In a new post on Verso, ‘Applied Arts or Ancient Sculpture? A Renaissance Gem in the Census Database’, Karl-Magnus Brose explores how miniature, carved stones were understood as sculptures in their own right before the marble statue became the benchmark of ancient art in the eighteenth century. Focusing on the so-called ‘Seal of Michelangelo’, a gem that sparked intense scholarly debate in Enlightenment Paris, Brose considers a controversy over how this object should be reproduced and classified: as a sculpture or a painting.
Tracing the gem’s reception from the Medici court to the French royal collections, the post examines how artists and antiquarians projected competing values onto a small object of great significance. As Brose shows, debates over the Seal of Michelangelo became a testing ground for early modern ideas about authenticity, style, illusion, and the paragone between sculpture and painting.
The full post is available in English here and in German here.
Karl Brose is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Virginia and the 2024–25 Census x Warburg x Hertziana Fellow in the Reception of Antiquity. His research focuses on sculptural aesthetics and the transnational reception of antiquity in eighteenth-century Europe. His dissertation explores the sculptural practice of Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) within the broader context of international exchanges of sculptural antiquities.
