and Adonis by Titian just like the one your neighbor already owns are two different experiences«.

Introduction

25

aquamaniles were cast in different workshops of Magdeburg to fulfill the needs of the

new ecclesiastical buildings founded by Archbishop Wichmann von Seeburg (1152–1192)

as well as to supply exports on a large scale. Interestingly, the discovery of such artifacts

in Eastern Europe can be associated with the presence of Saxon colonies. In Magdeburg

as well as in Hungary, it is possible that the similarity of the aquamaniles facilitated

their recognizability and contributed to their perception as objects with specific cul-

tural connotations in terms, respectively, of archiepiscopal patronage and ethnic iden-

tity. A second group of aquamaniles can be classified, according to Olchawa’s proposal,

as thirteen-century Hungarian imitations of the aquamaniles that had reached this

area from Magdeburg. If this were so, the Magdeburg ›multiples‹ would have become

prestigious models for new forms of production in Hungary and would represent a very

interesting case of intersection between horizontal and vertical relations with other

similar objects.

Stefano Pierguidi’s paper considers a rather uncommon kind of evidence: that

of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters, city guides and artists’ biographies

that compare different versions of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s busts (of Scipione Borghese,

Urban VIII and Innocent X) and thereby document the reception of these portraits as

›multiples‹. Several sources adopt a very similar »anecdotic construction«: a marble vein

emerges after the polishing of an otherwise perfect portrait and forces Bernini to quickly

realize a second version in a better block. This topos enables the writers to thematize the

comparison between almost identical works as a means to sharpen the collector’s eyes

and evaluate the artist’s strengths. Quite a few sources also mention the aesthetic criteria

(»prestezza«, »varietà«, »espressione più viva«) that justified the patrons’ preference for

one or the other specimen. For these seventeenth-century patrons, multiple versions of

the same bust were neither indistinguishable from nor substitutable with each other.

Moreover, possessing two identical busts, one of which disfigured by a marble vein (as

in the case of the Borghese family) was a way of exhibiting a special appreciation of

Bernini’s skills and invention in spite of the deficiency in the material that had betrayed

him.

Malcolm Baker studies examples of sculptural display (in particular, that of the Wren

Library in Cambridge around 1750) in order to assess the different status and modes of

perception that characterized the multiple busts made by Roubiliac in the eighteenth

century. »This was not only a period«, Baker suggests, »in which commodification and

luxury consumption were linked with the increased production of ›multiples‹, but also

a period in which individual ›original‹ works were associated with named authors (or

sculptors) and acquired the aura of autonomous work of art, in part through the way in

which they were viewed« (italics mine). So, Roubiliac »developed effective modes of multiple

26

Introduction

production« even while he was presenting himself as an inventive and original artist

»whose highly finished sculptures were being given the sustained attention accorded

to works of high aesthetic value« which bore »the marks of authorship«. For instance,

Roubiliac realized several plaster models of busts in the same moulds and then differen-

tiated them by modifying their drapery, adding different heads and finally translating

them in marble. Yet, the complex ways in which this sculptor integrated vertical and

horizontal forms of repetition in the very process of production did not strictly corre-

spond to their forms of reception as documented through their display, price and appre-

ciation.

Several essays in this collection consider objects such as seals, medals, coins and

aquamaniles. Their inclusion testifies that the selection of the topics did not aim to sug-

gest a distinction between ›fine arts‹ and ›applied arts‹, but rather to focus on artifacts

whose replication had a significant impact on their reception. This focus has led us to

put aside (at least on this occasion) several other types of utensils, tools, weapons, tex-

tiles and small objects without having the pretension to claim that their cultural signif-

icance was not connected to their nature of ›multiples‹. As it often happens, the borders

of our research were established much more by the documentation available.

This survey should be sufficient to demonstrate that this book does not address only

issues of art theory. Discussing ideas such as the replication, temporality, materiality,

authorship and authenticity of works of art still requires the ability to distinguish a

later version, to identify the traces and peculiarities of a specific production process and

to detect the effects of aging and restorations. The argument that connoisseurship as it

developed in the first three quarters of the twentieth century often focused on aspects

that mattered only secondarily to pre-modern viewers (as far as sources can document) is

true, but does not imply that connoisseurship itself (or the history of artifacts tout court)

is unnecessary. Rather, our knowledge of the artifacts must be updated and grounded

on broader premises in order to bridge the interplay between production and reception

with more efficient tools of interpretation.

The realization of a book is, of course, also an inevitable occasion to incur intellectual

debt with a considerable number of colleagues and institutions. This last paragraph is

an attempt to recognize this debt and to express my deepest gratitude to all those who

have provided their help. The genesis of this initiative owes very much to my conversa-

tions with Ulrich Pfisterer and Rolf M. Schneider at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Univer-

sität. Without their generous advice and frank feedback, not only its realization, but

also its conception would not have been possible. The strong and positive interaction

among all the authors before and during the redaction of the final texts was crucial for

Introduction

27

the success of this work. Gianfranco Adornato, Anna Anguissola, Andrea Bacchi, Gabri-

ela Cirucci, Frank Fehrenbach, Massimo Ferretti, Urte Krass, Matthias Krüger, Peta Mot-

ture, Johannes Lipps, Charlotte Schreiter and Avinoam Shalem also contributed signifi-

cantly with very useful suggestions and remarks. Ulrike Keuper, Rachel King and Karen

Lloyd not only provided intelligent linguistic revisions to several texts, but also contrib-

uted to improve them with thoughtful commentaries. A special thank you goes to Mary

F. Lefkowitz, who made it possible to publish Miranda Marvin’s paper.

The Excellence Initiative of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich

generously sponsored the publication of this book as well as the realization of the

symposium that prepared it. The staff of the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-

Maximilians-Universität Munich (especially Sonja Asal, Susanne Schaffrath and Lena

Bouman) and the Department Kunstwissenschaften of the same university (especially

Matteo Burioni, Christiane Hille, Renate Tauber, Eva Winter and Regina Wohlfarth)

enormously facilitated its organization with their competence and commitment.

Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Anthony Grafton, Salvatore Settis and Paul Zanker

will perhaps recognize the spurs of very fruitful conversations that we had in different

places and on different occasions over the last years. My interest in the topic of ›mul-

tiples‹ (and my first impression that further investigation on pre-modern replicated

objects was needed) also owes very much to my encounter with Miranda Marvin at the

American Academy in Rome in 2004. Her amazing ability to convey enthusiasm and her

profound respect for the specificity of each work of art (also the replicated ones) imbue

several of these pages.

Walter Cupperi

Munich, April 2013

28

Introduction

1 Three Examples of the Herkules with a Club by Pier Jacopo Alari de Bonacolsi (Paris, Louvre; Wien, Kunsthistorisches Museum; New York, Frick Collection), showcase of the exhibition Antico. The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. November 6, 2011–April 8, 2012. Photo: Rob Shelley, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives.

Introduction

29

2 Youth of the Magdalensberg, 1551–1552, bronze aftercast from a first century BC bronze statue of an Athlete in Prayer found on the Magdalensberg in Carinthia, h: 1.89m, Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, No. III. 17.812

30

Introduction