Colouring the Emperor: Andrea di Sansovino’s Polychrome Terracotta Relief of Galba

By the time of the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori in 1550, glazed terracotta was decidedly out of favour. Yet when the second edition of the work appeared in 1568, Vasari had acquired Andrea Sansovino’s polychrome terracotta relief of the Roman emperor Galba. Sculpted profiles of Roman emperors were popular in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century, and marble reliefs could also be accentuated with colour, as seen in the series of reliefs by Gregorio di Lorenzo and his circle, dated to the late fifteenth- or early sixteenth century. The production of this type of portrait had dried up long before the first edition of the Vite, and Vasari’s interest in the Galba appears exceptional. The writer’s penchant for coloured stones is well-attested and went hand in hand with his approval of monochrome works, but, for the most part, he does not discuss the use of colour in sculpture in the Vite. This article considers Vasari’s treatment of colour in sculptures of the late Florentine Quattrocento, through the lens of Sansovino’s portrait

Contradictory Representations: Warrior Women in the Seventeenth-century Painting

This article considers seventeenth-century portraits of female warriors in the light of women’s participation in a war. Their contribution was far from insignificant, and the article argues that the number of portraits emphasizing women’s military effort may appear surprisingly limited. Contemporary views on women and warfare probably explain the lack of such portraits, but women’s participation was not universally condemned. By comparing historical accounts, contemporary literature as well as the visual arts, the article shows how attitudes were highly ambivalent; women could be praised as defenders of their homes but rarely as aggressors. Rather predictably, then, the warrior portraits tend to emphasize both so-called masculine and feminine qualities, often drawing on Minerva as a model. It is argued here that women’s bellicosity was sometimes modified by references to hunting, and that this may have been a reflection of changing attitudes to was as well as to female combatants in the seventeenth century