Hands From a Relief of the Pietà in the Tabernacle by Desiderio da Settignano

A self-described “scholar-photographer,” Clarence Kennedy learned photography in the 1920s in order to document the classical sculptures he was studying as a professor of art history. His stated goal was not to interpret the work anew but rather to bring out the character of the sculptor’s forms. In order to make this detail of the hand of Saint John, he employed a large-format camera in the natural light of a Florentine church—all supported on scaffolding that he built himself. Hugh Edwards acquired six photographs by Kennedy and seems to have included them in the exhibition Photography before 1914, to show the influence of early photography on work made in subsequent years.