Display and Displacement Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern (1550-2000) Edited by Dr Alexandra Gerstein The relationship between sculpture and pedestal is at the intersection of a number of art-historical disciplines, ranging from the history of design, architecture and urbanism to museum studies, yet because of its supporting role it has remained a largely neglected and unstudied field. This book will show how rich a seam it is for investigation. Essays range from 16th-century Venice to 21st-century London, and provide a fascinating variety of approaches to the issue. Each essay is a focused exploration into the making, placing or abandonment of the pedestal, plinth or socle within a particular context. Among the topics under study are the display and reception of sculpture (with or without bases), and the displacement or mediation of sculptural meaning through inscriptions, ornament and other devices. While approaches differ, the essays all consider particular moments in the history of the relationship between sculpture and pedestal. Topics include: Alessandro Vittoria's socles (Victoria Avery); plinths in mid-18th-century sculpture (Malcolm Baker); pedestals in Early Modern France (Etienne Jollet); the vicissitudes of public sculpture (Sue Malvern); pedestal verse and inscriptions (Alison Yarrington); pictorialism and the pedestal of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square (Philip Ward-Jackson); Alberto Giacometti and Jacob Epstein's Fallen Women: the gender of horizontality and the abandonment of the pedestal in 1932 (David Getsy); contemporary explorations of the gallery plinth (Jon Wood). This collection of essays is based on papers from two symposia entitled ?Sculpture and the Pedestal', which took place at the University of Reading in January 2002 and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in June 2003, but also includes specially commissioned papers by authorities in the field. 60 illustrations
