Book Description

"Mary Gibbons's appraisal provides the first scholarly study of Giambologna's remarkably original religious sculpture in relief. In their pictorial austerity and unabashedly metallic forms, Giambologna's bronze narratives present us with bold innovations. This study offers new photographic documentation, archival discoveries, and, most significantly, new ideas and fresh perceptions of Giambologna's art."--Malcolm Campbell, University of Pennsylvania "This timely interdisciplinary study makes a major contribution, integrating Genoa into Late Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque studies. Mary Gibbons illuminates the late career of this major Mannerist court artist. Her use of new documents to reconstruct and redate the commission argues for a more contextual approach to Giambologna in relation to the Genoese old nobility, the Genoese Republic, Catholic reform, and Genoese-Florentine relations within the Hapsburg Empire at the end of the Cinquecento."--George L. Gorse, Pomona and Scripps Colleges "Mary Weitzel Gibbons's book successfully challenges the received wisdom that Giambologna as a sculptor was concerned only with the formal appearance of his figures in the round. In this highly original analysis of his work in the Grimaldi Chapel in Genoa, Gibbons takes on the largely neglected field of sixteenth-century relief sculpture, placing Giambologna's contribution properly in the larger discourse of narrative practices in both painting and sculpture."--Sheila Folliott, George Mason University