Giambologna

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Giambologna

Giambologna, born as Jean Boulogne, also known as Giovanni Da Bologna and Giovanni Bologna (1529 - August 13 1608), was a sculptor

Sculpture

Sculpture is Three-dimensional space artwork created by shaping or combining hard and or plastic material, sound, and or text and or light, commonly Stone sculpture , metal, glass, or wood....
, known for his marble

Marble sculpture

Marble sculpture is the art of creating three-dimensional forms from marble. Sculpture is among the oldest of the arts. Even before painting cave walls, early humans fashioned shapes from stone....
and bronze

Bronze sculpture

Bronze is the most popular metal for Casting metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply a "bronze".Common bronze alloys have the unusual and desirable property of expanding slightly just before they set, thus filling the finest details of a mold....
statuary in a late Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
or Mannerist style.

bologna was born in Douai

Douai

Douai is a Communes of France in the Nord Departments of France in northern France.It is a Subprefectures in France of the department. Located on the river Scarpe some 40 km from Lille and 25 km from Arras, Douai is home to one of the region's most impressive belfry ....
, Flanders

Flanders

Flanders is a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. Over the course of history, the geographical territory that was called "Flanders" has varied....
(now in France

France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
).

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Giambologna, born as Jean Boulogne, also known as Giovanni Da Bologna and Giovanni Bologna (1529 - August 13 1608), was a sculptor

Sculpture

Marble sculpture

Bronze sculpture

Renaissance

Biography

Giambologna was born in Douai

Douai

Flanders

France

Jacques du Broeucq

Jacques du Broeucq was a sculptor and architect from Southern Netherlands.Jacques du Broeucq is perhaps best known as the teacher of Giambologna in Antwerp....
, he moved to Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
in 1550, and studied in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital city of Italy and Lazio, and is Italy's largest and most populous city, with 2,724,347 residents in an urban area of some ....
. Giambologna made detailed study of the sculpture of classical antiquity

Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome....
. He was also much influenced by Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance Painting, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer....
, but developed his own Mannerist

Mannerism

Mannerism is a Art periods of European art which emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but continued into the seventeenth century throughout much of Europe....
style, with perhaps less emphasis on emotion and more emphasis on refined surfaces, cool elegance and beauty. Pope Pius IV

Pope Pius IV

Pope Pius IV , born Giovanni Angelo Medici, was Pope from 1559 to 1565. He is notable for presiding over the culmination of the Council of Trent....
gave Giambologna his first major commission, the colossal bronze Neptune and subsidiary figures for the Fountain of Neptune (the base designed by Tommaso Laureti

Tommaso Laureti

Tommaso Laureti, often called Tommaso Laureti Siciliano , was a italy painter from Sicily who trained in the atelier of the aged Sebastiano del Piombo and worked in Bologna and, from 1582, for papal patrons in Rome in a Michelangelo-inspired style with special skill in illusionistic perspective that in his Roman work avoided all but t...
, 1566) in Bologna. Giambologna spent his most productive years in Florence

Florence

Florence is the Capital city of the Italy Regions of Italy of Tuscany and of the provinces of Italy Province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany and has a population of 364,779 ....
, where he had settled in 1553. He became the Medici

Medici

The M?dici family was a powerful and influential Florence family from the 14th to 18th century. The family had three popes , numerous rulers of Florence and later members of the French and English royalty....
court sculptor, and died in Florence at the age of 79. He was interred in a chapel he designed himself in the Santissima Annunziata

Basilica della Santissima Annunziata di Firenze

The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata is a Roman Catholic minor basilica in Florence and the mother church of the Servite order. It is located at the northeastern side of the Piazza Santissima Annunziata....
.

Work

Giambologna became well known for a fine sense of action and movement, and a refined, differentiated surface finish. Among his most famous works are the Mercury (of which he did four versions), poised on one foot, supported by a zephyr. The god raises one arm to point heavenwards, in a gesture borrowed from the repertory of classical rhetoric that is characteristic of Giambologna's maniera.

