By Francesco Rossi. 3 vols., I: 504 pp. incl. 822 b. & w. ills.; II: 240 pp. incl. 369 b. & w. ills.; III: CD-Rom, 387 pp. incl. 741 col. ills. (Lubrina Editore, Bergamo, 2011), €800. ISBN 978–88–7766–421–1.

The subject of this catalogue is the finest privately owned collection of the small cast metal reliefs known as plaquettes, assembled over the last three decades by the Milanese industrialist Mario Scaglia. The Scaglia collection, selections from which were recently exhibited in Milan,[1] is remarkably wide ranging, but plaquettes have long formed the collector’s principal area of interest. Although sumptuously produced and fiendishly expensive, it would be quite wrong to dismiss this important work simply as a private owner’s catalogue de luxe. Scaglia has long wanted to commission a catalogue of his remarkable collection, not only as a permanent record of his achievement, but also to provide future scholars and collectors with the sort of reference work which would have helped him when he set out to build his own collection. As President of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo over many years, he was fortunate to have had as his Director Francesco Rossi, one of the world’s foremost authorities on plaquettes and the author of the present catalogue. In many respects, as Rossi acknowledges in his introduction, the catalogue is really the work of both men, who have from their different perspectives thought about and debated the subject with one another over many years. 

Aiming to set new standards for the publication of collections of plaquettes, the catalogue very largely succeeds in this. It is exceptionally comprehensive and is illustrated to an extraordinarily high standard, with excellent black-and-white photographs of every object presented, virtually all at actual size, together with high-resolution colour images on the accompanying CD-Rom. The catalogue is divided into fourteen sections, providing a history of the Italian plaquette, from the first casts made after antique gems in Florence and Rome in the fifteenth century, through to its decline after the Counter- Reformation into a vehicle for religious narrative imagery. With the exception of small groups of German and Netherlandish plaquettes, the focus of the Scaglia collection is emphatically on Italy, and in particular the rather short heroic age of the plaquette, from around 1450 to 1530. Here the collection is extremely strong, with all the major makers well represented and the two most important Italian Renaissance plaquette artists, Moderno (the Veronese goldsmith Galeazzo Mon - della) and the great Paduan sculptor Riccio, given their own sections. Each section has a short introduction followed by catalogue entries on individual plaquettes. The structure of the entries, although quite com plex, is consistently applied and, with use, becomes relatively easy to follow. In addition to the normal critical apparatus, there are sections on iconography, iconographic sources, derivations (uses of the plaquette design in other media), lists of recorded examples and critical history. In many respects these entries are exemplary, establishing new standards, of which every future catalogue of plaquettes will need to take account. One key innovation is the publication not only of the external measurements of each plaquette, but also of a designated internal measurement, taken between two points within the design. External measurements are often of limited value for plaquettes because of the widely differing types of integral frames found on different examples of the same model. Internal measurements in particular should allow original casts to be distinguished from aftercasts made from another plaquette, always slightly smaller because of shrinkage in the metal-casting process. The catalogue also goes further than any earlier publication in the thoroughness of its listing of versions of plaquettes, first identifying the known variants of a particular design and then enumerating recorded examples, divided into specimens in museum collections, private collections and those with dealers or in auction sales. Although initially seeming quite confusing, with the same example sometimes appearing two or three times within these categories, the system does actually work very well. Each entry is accompanied by numerous comparative illustrations of other examples or variants, but these are unfortunately reproduced on such a small scale as to be in most cases of little practical use. Rossi is otherwise particularly interested in iconography and the identification of iconographic sources, as well as in attribution. Long-running attributional disputes, such as the possible identification with Riccio of the artist signing plaquettes as ‘Ulocrino’, are tackled with brio, Rossi here suggesting that they are indeed by Riccio, but most probably early works produced with assistance from his workshop (Fig.52). Elsewhere his association of some major sculptors, such as the Lombardi (cat. nos.III.7, 8 and 11) and Alessandro Vittoria (no.IX.23) in Venice or Domenico di Paris in Ferrara (no.VI.3), with the production of designs for plaquettes represents a courageous attempt to begin the process of resolving the authorship of some of the many plaquettes which have long languished in an attributional wilderness. 

The catalogue is in so many respects authoritative and reliable, certainly with respect to the standard plaquettes literature. It is a pity therefore that more recent literature is less well covered, with some surprising omissions, for example, the 2005 catalogue of the sculpture collections in the Pinacoteca Civica in Vicenza, which includes a representative plaquettes collection. That catalogue has a good discussion by Lucia Simonato of Agostino Cornacchini’s plaquette reproducing the sculptor’s monument to Charlemagne in St Peter’s, Rome (no.XIII.28), in which she cites correspondence between Cornacchini’s patron and a friend in 1721, clearly identifying the plaquette as having been recently made by the sculptor, to satisfy people’s curiosity about the form his large monument was taking.[2] Unaware of this source, Rossi wrongly retains a more traditional dating to around 1725. Rossi also does not deal with the vexed question of nineteenth-century casts of plaquettes, something which could have been addressed with certain designs. These include the Martyrdom of St Paul (no.VIII.6), which probably originated as a plaquette design in Rome in the early sixteenth century, but which exists today in a suspiciously large number of versions in silver and bronze, some (or perhaps many) of which were made in Vienna in the nineteenth century, to the order of the dealer Hermann Samuel Ratzersdorfer.[3] These are relatively small observations in the context of this magni ficent work of scholarship, which represents a huge advance in the systematic assembling of information on plaquettes and which will henceforth become a fundamental work for anyone studying these remarkable small sculptures. 

[1] A. Di Lorenzo and F. Frangi: exh. cat. La raccolta Mario Scaglia. Dipinti e sculture, medaglie e placchette da Pisanello a Ceruti, Milan (Museo Poldi Pezzoli) 2007. 

[2] M.E. Avagnina, M. Binotto and G.C.F. Villa, eds.: Pinacoteca Civica di Vicenza. Sculture e arti applicate dal XIV al XVII secolo, Vicenza 2005, pp.254–45, no.301 (entry by L. Simonato). 

[3] See auction catalogues from Morton and Eden, London, 20th May 2010, lot 355; and 9th June 2011, lot 191, for examples marked ‘HR’ for Ratzersdorfer.