Terracotta and Its Times / Il tempo della terracotta

Lucia Simonato

Artus Quellinus the Elder, Samson and Delilah, ca. 1640, terracotta, 37.5 x 43 x 31 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst — Artus Quellinus the Elder, *Samson and Delilah*, ca. 1640, terracotta, 37.5 x 43 x 31 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst

Artus Quellinus the Elder, *Samson and Delilah*, ca. 1640, terracotta, 37.5 x 43 x 31 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst

With a broad chronological approach, this project illustrates some of the main moments in the critical fortunes of terracotta in the modern age – a material that, both in literary judgements and in collecting, seems more than others to have oscillated over a few centuries between the background and the foreground of art history, sometimes imposing its own peculiar expressive qualities in a trans-medial manner on other productions (above all in marble), but sometimes being subject to heteronomous formal models or reacting to specific historical, religious, social, conservational and critical contexts.
Three main themes guide this research: the problematic reception of terracotta in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives; the role that Renaissance or Flemish clay production played as a model in the evolution of marble sculptural production in the Baroque age; and how modern-age sketches found their way onto the market and attracted the interest of collectors and critics in the 19th century in the light of a new, atmospheric, and anti-monumental idea of sculpture. This study then proceeds to a rereading of the main sources of art history of the modern age to sound out how the perception of fictile works changed between the 15th and 18th century.
This research on terracotta and its affordances does not aim at a historical reconstruction of the reception of Renaissance and Baroque clay works but rather at measuring the dialectic in art history between ‘materiality’ and ‘culture’, both visual and literary.