Online & IN-Person Lecture
Signatures and Artistic Authorship in Lorenzetti and Attavante
Dr. Christopher Platts
School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, University of London
43, Gordon Sq. Room 114, The Keynes Library London WC1H 0PD United Kingdom
Tuesday, May 21, 2024 · 5:00-6:30pm GMT+1
The Sienese painter Pietro Lorenzetti and Florentine illuminator Attavante signed about a dozen surviving artworks. In Lorenzetti’s case, the painter apparently autographed more works than any other European artist, working in any medium, until the late fourteenth century. Such a tendency to inscribe one’s own identity into an artwork, and to do so creatively, foreshadowed the practices of Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer a century or two later. In Attavante’s case, the illuminator’s inscriptions were either monumental in visual effect, if miniature in scale, or they were hastily scribbled onto the blank flyleaves of deluxe manuscripts. This paper examines two unusual cases, a unique “double-signature” by Lorenzetti and a newly discovered signature by Attavante, exploring how these self-inscriptions are different from each artist’s other autographs. By analyzing subtle relationships between text and image in each artwork—a monumental altarpiece on one hand, and a choir psalter on the other—this paper proposes that both artists were especially concerned with recording their own authorship, either publicly for multiple audiences or privately for themselves. Moreover, each painter, by choosing how and where he signed his work within the overall composition, emphasized that art-making was not only a devotional act but a holy one akin to the generative acts of God, the saints, or the prophets.
Christopher Platts is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on the style, form, and function of late medieval and early modern Italian art, especially Sienese and Venetian painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He is currently working on a book about Paolo Veneziano and the patronage and reception of Venetian Gothic painting in Europe and the Mediterranean during the trecento. Chris is also active as a curator at public and university art museums and libraries. His latest exhibition, which is currently up at the University of Cincinnati Art Library, is “Rediscovering Catharina van Hemessen’s Scourging of Christ: Women Artists, Patrons, and Rulers in Renaissance Europe.”
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