Caroline Elam: Esecuzione e ricezione del Codice Coner: Bernardo della Volpaia, Baccio d'Agnolo e Michelangelo

The so-called Codex Coner at Sir John Soane's Museum in London is one of the most beautiful model books of studies of ancient architecture produced in the Renaissance period, and has an extra fascination because copies were made from it by Michelangelo when he was beginning to work on the façade of San Lorenzo. The draughtsman of the codex was convincingly identified by Tilmann Buddensieg as the Florentine woodworker architect Bernardo della Volpaia who worked with Bramante and members of the Sangallo family in Rome. Close examination of the codex suggests that a second draughtsman added drawings to the book before it was consulted by Michelangelo. This lecture will propose that this second hand is that of Michelangelo's early collaborator on the façade project, Baccio d'Agnolo, and will discuss the different ways in which such model books were used by architects in this period.

Caroline Elam received her undergraduate degree in classics at Oxford University and an M.A. in art history at the Courtauld Institute, London University. She was a lecturer in Art History at the University of Glasgow (1970-72) and at Westfield College, London University (1978-87), with four years between as Junior Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, where she now holds an Honorary Fellowship, and a year as a Samuel H. Kress fellow at Villa I Tatti (1981-82). From 1987 to 1992 she was the Editor of 'The Burlington Magazine'. In 2002-04 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of art in Washington, and this year, in 2008, she has been the Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She is the Executive Editor of I Tatti Studies, and in 2003 was awarded the Agnes and Elizabeth Mongan Prize for Art History by Villa I Tatti.

Caroline Elam's publications have treated various aspects of fifteenth-century Medici patronage, the architecture of Michelangelo and the urbanistic history of Renaissance Florence. In recent years she has been preparing a book on 'Roger Fry and Italian Art', and she has edited translations into Italian of Fry's essays on Giovanni Bellini and Mantegna, published by Abscondita. She is contributing to the catalogue of the exhibition on Mantegna to be held at the Louvre this autumn. Her talk today comes out of the preparatory reseach for the catalogue she edited in 2006, 'Michelangelo e il disegno di architettura', for an exhibition held at the Centro Palladiano in Vicenza and at the Casa Buonarroti.