Animal-Shaped Masks in Sixteenth-Century Italian Sculpture, Architecture and Armour

An Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

In sixteenth-century Florence a variety of sculptural or architectural ornament was developed in the shape of animal masks, often featuring several animals or parts of different animals in one object, and the presence of eyes half hidden behind the surface mask. Michelangelo’s New Sacristy is a main locus for the development of these ornaments, but they soon spread over the city. Although sixteenth-century viewers called them “grotesques”, they differ from the two-dimensional variety inspired by the Domus Aurea because they consistently use strange, hybrid animal features that are not part of the repertoire of mythological hybrid beasts such as griffins, commonly used in grotesques inspired by the Roman tradition. They also stand out because they share these animal features with parade and tournament armour of the same period. Their formal characteristics, as well as their similarity to the ornament of contemporary parade armour, little studied until now, raises many questions about their origins, meaning, circumstances of creation and use, and possible impact. These ornaments also share many formal and compositional features with the masks made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. They share a duplication or triplication of animal shapes, the presence of eyes behind the mask, incrustation and other graphical patterns, and a particular patterning, or spreading, of animal features across the object they cover. The central question this article seeks to address is therefore: is it possible to develop an approach to these masks, both Italian and North American, that can suggest a common ground, in form, function, impact, or sets of beliefs that drove their creation and use? The analysis of Northwestern Coast mask design by Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Philippe Descola will serve, first, as an instrument to better understand the composition of sixteenth-century animal-shaped masks, because they make the viewer aware of aspects of their design that remain under the radar in traditional stylistic or iconographical interpretation. Second, the similarities between these two groups of artefacts will point to shared sets of beliefs in nature as a source of endless transformation, and in the fundamental kinship of humans and animals.