The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli,

ca. 1550

This engraving was commissioned by sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, Michelangelo’s archrival in Florence, as a form of self-advertisement in which the artist’s studio is conceived as an academic training ground. Bandinelli, standing at the extreme right, and adorned with the badge of the knighthood of Santiago, observes a group of fashionably dressed male students who are shown drawing, reading, and conversing. The skeletons, skulls, and plaster casts allude to the important role of anatomy and classical antiquity in the education of the artist in sixteenth-century Italy. The dissemination of prints from Northern Europe is reflected in the poses of the cat and the dog, appropriated from two engravings by Albrecht Dürer.