Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet. (Reviews).

Deborah Parker. Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x + 233 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-521-78166-3.

Hopes run high when a brave new book tackles old enigmas. This is more true of scholarship that bridges disciplines and brings into play primary material long forgotten or difficult of access. Deborah Parker's intelligently organized study does all of these things, as it "seeks to clarify what Bronzino's poems mean, to argue that his poems are a considerable literary achievement in themselves, and to demonstrate how the poems might be useful in a discussion of Bronzino's paintings" (11). Whether readers agree with her conclusions or not, in our academic era of ever shrinking field boundaries, the author's venturesome spirit deserves a salute.

Parker's lively guided tour of Bronzino's poetry educates us for revisiting the Holy Grail of his art, the Allegory of Venus, the final stop on her itinerary. Chapters one and two ("A Poetry of Transgression: Bronzino's Rime in Burla," "The Comfort of Friends in Bronzino's Canzoniere") prepare for chapter three ("The World of Art in Bronzino's Poetry") which describes verse about his profession as painter, both in the elevated sonnet form and in obscene capitoli. Chapter four ("The Poetics of Bronzino's Painting") compares a mock allegorical poem, "The Painter's Defense," with the Allegory of Venus that has so bedeviled art historians. Since Bronzino wrote both courtly and burlesque poetry, Parker reasons, the same dualism must hold for his paintings. There is no one single meaning in his Venus. It presents the "ruins of an allegory" (151) and signals Bronzino's commitment to ambiguity, his "resolute deferral of definitive statement."

Like "Ithaca" for Costantino Cavafy's Ulysses, less the end point here than the journey counts. Along the way, the author introduces us to Bronzino literatus, whose jocose vein drives her most engaging analysis. When it comes to conclusions, however, she disappoints by her own deferral of definitive statement within the larger critical frame her texts warrant. Bronzino, she writes in her final pages, was "not animated by some majestic, overarching vision" (165); rather he was "a consummate technician" in whom "submission to circumstances replaces pursuit of an ideal" (169).

To see the brilliant, polymorphic Bronzino as "decidedly divergent" -- even devoid of a sustaining core philosophy -- is a distortion. On the contrary, this master at the Medici court situated himself dead in the mainstream. Dante's earthy tenzone with Forese Donati stood side-by-side with his sonnets for the blessed Beatrice, and his Inferno mucked with "merda" counterpoised a Paradiso where the angels speak. Lorenzo the Magnificent composed carnival songs as fine as his sonnets; Cellini (whom Parker contrasts to Bronzino for his consistency as "a swaggering libertine in both the Vita and his poetry") was actually as capable of polished Petrarchismo as he was of smut, ambidextrous play that attracted a good many others -- della Casa, il Lasca, Caro, Varchi. Versatility itself is the conceptual ideal. Another missing piece of the cultural grid leads to skewed perspective on Bronzino's canzoniere, which anthologizes sonnet exchanges with his friends. Not the innovative project Parker envisions, it is fashionab ly imitative. Dialogic poetry, inherited from the troubadours and practiced in Italy from the time of Jacopo da Lentini, returned to favor after the second and third editions of Pietro Bembo's Rime (1538, 1548) and prompted his emulators to publish their own multivoiced collections -- Domenichi, Terracina, Varchi, Battiferra, to name a few. Parker takes her Bembo, as other texts including Bronzino's sonnets, not from sixteenth-century sources, but second-hand, from later editors, when a return to the originals (with a statement of her own editorial criteria) would have given more reliable raw material on better and more consistent philological authority. Unfortunately for her visual focus, she reproduces the Allegory of Venus, fig. 18, in an outdated Alinari photo taken before prudish overpaintings were removed -- a loin cloth like a stiff old dust rag propped across Venus' pudenda and an alien laurel that sprouts over Cupid's ready anus - whereas the attractive jacket of the book carries a full-color detail of the restored panel.

Like any ambitious effort, this book will delight some and leave others with reservations. Parker has taken a step that ought to invite more interest in a major literary corpus, beginning with a reliable edition of Bronzino's Rime. Perhaps, too, those who pick up where Parker left off will venture to ponder questions that she does not. If we knew Bronzino's poetry as well as his painting, would we still think him better at the latter? Are his verses the obscure pastiches of a "technician" or the play of a genius in art forms a clef? Do his Petrarchan pieces seem to dim a bit before their bawdy companions from his studio because lyricism wasn't his vein or because they still lie covered with thickly spun cobwebs?