Giambologna's several depictions of Venus

Venus (mythology)

Venus was a major Roman mythology goddess principally associated with love, beauty and sexual reproduction, the equivalent of the Greek mythology Aphrodite....
established a canon of proportions and set models for the goddess's representation that were influential for two generations of sculptors, in Italy and in the North. He created allegories strongly promoting Medicean political propaganda, such as Florence defeating Pisa and, less overtly, Samson Slaying a Philistine
Samson Slaying a Philistine (Giambologna)

The sculpture of Samson Slaying a Philistine is the earliest of the great marble groups by Giambologna , sculptor to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, and the only substantial work by the artist to have left Italy....
, for Francesco de' Medici (1562) He delighted in solving the complex spatial problems of three intertwined figures in his famous Rape of the Sabine Women (1574-82). The subject was not finally determined until after it had been set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi

Loggia dei Lanzi

The Loggia dei Lanzi, also called the Loggia della Signoria, is a building on a corner of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy, adjoining the Uffizi....
in Florence's Piazza della Signoria. Hercules beating the Centaur Nessus (1599) is also a conscious tour de force. It is also in the Loggia dei Lanzi.

The equestrian statue of Cosimo I de' Medici also in Florence, was completed by his studio assistant Pietro Tacca

Pietro Tacca

Pietro Tacca was an Italy sculptor, who was the chief pupil and follower of Giambologna. Tacca began in a Mannerism style and worked in the Baroque style during his maturity....
.

Giambologna provided as well as many sculptures for garden grottos and fountains in the Boboli Gardens

Boboli Gardens

The Boboli Gardens, in Italian Giardino di Boboli, form a famous park in Florence, Italy, that is home to a distinguished collection of sculptures dating from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with some Roman antiquities....
of Florence and at Pratolino, and the bronze doors of the cathedral of Pisa

Campo dei Miracoli

The Piazza del Duomo is a wide, walled area at the heart of the city of Pisa, Tuscany, Italy, recognized as one of the main centers for medieval art in the world....
. For the grotto of the Villa Medicea of Castello he sculpted a series of studies of individual animals, from life, which may now be viewed at the Bargello

Bargello

The Bargello, also known as the Bargello Palace or Palazzo del Popolo is a former barracks and prison, now an art museum, in Florence, Italy....
. Small bronze reductions of many of his sculptures were prized by connoisseurs at the time and ever since, for Giambologna's reputation has never suffered eclipse.

Giambologna was an important influence on later sculptors through his pupils Adriaen de Vries

Adriaen de Vries

Adriaen de Vries was a Late Mannerist sculpture born in the Netherlands, whose international style crossed the threshold to the Baroque; he excelled in refined modelling and bronze casting and in the manipulation of patina and became the most famous European sculptor of his generation....
and Pietro Francavilla

Pietro Francavilla

Pierre Franqueville, generally called Pietro Francavilla , was a Franco-Flemish sculptor trained in Florence, who provided sculpture for Italian and French patrons in the elegant Mannerism tradition established by Giambologna....
who left his atelier for Paris in 1601, as well as Pierre Puget who spread Giambologna's influence throughout Northern Europe, and in Italy on Pietro Tacca

Pietro Tacca

Pietro Tacca was an Italy sculptor, who was the chief pupil and follower of Giambologna. Tacca began in a Mannerism style and worked in the Baroque style during his maturity....
, who assumed Giambologna's workshop in Florence, and in Rome on Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini was a pre-eminent Baroque sculpture and architect of 17th Century Rome....
and Alessandro Algardi

Alessandro Algardi

Alessandro Algardi was an Italy high-Baroque sculptor active almost exclusively in Rome, where for the latter decades of his life, he was the major rival of Gian Lorenzo Bernini....
.

Giambologna

Biography

Work

External links