Studiolo n°16

Issue 16 looks at the conceptual issues surrounding the artist’s hand from both a historical and historiographical perspective, without neglecting questions of style and attribution.

The Left Hand, formerly known as Michelangelo’s Hand, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, questions the art historian in a number of ways. The strange terracotta fragment depicting a hand truncated at the wrist stands on its own fingers clutching a drapery or an indeterminate object. While it is largely a product of the keen interest that spread during the Renaissance in the study of dissociated anatomical elements, it also embodies the fascination that led certain artists to ape the style of their masters, as Bartolomeo Passerotti did in a drawing long considered a study of the hand of Michelangelo, the master of the divinissime mani.

Testifying to a reverence reminiscent of the cult of relics, this fragment of a hand, which may in turn have served as a model in the same way as the ancient remains or plaster casts that populate studio backgrounds, is enriched by another value. It embodies in itself the question of the hand that creates, that gives life and body to the material, that, on its own, is capable of carrying the very idea of style (la maniera); so many questions addressed by the authors who have contributed to this thematic issue.

Initially scheduled for 2020, issue 16 of Studiolo is the fruit of a handover involving both the management of the magazine and the art history department, and the management of the Académie de France in Rome. With an enlarged editorial board, the magazine aims to reaffirm its focus on innovative perspectives in art history, as well as on the dialogues between periods and disciplines that are constantly taking place at the Villa Medici.