Siena’s Bronze Renaissance

Siena is famous for painting, but in the fifteenth century it was also one of Italy’s great centers of bronze sculpture—a city of molten metal, furnaces, bells, monuments, experiments, and extraordinary technical ambition. This lecture, an introduction to Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450-1500: https://www.frick.org/exhibitions/siena, offers a new view of the Sienese Renaissance. Here the protagonists are Florentine artists (like Donatello) and Sienese artists (like Vecchietta and Francesco di Giorgio), as well as the founders, engineers, architects, and craftsmen who turned wax, fire, and metal into some of the most original sculptures of the century. Their bronzes are daring and beautiful, sometimes strange, and often astonishingly modern in their handling of surface and form. Together, they reveal a Siena far more inventive, connected, and ambitious than the familiar story of the Florentine-centric Renaissance has allowed us to see.

Giulio Dalvit is Associate Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. In 2020-21, he worked as Guest Curator on the Frick Madison Project, working on the temporary installation of the Frick in the Breuer Building and on temporary exhibitions such as Propagazioni. Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres (2022) and The Eveillard Gift (2022-23). Over the following years, he has worked on the reinstallation of the Collection at 1 East 70th Street, inaugurated in 2025. He is currently working on the exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze (2026) and another on Filarete (2027). Before joining the Frick, he has held various fellowship, lecture and research positions at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the University of Amsterdam, UCL and the Courtauld Institute in London, where he also pursued his Ph.D on the Sienese artist Vecchietta (1410-80). His research has appeared in many catalogues, books and academic journals. His latest books are Vecchietta (2025), which has appeared both in Italian and English, and Titian’s Man in a Red Hat, co-authored with American painter Elizabeth Peyton. Together with Xavier F. Salomon and Aimee Ng, he has featured in various Frick video series, including the Webby Award-honored “Cocktails with a Curator”, now a book for Rizzoli.

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Louis Vuitton Principal Cultural Sponsor

Leadership support is provided by an anonymous donor in honor of Ian Wardropper and by Margot and Jeremiah M. Bogert, Elizabeth M. and Jean-Marie R. Eveillard, and The Christian Humann Foundation.

Major support is provided by Clémence and William von Mueffling, Fondazione Bracco, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation, The Eric & Jane Nord Family Fund for Exhibition Programming, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Filippo Benappi; Andrew Butterfield and Claire Schiffman; The Helen Clay Frick Foundation; Mr. and Mrs. Hubert L. Goldschmidt; Jon and Barbara Landau; Wendy Lewison; Carlo Orsi, Trinity Fine Art; Jane Richards; Sabina and Harlan Stone; the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation; Bosilika An in honor of the Abbruzzese Family; Eric Blair-Joannou; Loren Davis; Bailey Foote; and Alexander Mason Hankin.