Chapter 4 Cherubino Alberti’s Engravings after Polidoro da Caravaggio: from Chiaroscuro to Sculpture
In: Sculpture in Print, 1480–1600Search for other papers by Maria Gabriella Matarazzo in
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Abstract
To date, art historical scholarship has considered the engraved reproductions of Polidoro da Caravaggio’s monochromatic facade frescoes mainly as records of the perished originals, which are at present almost entirely lost. This study aims to assess the active role played by the engravings after Polidoro da Caravaggio in the reception of his chiaroscuro technique as an imitation of sculpture. In particular, I will focus on Cherubino Alberti, who, after moving to Rome in 1568, drew and engraved – among other models – both antique sculpture and Polidoro’s facades. By comparing Cherubino’s treatment of these two subjects, I will point out that his visual strategies, indebted to his approach to sculpture, aimed to render the plastic intention of the monochromatic technique thus conferring sculptural prominence to Polidoro’s painted friezes. I will demonstrate how, by applying the representational conventions of the antiquarian printmaking to Polidoro’s chiaroscuro frescoes, Cherubino deceptively represented them as marmoreal, thus fostering their visual assimilation to ancient bas-reliefs. At the time, sculpture was acknowledged to be difficult to portray on two-dimensional media (both drawings and prints). By weaving together the stylistic analysis of Cherubino’s burin-hand and the survey of the coeval literature of art, I will reassess the practice of copying Polidoresque facades in the late sixteenth century, which will emerge from my study as a particularly successful formula that served as a pictorial (and Raphaelesque) filter to this challenge.