Sculptural Values: Carving, Modelling, Making

Among the artists who competed with Ghiberti for the commission of the second set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery in 1401, Francesco di Valdambrino (active c.1390-1435) followed a markedly different artistic trajectory, working almost exclusively in wood and specialising in Annunciation groups. Scholars have largely neglected both choices, yet a reassessment seems methodologically relevant.

Using Valdambrino’s Annunciation for the church of San Francesco in Pisa (early fifteenth century) as a case study, this paper explores how the artist’s choice of limewood shaped his approach to sculpture, from conception to completion. It argues that, while scholars of Valdambrino have focused almost exclusively on style and iconography, the sculptures themselves reveal a sophisticated understanding of the physical properties of wood, its behaviour, and its cultural associations, all of which contributed to shaping the form of the sculpted image, as well as its devotional function and use.

By integrating technical analysis with the study of materiality and devotional practice, this paper proposes a different approach to Valdambrino’s wooden sculpture. Rather than treating wood as a secondary support for sculptural form, it argues that attention to wood’s materiality offers a richer understanding of how sacred images were conceived, produced, and experienced. In doing so, it suggests that writing about medieval wooden sculpture can begin not only with what the image represents, but also with what it is made of and how that material itself shaped its meaning and role within devotional practice.

Beatrice Bimbi is an MA student in Art History at the University of Pisa. Her research focuses on late medieval and early Renaissance sculpture in Italy, with particular attention to wooden sculpture and the relationship between materiality, artistic practice, devotional experience, and sacred performance. She is currently completing a dissertation on Francesco di Valdambrino, exploring how the physical properties and cultural meanings of wood informed the conception, making, and liturgical use of sacred images. Her broader research interests include medieval sculpture, material culture, devotional images, and the relationship between sculpture, ritual, and space.

The many small bronze sculptures produced in Northern Italy around 1500 occupied an ambiguous position between domestic sculpture and household objects. Serving as functional inkwells and lamps, or as purely decorative statuettes, they were made not only to be viewed but also to be held, turned, moved, and handled in everyday life. Their small scale, weight, durability, and mobility encouraged an intimate mode of encounter fundamentally different from that of monumental sculpture. Taking these objects as a case study, this paper asks how art history might understand and describe such forms of engagement: does the hardened cast surface still carry a trace of the soft, modelled material? What kind of movements do the sculptures invite? How do size and use shape the experience of the sculpture?

It also explores the tension between past and present modes of encounter. While the bronzes were designed to pass through many hands, they are today encountered through museum display, where interaction between object and viewer becomes imaginative rather than physical: How is the reception influenced when they cannot be touched? Does the practice of handling translate into tactile imagination? This raises broader methodological questions about how we write about objects whose original meaning depended on both handling and vision. Engaging with this workshop’s interest in tactility, immediacy, scale, and sculptural description, this paper proposes Renaissance bronze statuettes as a means of reconstructing early modern acts of touch and reconsidering how art history might articulate these haptic dimensions of sculpture.

Anna Carrarini completed her BA and MA in Art History and Early Modern History in Munich and Durham. Subsequently, she worked as a research assistant to the director at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich, where she focused on early modern printmaking. In October 2026, she will begin her doctoral studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the V&A through the CDP Project ‘Paduan Renaissance Bronzes at the V&A: Exploring New Critical Approaches’. Her research will examine animal and hybrid imagery in the small-scale sculptures, exploring questions of materiality, display, and early modern encounters between the human, the natural, the artificial, and the antique.

This academic paper discusses a pair of ivory relief sculptures from the late seventeenth century attributed to the German carver Franz Stainhart. The sculptures borrow their compositions from two different paintings by Guido Reni and Annibale Carracci. Contrary to traditional accounts, this paper presents the sculptures’ reliance on preexisting prototypes not as a weakness but as an opportunity for reconsidering sculptural practice. Indeed, comparing the sculptures with their respective prototypes brings into focus the characteristics of visual and tactile encounters with relief sculptures in general, and with ivory objects in particular.

In the first part, the paper uses Stainhart’s objects and their prototypes as examples to outline how early modern intellectuals described the differences between relief sculpture and painting in the paragone debate. It particularly highlights the contrast in the production processes of Stainhart’s relief sculptures and of their painted prototypes, the former being carved into the material and the latter constructed in several layers of paint. Subsequently the paper turns to the specific material qualities of ivory and assesses how the compression of large-scale painted compositions into small sculptures, the absence of colour, and the facilitation of tactile engagement through raised relief affect the reception of Stainhart’s works. Finally, the paper includes a brief ecocritical reflection on the ivory objects. Nowadays, ivory is strongly associated with the poaching of elephants, which has put several elephant species under threat of extinction. How might this association affect the meaning of early modern ivory objects for the contemporary observer?

Francesco Alessandrini Lupia is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Universities of St Andrews and Bonn (coutelle). He studies the emulation of Bolognese seventeenth-century compositions across different media, including sculptures. Before starting his PhD in 2025, Francesco completed his undergraduate studies in Art History at the University of St Andrews in 2023 and the MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute in 2024. In parallel, he also gained professional experience at museums in Munich, Venice and Vienna.

In Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini, limestone is marine life compressed and reanimated: stone brought to life through the figure. Carving and modelling are conceptions that coexist in sculpture, yet carving carries the stronger claim to material responsiveness. Approaching this preference through clay and the working mould, this paper asks what changes when sculptural invention is located in the passage of form between materials.

Reading the della Robbia workshop’s moulded Madonnas and the wax votive effigies associated with Santissima Annunziata through Peirce’s index and Didi-Huberman’s resemblance by contact, Fero proposes the working mould as an index with a future: an impression that records one contact and a matrix that enables another. A received form becomes the means of further invention. Its repetitions give difference a structure. In plaster, repeated casting can wear the mould’s surface and pass traces of use into later casts. Fero reads this meeting of recurrence and change as the working mould’s material tempo.

Extending this argument through Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost, Clare Twomey’s Trophy, and my own Searching for Celadon consisting of over fifty porcelain casts from a single mould, the paper argues for a contact-conception alongside carving and modelling. This extends Stokes’s question of material vitality to the transmission and transformation of received form. Material responsiveness need not mean fidelity to a single substance; it can emerge through the passage between substances. The mould does not merely reproduce sculpture. It makes transmission a site of sculptural invention.

Olivia Fero is a ceramicist and researcher whose practice joins studio work in porcelain and local clay with criticism. She holds a First-Class BA from Goldsmiths and is completing an MA in International Ceramic Design at the University of Pécs. She writes for Ceramics Now, recently on the fictions of the vessel/sculpture divide. In 2026 she presented ‘The Index Cannot Be Archived’ at the AHRC Future Ecologies of Clay conference (CREAM, Westminster/V&A) and undertook a Jingdezhen residency on a Pannonia Mobility Scholarship, working with celadon glazes and slip-cast multiples. She is represented by Ancora Gallery, Pécs.

At Carrara, where marble is still hauled down the mountain, the direct carving that Adrian Stokes raised into a moral value is now performed with angle grinders and pneumatic chisels. Truth to material – the stone brought to life as stone – meets the fact of its own fabrication. If the premodern value of carving survives here, it survives not as a property of the material but as a gesture of the body.

Drawn from her own passage from carving stone at Carrara to casting, this paper discusses what Pan calls a gestural facture: the manner of making relocated from the material to the maker’s act. Re-grounded in the body, Stokes’s distinction re-describes itself as two gestures. Release is the carver’s subtractive, repetitive, penetrating labour, a possessing gaze that holds its object off as Otherness, even when that object is a human form. Impression is the caster’s receptive act of adapting and placing, where matter takes an imprint and keeps a memory, and is received instead through contact, warmth and touch.

The hinge is a counterfeit, Pan claims: he poured cement to impersonate stone itself, the very substance Stokes made carving reveal. A gesture of impression yields the look of carved stone, and a body seems to surface within it, so the value we had assigned to the material proves to have been in the act all along. This, Pan argues, is how premodern matter turns contemporary: carving and modelling persisting as gestures that can be electrified, transposed and forged.

Wenyi Pan is an Edinburgh-based artist. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from The Glasgow School of Art and is currently a practice-based PhD researcher at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Her practice explores the performativity, participation and spectatorship within sculptural and mixed-media installation, with particular attention to material, spatial and cultural contexts in relation to East Asian social and gender experience. Pan was a funded artist fellow at Glasgow Sculpture Studios and, in 2026, a session convenor at the Association for Art History Annual Conference, University of Cambridge.

This paper extends Dreifelds’ research on ‘weaver’s logic’ from contemporary installation critique into the language of premodern sculptural description. In dialogue with Adrian Stokes’s writings on quattrocento sculpture, she proposes weaver’s logic as a creative-critical method for describing the mechanics of premodern relief. Stokes brought together modernist values of direct carving, speculative psychoanalysis, and a sensitivity to stone as a continually reanimated material. Dreifelds pushes this further by positioning weaver’s logic not as an applied metaphor, but as a practitioner’s epistemology for attending to relation, pressure, and material behaviour.

The paper begins with Agostino di Duccio’s Venus relief in the Tempio Malatestiano (Rimini, c.1449-57). She reads its carved water, figure, and ornament through tensioning, defined here as the way sculptural matter negotiates the relationship between surface, interior pressure, and time. Dreifelds then turns to the Samudra Manthana (Churning of the Ocean of Milk) at Angkor Wat (Cambodia, early twelfth century), where devas and asuras pull the serpent Vasuki as a rope. Angkor Wat serves as a limit case rather than a false equivalence. She uses it to test what Stokes’s vocabulary, and her own weaver’s logic, can and cannot hold when confronted with differing cosmologies of carving.

Through these sites, the paper explores how weaving behaves like water: achieving movement through constraint by crossing, resisting, and redirecting force. Read through this lens, relief becomes carved water, or a hydrological surface where current, pressure, and tempo emerge as vital sculptural values.

Helen Liene Dreifelds is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher and educator working across sculpture and installation. She holds a BA from Concordia University, an MFA from the Yale School of Art, and is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently teaching Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, her research develops ‘weaver’s logic’ to describe how artworks hold relation through material behaviour, tension, and permeability. This framework is grounded in her studio practice and has been developed through the Whitney Humanities Center’s Textile Thinking Panel and the Textile Society of America’s Emerging Scholars Lab.