Epilogue

In considering Giambologna from a new perspective, I have focused on his part in creating historical narrative, concentrating on the program of the Grimaldi Chapel, especially the Passion cycle, and presenting a fresh view of his work in the context of the post-Tridentine church. This context included a renewed devotion to the cult of relics, to the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist, and to the doctrine of justification. To involve the devout more deeply in the act of worship, church spokesmen required that images, in addition to conforming to church doctrine, be easily identifiable and narratives readily understandable. I have proposed the part that Luca Grimaldi, motivated by his religious and sociopolitical aspirations, played in conceiving this program and have explicated Giambologna's strategy in carrying it out.

Other issues I have only touched on or suggested: Did Genoa have a strong devotion to the Passion? Were sermons delivered and confraternity activities held there that would yield such information, particularly about practices at San Francesco di Castelletto?

In some sense, the Grimaldi Chapel was a Florentine chapel transplanted into a Genoese setting, thus combining elements from both contexts. The dynamics of this interaction might come to light in a juxtaposition of the Grimaldi with Giambologna's Salviati Chapel.^[1] Following the Grimaldi Chapel, there was a spate of family chapels in Genoa that would bear study for what they might reveal about this post-Tridentine type and about the interaction of artists from different parts

of Italy working in Genoa. Some came from cultural centers like Florence and Milan, others from lesser-known areas like Lucca and Pisa. This brings to mind the dual concept of the "center" and "periphery" discussed by Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg in an article of 1979.^[2] They challenge the traditional idea of scholars like Kenneth Clark that creativity originated in cultural centers and radiated out to the provinces, an idea that presumes a unified style that was then taken up and modified by local artists. Castelnuovo and Ginzburg see the situation as far more complex. For example, to understand Genoese art in the sixteenth century, one must look at it in the context of political, economic, religious, historical, and cultural circumstances. Genoa was neither a provincial outpost nor a center like Florence or Rome. Artists were attracted to Genoa in numbers, however, presumably by commissions. There were always Lombard artists working there—the della Porta, for example—and in the sixteenth century, as mentioned earlier, some artists from central Italy: Perino del Vaga, Giulio Romano, Giovanni Montorsoli, Galeazzo Alessi, and Giambologna himself. How the Genoese government and Luca Grimaldi persuaded Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici to lend them Giambologna remains a frustrating puzzle, whose solution, however, must lie in the political and economic ties between Genoa and Florence. Imagine how impressed the Genoese must have been when the reigning sculptor in Europe was allowed to come to their city to work for a member of their nobility. Even Andrea Doria had not lured as famous an artist to work for him.

As for what happened to bronze relief after Giambologna, we can mention several later artists. Giambologna's scenographic brand of bronze pictorial relief was carried to foreign lands by Adriaen de Vries (c. 1560–1626), who studied with Giambologna and was his assistant from about 1574 to 1588.^[3] De Vries's large Martyrdom of Saint Vincent (1614) in the cathedral of Warsaw is an elaborated version of the relief style Giambologna created for the Grimaldi Chapel. De Vries's energized spiral figures, the extensive background in which they interact, and the possibility for multiple views all show his debt to Giambologna. Closer to home, Ferdinando Tacca (1619–1656), son of Pietro, the heir to Giambologna's studio, produced an impressive antependium, Saint Stephen Suffering His Martyrdom, in 1656 for the high altar of Santo Stefano, Florence, developing Giambologna's type of relief into an extensive river landscape teeming with figures from the immediate foreground to the distant background. Giambologna's legacy surfaces again

in the work of the gifted Tuscan Massimiliano Soldani Benzi (1656–1740), who was sent to Rome in 1678 by Cosimo III to study at the Grand Ducal Academy, where he remained for four years.^[4] The modest-size reliefs he did for the chapel in the Sansedoni Palace in Siena (c. 1692–1700) recall strongly Giambologna's way of relating figures and background. But Soldani's reliefs are clearly late baroque in their overt emotional display: swirling draperies, straining figures, flamboyant gestures, and a dramatic play of light and dark.

Several distinguishing elements of the Grimaldi reliefs are worth noting again since they seem to link Giambologna to seventeenth-century interests. First, his pictorial technique blurred distinctions between sculpture and painting. Furthermore, his clear exposition of the story produced a continuously unfolding narrative, in relation to which the spectator assumed a more active role. Multiple views and a multipoint perspective gave the spectator the opportunity to read the story from several vantages, each with a different shade of meaning. Mutability of meaning signifies the passage of time and the awareness of its transitory character, a major concern of the seventeenth century. Bernini's capture of the momentary and his incorporation of narrative into freestanding sculpture are legendary. His David, for example, not only embodies an instant but also implies the moment before and the moment after the release of the slingshot—an unfolding narrative in which the spectator plays a necessary part. If time has become an ingredient in the Grimaldi reliefs, its concomitant—space—has also been conceived as continuous, as indeed it is in Bernini's works. In each of the Grimaldi panels the implication of infinite spatial extension is clear, as Pilate Washing His Hands (Plate 11, Figs. 56a–c) demonstrates.

The change in Giambologna's art in the 1580s needs to be charted in his other works, among them the Salviati Chapel, the Soccorso Chapel, the Acts of Francesco I, the Jerusalem panels, the Equestrian Monument of Cosimo I, the Saint Luke, and Hercules and the Centaur . It is hoped that this study is a first step in reassessing the meaning of Giambologna's sculpture.