#laura Ammanati

[thetudorslovers]

"Women have been there all along. They've been there, and they've been doing things! They've been relentlessly doing stuff, whether you knew about it or not!"

[italianartsociety]

By Jean Marie Carey

Sculptor and architectural designer Bartolomeo Ammanati was born 18 June 1511 in Settignano, a village near Florence.

Orphaned at the age of 12, Ammanati earned his living in the workshop of Baccio Bandinelli (c. 1523–7), after which time he left Florence for Venice. Jacopo Sansovino had just arrived there, and Ammanati was probably involved on some of Sansovino’s early commissions. Ammanati’s early posed figures are obviously indebted to Michelangelo’s tomb sculptures for the Medici, but they exude a greater feeling of calm, classical beauty, and this betrays Ammanati’s debt to Sansovino.

Ammanati was documented as active in Padua and Vicenza intermittently between 1544 and 1548. He carved a colossal Hercules for the courtyard of the Paduan palazzo of the humanist jurist and antiquarian Marco Mantova Benavides.

In Urbino on 17 April 1550 Ammanati married the poet Laura Battiferri (1523–89). They travelled to Rome to solicit work from the newly elected pope, Julius III. When Julius III died in 1555, Ammanati returned to Florence to enter the service of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Ammanati’s best-known sculpture from this period is the Fountain of Neptune (c. 1560–75) in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence.

By 1582 Ammanati had become so strongly influenced by the Counter-Reformation and the Jesuits, with whom he had been in contact since 1572, that in a famous letter to the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, printed on 22 August 1582, he denounced on moral grounds the public display of nude sculpture (of which he had made many himself). In their wills Ammanati and Battiferri left all their property to the Jesuits in Florence. Ammanati died in Florence on 13 April 1592.

Reference: Charles Avery. "Ammanati, Bartolomeo." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T002389.

Fountain of Neptune, c. 1560–75, in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Photo: Museums of Florence.

Leda e il cigno, c. 1550.  Photo: Museo nazionale del Bargello.

Victory, 1540. Photo: Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

Chapel on the Mount detail, c. 1550. Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading: John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy. Italian High Renaissance & Baroque Sculpture. London: Phaidon Press, 2000. 

Giovanni Careri and Ferrante Ferranti. Baroques. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. 

[thetudorslovers]

"And you, wandering spirits,

to whom heaven gave such great gifts

as to win you the bliss

of eternal citizenship above.

     Let my humble prayer be heard in heaven:

though I am far away, living in horrible darkness

and buried alive on the Arno,

     Make my name, that best part of me

that stays here on the Tiber, purged of all dross,

remain alive among your precious treasures."

Laura Ammanati (born Battiferri) was a celebrated poet and literary scholar in the cultural circles of Renaissance Florence, which included her husband, the prominent architect and sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Agnolo Bronzino, the erudite Mannerist artist who painted Battiferri’s portrait and exchanged sonnets with her. She was an honored member of literary societies such as the Accademia degli Intronati of Siena and the Accademia degli Assorditi in her native town of Urbino. Her principal collection of poems, Il primo libro delle opere toscane (The First Book of Works in Tuscan), was published in 1560.

In her younger years, Laura aggressively sought recognition for her art, and actively forwarded her career but in her later life she withdrew from the public eye. She spent most of her days meditating, praying, or composing unprinted spiritual poetry in the private chapel that Bartolomeo had built for her at their villa in Camerata. While in the process of compiling the third and final anthology of poetry, her Rime, Laura died in 1589. Her husband attempted to have it completed, but Bartolomeo also died before the process was completed. Laura and Bartolomeo were both buried at the Church of San Giovannino At least one-third of her entire written works were never published. Her late productions��hundreds of spiritual sonnets, biblical narrative poems, and her incomplete epic on the Hebrew kings—was entrusted to the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome and nearly none of it ever came to light.