THE RENAISSANCE TOMB IN MILAN. (VOLUMES I--III) (ITALY)

The Renaissance Tomb in Milan is an account of the development in Milan of funerary sculpture from the early fourteenth century to the early years of the sixteenth focusing upon ten monuments. Other works of sculpture are considered in relation to these ten.;The Renaissance Tomb in Milan is not an exhaustive study, but an overview--an investigation into the nature of Milanese tomb sculpture designed to provide the necessary framework on which further studies may be based. To this end it focuses upon (1) the particular forms the tombs were given, asking in each case why a tomb took the shape it did, and what or who could have influenced it; (2) the commission; (3) the intended or actual site of each monument, asking why such a monument would have been commissioned by a certain patron for particular location, and what influence the site may have had on the funerary program; (4) the iconography; and (5) style, where it became clear that traditional attributions had rarely, if ever, been tested, and that even when documents existed telling us who was commissioned for or paid for a particular monument the written testimony was not always in accordance with the visual evidence. The question of authorship, in fact, is one of the largest problems in any study devoted to Lombard sculpture, but to this question this work offers suggestions, and few solutions, for this consideration alone would have demanded the author's full attention. The monuments themselves served as my most trusted source of information.