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Speaker: Carmen Bambach (I Tatti / The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In the last 20 years especially there has been a drastic re-evaluation of Verrocchio as a draftsman, sufficiently so that he must now be counted among the pantheon of the very greatest masters of disegno of all times. The number of autograph drawings by Verrocchio is very small, no more than 20-25, however, due to the vicissitudes of time, and he has also been unduly overshadowed by his pupil Leonardo. In this lecture, Carmen Bambach will examine the rich dimensions of Verrocchio’s contribution, which in many ways can also be hypothesized by looking at the evidence about Leonardo retrospectively. The draftsman Verrocchio’s contribution especially will be characterized as one which was conceptual, and thus one which transcends the undeniable technical virtuosity of his drawings.
Carmen C. Bambach is Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the Inaugural Vilcek Foundation Prize for Excellence for her contribution to U. S. society and culture as an immigrant, April 4, 2019. Her Michelangelo Divine Draftsman and Designer accompanying her exhibition at The Met, won the Phyllis Goodhart Book Prize of the Renaissance Society of America in 2019, and also from the Association of American Museum Curators in 2018. She was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in 2010-12 at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art. Her books include Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300-1600 ("Premio Salimbeni 2000”). Her Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, 4 vols. (Yale University Press), will be out in June 2019. She has organized several exhibitions at The Met.