Maestro Ercole Ferrata
Abstract
Ercole Ferrata (1610-1686), a gifted sculptor, collaborator, and restorer of antiquities, made his strongest impact on the Italian art scene as the director of Rome's preeminent teaching workshop. Ferrata was the only artist of his generation to devote himself to the education of sculptors. His diverse talents in sculpture, which he cultivated during travels throughout the peninsula, gave him the freedom to work on high-profile projects that varied in genre, medium, scale, style, and technique. In his house-workshop, Ferrata saved the models of his own works, acquired molds and studies by modern masters, and collected casts of ancient statuary. This unparalleled collection of sculptural studies, coupled with Ferrata's skill and his links to Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, and Rome's most powerful patrons, attracted students from the length of the Italian peninsula and abroad. His own emphasis on iconography, narrative, and an archaeological accuracy in rendering ancient subjects informed the manner in which he trained his students in his workshop and in the Florentine Granducal Academy. By combining a thorough course of modeling from art and from life with lessons in restoration and practical experience gained from collaboration, Ferrata taught his students to become workers of stucco, marble, wood, and bronze. This dissertation addresses Ferrata's completion of his artistic education in Rome under Algardi, considers his stylistic maturation under Bernini, reconstructs his workshop, investigates the role he played as professore in the academy, reclaims his contributions to collaborations with students and masters, and seeks to dispel the myth of Ferrata's lack of creative invention. The project also explores how Ferrata and his students responded artistically to the masterpieces in their immediate environment and in doing so, affected the development of Baroque art. These investigations, which depend on the close reading of the sculptures themselves, should provoke a return to the object that has long been missing in the history of Baroque sculpture by major artists other than Bernini, Algardi, or Duquesnoy.
Subject Area
Biographies,Art history
Recommended Citation
Jessica Marie Boehman,
"Maestro Ercole Ferrata"
(January 1, 2009).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3363256.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3363256
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