Julius Caesar

Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ferrucci’s pleasing Julius Caesar exemplifies the delicately ornate, a l’antica style of Florentine sculpture fashionable in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While the face is strikingly naturalistic and portrait-like, the profuse amount of surface detail seems to disperse rather than unify form and to reduce the scale of the sculpture rather than create a sense of monumentality. The innovations of Michelangelo’s Brutus emerge when it is compared to Ferrucci’s bust. Ten years older than Michelangelo, Ferrucci was described by Vasari as one of those marvelous "sculptors who without knowing at all how to draw on paper nevertheless brings their works to a fine and praiseworthy finish with their chisels." He became head of the workforce at San Lorenzo in 1524, where his expertise in carving marble proved valuable to Michelangelo.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art