Uccello, Luca della Robbia, Domenico Veneziano, Castagno, Masaccio, Alberti, Filipo Lippi, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Verrocchio 4as well as the great Leonardo and Michelangelo, and in the sixteenth century, Rosso, Francesco Salviati, Pontormo, and <nally, Vasari, better known for his biographies of other artists than his own work. The history of Florence goes back to pre-Roman times 4the word cTuscany, d the region in which Florence is located, is related to the word cEtruscan. d In the heyday of Rome, Florence 9s Piazza della Republica was the city forum. By about 1115, Florence was a self-governing city-state, one of many throughout Italy competing for territory, and by 1300 the population was close to 100,000.<br><br> Florence was then a thriving center of commerce and trade, primarily based on the cloth industry. During the fourteenth century <re, famine, =ood, and plague caused serious losses, but by 1400 Florence had recovered somewhat, and in 1406 Florence conquered Pisa, thus gaining a seaport, Livorno, on the western coast of Italy. During the <fteenth century Florence reached its apogee.<br><br> Who was Antonio Pollaiuolo? Although he identi<ed himself throughout his life as a goldsmith 4 or metalworker 4he was also a painter and sculptor. All of these arts are based in the medium of drawing ( disegno in Italian).<br><br> Throughout his life and afterward, Pollaiuolo was known as a maestro de disegno, a master of drawing. Drawings would have been made for projects in numerous media, for goldsmith 9s work, for paintings, and for such things as embroideries 4twenty-seven embroidered scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist designed by Pollaiuolo for the Baptistery are preserved in the Museo dell 9Opera del Duomo. Although embroidery is now deemed one of the so-called minor arts, huge numbers of them would have been made for decorating ecclesiastical vestments and cloths used in liturgical ritual (the vast majority have perished).<br><br> The Gallery has on loan a painting by Cima da Conegliano of about 1510 showing St. Nicholas with a vestment edged with just the kind of embroidered scenes for which Pollaiuolo 4and many of his contemporary artists 4made drawings. Pollaiuolo 9s <rst commission for a work in metal was for a candlestick for the Cathedral, in 1457.<br><br> This work, like the great majority produced from Pollaiuolo 9s designs, no longer exists, for the curse of goldsmith 9s work is that once things made from precious metals such as silver and gold have gone out of style, or if the gold or silver was needed for something else, the objects would be melted down. Pollaiuolo certainly made drawings, but how much of the labor to create their intended end product he would have done is unclear. He almost certainly would not have done embroidery.<br><br> How much he would have worked on casting either small-scale goldsmiths 9 objects or larger works is also uncertain. His last commissions were tombs for two popes 4the <rst for Sixtus IV, which was in process in Rome between 1484 and 1493 , and the next for the subsequent pope, Innocent VIII. These are huge bronze objects, and it also seems unlikely that Pollaiuolo would have cast every bit of these himself.<br><br> For Pollaiuolo 9s painting, the facts are equally uncertain. Antonio Pollaiuolo was <rst of all a goldsmith, a member of the goldsmiths 9 guild. Contemporary accounts say that he learned painting from his brother Piero, who was ten years younger and primarily a painter.<br><br> The two brothers worked together, so that the product of their workshop could well be by both brothers. Certain scholars still credit Yale 9s painting to Antonio and Piero, and its state of conservation is such that it probably will never be possible to be certain whether there were one or two hands involved in it. Although Hercules is a mythological <gure, not a religious one, in Florence he was regarded as emblematic, indeed almost as a patron saint.<br><br> He was both strong and virtuous, and he performed extraordinary deeds. Numerous Florentine paintings depicted Hercules, including a number by Pollaiuolo, several (now lost) done for the Palazzo Vecchio. Smaller replicas of these are in the Uf<zi, exemplifying his style, characterized by <gures with strong and well-de<ned contours, in vehement action, with expressive limbs.<br><br> Yale 9s painting depicts the centaur Nessus trying to abscond with Deianira, the wife of Hercules. Because the waters of the river were swollen, Nessus offered to carry Deianira across, but she realized he was trying to =ee with her and shouted for help. Hercules shot at Nessus with a poisoned arrow, killing him.<br><br> Before he died, however, Nessus persuaded Deianira that his blood was a love potion, and that she should smear a tunic with the blood and give it to Hercules. When Hercules put on the tunic, he was consumed with agony, and Deianira killed herself. The painting was given to Yale in 1871.<br><br> It was originally on panel, probably part of a piece of furniture, perhaps something given to celebrate a marriage. In 1867 , the painting had been removed from its panel support and transferred to canvas. When the painting was conserved in 1998, a sliver of wood, which was analyzed as cherry, a kind of wood often used for furniture, was found in the lining.<br><br> Nothing about the commissioning of this painting is known. The mythological scene is shown not in an ancient setting but in the Arno valley, above the walled city of Florence. The course of the river Arno 2 is discernible, leading down into the city.