Felipe Pereda’s new book is a well-produced and lucidly-written synthesis of existing Torrigiano scholarship. The author divides the volume into four geographically-located chapters, loosely set in London, Seville, Rome and Florence (with many cross references), which he dedicates to ‘reconstructing the artist’s memory across the intertwined narratives of mythology and history in the form of a story’. This self-declared goal ‘to navigate between history and myth’, perhaps contributes to the writer’s willingness to focus his narrative around the famous story of the title, and its effect on the career of the man whom Michelangelo called ‘un uomo bestiale e superbo’ (a bestial and arrogant man), according to Ascanio Condivi in his Life of Michelangelo published in 1553.

Pereda fulsomely acknowledges his debt to earlier scholars. It is in fact over forty years since Alan Darr produced his seminal doctoral thesis on Torrigiano’s work, Pietro Torrigiano and His Sculpture for the Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, New York University, published in 1980, although he subsequently penned a number of supplementary articles, including a contributory chapter in Cinzia Maria Sicca and Louis A. Waldman’s important study The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance: Art for the Early Tudors, in 2012. Despite the existing scholarship, a number of outstanding questions still surround Torrigiano’s life and activities, including the circumstances and timing of his arrival and departure from England and his flight to Spain, on which the present volume offers a view.

The Man Who Broke Michelangelo’s Nose is full of interesting information and contextual background, contributing new hypotheses regarding Torrigiano’s biography. On the timing of Torrigiano’s arrival in London, Pereda asserts that this must have been in spring 1509, although he admits that the sculptor’s presence is not documented there until 1511. He also cites the document dated 26 April 1510, regarding a payment to Torrigiano for travelling to Brussels from Antwerp ‘pur recoller et rejoindre le col de la figure de madam Marie d’Angleterre’. Pereda argues that this relates to the lost portrait bust of Princess Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, which was commissioned from Torrigiano by Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy, Regent of the Low Countries. (Mary was betrothed to Margaret’s nephew Charles, later Emperor Charles V, from 1507-13.) The author discloses in a later chapter his rediscovery of this bust in the collection of Harvard Art Museums in collaboration with Tony Sigel, the museum’s Head of Conservation, and has plans to publish more detailed information concerning their reattribution of this piece.

As a Professor of Spanish Art, it is perhaps to be expected that Pereda is particularly interesting on Torrigiano’s Spanish patrons and activities. He shows how the sculptor’s association with such patrons began in Rome, where in 1499 he worked on the tomb effigy of Pedro Suárez de Guzmán, now in the church of Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli and from 1500-02 on the cantoria for the church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli. Indeed, Torrigiano’s Spanish contacts were clearly sufficiently strong to offer him the prospect of lucrative commissions there. Pereda speculates that when Torrigiano left England for Florence in 1519 to recruit a team of artists to complete commissions for Westminster Abbey, he never returned to England, but instead travelled directly to Lisbon and then Seville. Although this move is undocumented, Pereda hypothesises that Torrigiano was in Seville by 1522, enjoying the patronage of the mayor of Seville, Rodrigo Ponce de León, Duke of Arcos and his wife. Additionally – and interestingly – he cites a Seville document of 1526 referencing another lost terracotta portrait bust of one of Charles V’s potential brides, this time the one he married, Isabella of Portugal, although he adds that since the bust does not survive, and is only mentioned by Francisco de Holanda in his On ancient painting (1548), it ‘might well never have existed’.

Pereda makes significant claims for Torrigiano’s importance within Spanish sculpture, arguing that he ‘did not merely adapt to the local practice that he found in Spain but fully transformed it’, and it is certainly credible that he influenced the greats of Spanish polychrome wood sculpture, such as Juan Martinez Montañés. The author also offers interesting insights into Torrigiano’s life in Spain and his two surviving works in the Museum of Fine Arts, Seville, namely the Virgin with Child (formerly in the Monastery of Buenavista, Seville) and St Jerome. Pereda proposes that it was his ‘Florentine friend’ Niculoso Pisano who informed Torrigiano of the insultingly low sum of money offered by the Duke of Arcos for the second version of the Virgin and Child, which led the sculptor to destroy the work and be jailed for heresy. Pereda also cites documentary proof that Torrigiano did indeed die in jail at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. The assertion however, that Torrigiano’s Spanish terracottas were fired in Pisano’s workshop in a kiln known as a horno arabe, needs further consideration.

Sadly, when it comes to Torrigiano’s work in England, some errors creep into the text. Henry VII’s funeral effigy, now in the Abbey’s Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries, was not the last recorded use of ‘the effigy, representation, or image’ as the author avers. And it misrepresents the situation to suggest that ‘foreign rather than English artists were sought for making the effigies used in royal funerals’ as this ‘would have certainly enhanced the ritual’s exceptionality’. In addition, at times it is difficult to grasp what the author means, for instance, his assertion, when discussing one of Torrigiano’s portrait busts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ‘That the man dressed as a merchant comes not from the royal collections but from Westminster Abbey…’

However, there is no doubting Professor Pereda’s enthusiasm and advocacy for Torrigiano, and he argues that the sculptor was the most important artist in the reinvention of sculpture as the art of ‘image making’. He also suggests that: ‘Whether true or false, historical or legendary … in this book we … attempt to consider the two entangled’. This is a curious, if accurate, claim, and the publication is probably best viewed as an interesting overview of Torrigiano’s life, that crafts existing scholarship into a compelling story, whilst providing a helpful bibliography. We recommend the reader enjoys the story but carefully picks through the scholarship to draw his/her own conclusions about what may – or may not – have befallen Torrigiano.

 

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