![]() ![]() ![]() The saga abounds with colourful characters, from the Russian cosmetics manufacturer who bought the portrait in a French junk shop for €3,200 to the entrepreneurs who tried (and failed) to sell the picture to the National Museum of Saudi Arabia for precisely €56,487,902. Taking a cue from wildly successful true-crime podcasts such as Serial, Brotton investigates the recent discovery of a purported self-portrait by Cellini. In following Cellini’s story, Brotton treads the same path as Vasari, bringing artworks to life by focusing on the lives of those who made and interacted with them.īut Blood and Bronze is much more than a straightforward biography. Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University in London, and his series traces the life of Benvenuto Cellini, an Italian Renaissance goldsmith, sculptor, musician, and murderer, who in his sensational autobiography traversed artistic creation, violent death and the arts of necromancy. Take Jerry Brotton’s ten-part series Blood and Bronze, the latest offering from Radio 3’s The Essay (22 March to 2 April, afterwards available on BBC Sounds). While nowadays artworks are easily illustrated (copyright permitting) in print or on screen, the solutions that Vasari found for translating the visual into words are still in use, as anyone who listens to art podcasts or radio shows will know. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, the first edition of which was published in 1550, is often considered the first work of art history – yet besides engraved portraits of his subjects, there were originally no pictures in his book at all. How do you communicate the history of art without pictures? This is the question facing scholars who venture into radio, but it isn’t a new problem. ![]()
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