Artisti, "artistucoli" e "buoni lavoranti": Francesco Carradori e la razionalizzazione dei processi operativi nell’«Istruzione elementare per gli studiosi della scultura» (1802)

Francesco Carradori's treatise «Istruzione elementare per gli studiosi della scultura» (1802) codifies the organization and working process within a sculpture workshop in such an exemplary manner that it is an indispensable source for understanding the marble industry in the 19th century. The author analyses Carradori's text both through its Renaissance and Baroque sources (Vasari, Cellini, Boselli) and through encyclopaedic repertories (Baldinucci, Félibien, de Jaucourt, Falconet, Levesque) and then proposes a comparison with the similar attempt by the Prussian sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, whose essay «Die Werkstätte des Bildhauers» (1802) similarly narrates the work processes, but unlike his Tuscan colleague, Schadow could not rely on a linguistic tradition that was still to be defined.