<br><br> Just beyond the left hand of Deianira is Brunelleschi 9s famous dome of the Cathedral of Florence 4<nished just about the time Pollaiuolo was born 4which is both exactly in the middle of the city and in the center of the composition. This is not the only painting by Pollaiuolo that shows Florence in the background 4one of the best known of the others is the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (National Gallery, London) 4manifesting the pride that he and others took in being Florentine. Perhaps the single best-known work by Pollaiuolo is the engraving Battle of the Nudes.<br><br> Its status as a monument of <fteenth-century Italian art, however, has not provided certainty about any of its various aspects. The print depicts ten men, silhouetted with little overlapping, on a shallow stage created by a dense background of plants, including a kind of corn, and a vine bearing grapes. Most of the ten men can be roughly paired, as mirror images of each other, a feature relatively common in works by Pollaiuolo, as in the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.<br><br> The print is inscribed cOpus Antonii Pollaioli Florenttini, d prominently displayed on a tabula ansata, a plaque with handles. Because of this inscription, it has been assumed that Pollaiuolo engraved the plate himself, but that assumption is open to question. Additionally, both the subject and the date of the print are unknown.<br><br> Various subjects for this print have been proposed, but none has yet won general acceptance. It has been suggested that the subject has to do with the Roman hero Titus Manlius, or the Golden Fleece. The grapes and grainlike plant in the background have been seen as connoting the Eucharist.<br><br> Recently, because the background planting is chaotic and the men 9s facial expressions violent, the subject has been understood as a moralized allegory, emphasizing that barbarians are subject to violence and passion 4in other words, the message is that the passions should be tempered. The print has even been seen as simply a pattern sheet, a demonstration of the kind of work that Pollaiuolo could do, although this latter idea seems anachronistic for the <fteenth century. Another unresolved question about the print is its date.<br><br> It is dif<cult to date Pollaiuolo 9s works on the basis of style; the artist seems to have arrived at his characteristic style at a relatively early age and changed little over the course of his life. Thus, it has been suggested that the print was made as early as the 1470 s, but no persuasive argument backs up the opinion. (Yale 9s painting is thought to be about 1475 , although there is no certainty for that either.) Other evidence makes a date around 1490 seem more probable.<br><br> At least <fty impressions of this print are known today. Only one of these impressions (Cleveland Museum of Art) is in the <rst state; the others are in the second, which re=ects just a few minor changes. The most salient difference between the two states is in the small diamond-shaped area on the inside of this ax-man 9s leg, which is completely blank in the <rst state but in the second has been <lled in.<br><br> The engraver perhaps saw this white spot as distracting or as creating a bulge in the leg. Assuming these changes happened fairly early on, it would make sense that there were few impressions of the <rst state but many of the second, as re=ected in the surviving impressions; conversely, the relative number of surviving impressions seems to indicate that the second state 3 followed the <rst closely in time. Two woodcut copies of the engraving were made, both copying the <rst state, and both datable in the 1490 s; the existence of these suggests that the print itself was not made until shortly before that time.<br><br> A speci<c ancient model 4a sculpture that was excavated in 1489 4has been suggested for the <gure on the ground at the right, and if indeed this was Pollaiuolo 9s source, that fact would be further evidence for a date around 1490 . Finally, no derivations from Pollaiuolo 9s print in the work of other artists are known until the 1490 s, when one of the engravings in Francesco Rosselli 9s series The Mysteries of the Rosary was drastically changed to re=ect the dynamic poses of some of the <gures in Pollaiuolo 9s composition. If Pollaiuolo 9s dramatic work had existed considerably earlier, its in=uence on other artists should certainly have been manifest.<br><br> Whether Pollaiuolo himself actually engraved this plate is also still unresolved. Pollaiuolo was a metalworker, so presumably he was comfortable with metalworking tools, but no other print is attributed to him. Other engravings show Pollaiuolo 9s designs, but these were by engravers such as Cristofano Robetta.<br><br> For an engraver to have as his <rst (and last) effort a plate of this magnitude and degree of technical accomplishment would be unusual, but as yet there has been no other work identi<ed as probably by the same hand. The inscription on the print has been seen as indicating that Pollaiuolo pushed the burin through the copper himself, but on the tomb of Sixtus IV, <nished in 1493 , a similar inscription reads cOpus Antoni Pollaiuoli Florentini, d and then c A-R-G, A-U-R, P-I-C-T, A-E-R-E, Clari d (The work of the Florentine Antonio Pollaiuolo, famous in silver, gold, painting, and bronze). The inscriptions on both print and tomb proudly identify the conception 4the disegno 4as Pollaiuolo 9s, but the actual production may have been by someone else.<br><br> Finally, the rarity of copies of the book Le dodici fatiche di Hercole (Beinecke Library, 2004 191 ) is, ironically, evidence of the popularity of the text, re=ecting the consistent pre-eminence of the greatest of antique heroes during the Renaissance. The presence in the book of designs deriving from Pollaiuolo, still in use three quarters of a century after the artist 9s death, attests to the ongoing vitality of Pollaiuolo 9s energetic and expressive style. 4<br><br>

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