Ivana Vranic is a PhD student in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and her dissertation, titled “Between Physis and Technē: Molding, Firing and Painting Terracotta Passion Groups in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” focuses on revealing the innovative, experimental, precarious and invigorative processes taken to produce life-size Passion groups and the material conditions imposed by the transformation of clay into terracotta. Taking up smaller case studies of works produced by Niccolò dell’Arca (c.1435-94), Guido Mazzoni (c.1450-1518), Agostino de Fondulis (1483-1522), Vicenzo Onofri (1493-1524), Alfonso Lombardi (c.1497-1537), and Antonio Begarelli (1499-1565), the dissertation research traces the ways in which these six artists, working for different patrons, in different urban centers and regions and over a period of hundred years, participated in a dialogue with the tradition of making large-scale terracotta sculpture. While being attentive to specific historical, regional, institutional and artistic contexts, her project considers how the material, technical and indexical traces of production of the different groups reveal a century of recreation, adaptation, migration, and conversion of religious subjects, material technologies, artistic and theological theories, and compositional and figural forms.
