Making it

Nicholas Penny

• The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino by Bruce Boucher
  Yale, 304 pp, £95.00, November 1991, ISBN 0 300 04759 2
• Giambattista and Lorenzo Bregno: Venetian Sculpture in the High Renaissance by Anne Markham Schulz
  Cambridge, 564 pp, £85.00, November 1991, ISBN 0 521 38406 0

Each day, hundreds of people visit the world’s finest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but thousands come to see the superb, though less comprehensive and extraordinary, collection of Italian Renaissance painting in the National Gallery nearly two miles away. When they were made, the paintings were no more highly esteemed than the sculptures – nor were the two separated from each other. In Florence especially, they were very close. Reliefs of stucco, terracotta and papier mâché were often coloured by painters. Donatello and Ghiberti, the leading Florentine sculptors of the early 15th century, began to pursue pictorial effects – effects of linear and aerial perspective which were also novel in painting. Yet these were not imitated from paintings. It was the sculptors who led the way.