Biography

Anne Dunlop holds the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, where she also serves as Director of the Australian Institute of Art History. She is interested in Italian and European medieval and early modern art, in materials and technologies of art-making, and in artistic cultural exchange. Her most recent edited book, The Mongol Empire in Global History and Art History, appeared in the I Tatti Research Series in 2023. Her other books include Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy; The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750; Andrea del Castagno and the Limits of Painting; and Antipodean Early Modern: European Art in Australian Collections, c. 1200–1600.

Project Summary

Bernard Berenson didn’t like Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348). Describing the Sala della Pace, in 1909, Berenson saw too much detail and too many things: ‘(Ambrogio) seems to have itched to reproduce whatsoever he saw…he makes no attempt to extract the essence of these conceptions and…. could think of nothing but vast panoramas overshadowed by figures powerless to speak for themselves, and obliged to ply us with signs and scrolls.’ The great challenge of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s work is that he seems to provide an excess of visual information relative to narrative needs. His paintings are filled with small and startling things: elaborate gold earrings on the Virgin Mary, East Asian boots on onlookers at an execution, or allegorical personifications armed with carpenter’s saws and planes. This project aims to develop an epistemology of the detail in the work of this formative trecento artist. Should these inclusions be seen as artistic flourishes supplemental to the basic work, or something more fundamental to it? And what is their relation to the artist’s notable experiments with fictive space, what Panofsky termed ‘the stage of mathematical accuracy’ in an emerging European visual language of perspectival painting? The research will be focused on the painter’s public fresco cycles, and starts from two intersecting questions: the place and role of the specific detail within the larger narrative scenes; and the question of how to judge or gauge the truth or reliability of information in a scenario of uncertainty. At the root of Ambrogio’s busy things is the issue of realism and scepticism—that is, how trecento viewers and the artist himself might have conceptualized both the aesthetic work and the truth-claims of image-making.