Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy
The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards
Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio
- Pages: approx. 232 p.
- Size:220 x 280 mm
- Illustrations:1 b/w, 75 col., 2 maps color
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2025
- € 95,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-1-915487-45-2
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Jan/25)
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Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards offers a new approach to the study of cross-cultural artistic exchange by examining the practical details of object movement by land and sea from Italy to Spain.
Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, PhD. Is Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Art History, Executive Director of the School of the Arts, and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont.
Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards focuses on enormous amounts of sculptures moved from Italy to Spain from ca. 1500-1750. An analysis of an important body of unpublished archival documentation regarding the practical issues involved in making and transporting sculpture, provide the basis for this study of the development of technologies, infrastructure, and labor organization necessary to make such challenging transports of moving sculptures by land and sea possible. Artists, patrons, and agents had the eventual movement to a destination at the center of decision making when new sculptures were commissioned to send. Sending antiquities or second-hand works required even more planning and care. Divided into a series of case studies of major sculptures, Shipping Sculptures offers a new approach to the study of cross-cultural artistic exchange, state gifts, collecting and patronage, by examining the practical details of object movement over challenging geographies.