About

This virtual exhibition brings to life the social interactions men, women, and children had with sculptures in the Italian Renaissance. On the street, in a church, and in the privacy of an elite household or a monk’s cell, people touched, dressed, moved, knelt before, spoke to, and generally treated sculptures as if they were alive. Digital reconstructions, based on visual and textual research, recreate not only the original appearance of these sculptures in situ (to the best of our knowledge) but also these social contexts and functions. The prototypical story of the sculpture that comes to life is the classical tale of Pygmalion, who falls in love with his own statue of a beautiful woman and treats it as his beloved, until his desires are satisfied, and his fingers sink into warm, yielding flesh. These Renaissance sculptures, almost all of holy figures, raise both the promise of Pygmalion and also the dangers inherent in such breathing, living images of beautiful bodies. The diverse sculptures in this exhibition, which were not made for museums but a part of everyday life in the Renaissance, offer a livelier, unexpected perspective into Italian Renaissance Art.

The exhibition was created by the students in ARTH 485, A Social and Material History of Italian Renaissance Sculpture, at Queen’s University in the fall of 2018, under the direction of Prof. Una Roman D’Elia. The images are drawn from an open access database of over 350 high resolution images hosted by Queen’s University, Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Tuscany: https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/14832