C. L. Joost-Gaugier. Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 284 pp. + 12 col. and 31 b/w pls. index, illus, bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-521-80923-1.

The important role played by humanists in the invention of pictorial narratives during the Renaissance deserves far more research. Because the rich archival record of the Mantuan court under Isabella d'Este and her son Federigo Gonzaga documents interactions between patrons, artists, and humanists, the participation of literary men including Mario Equicola in the creation of painted stories has been, almost inevitably, noticed by art historians. And though less documentary evidence survives from the intellectual circle surrounding Lorenzo the Magnificent, art historians have long associated the poetic imagery of Botticelli's mythologies with the classical and Neoplatonic interests of this fertile environment. Nevertheless, the work of scholarly advisors in the design and scripting of complex painted statements of humanistic learning and philosophy invites further exploration. Thus, even though Raphael's Vatican Stanza della Segnatura is probably the most famous painted room in the West, art historians have not delved deeply enough into the humanist mindset that shaped the highly intellectual program. Christiane Joost-Gaugier is one of the first to focus in great depth on the complex and intertwined subject matter of the four walls, the ceiling, and the mosaic pavement of the room that held the pope's library, and to provide a detailed explanation of the relationship between the room's iconography and contemporary humanist thought in Rome. Joost-Gaugier presents a profound and impressively articulate analysis of the entire learned program in the stanza.

She begins her book with an assertion that may seem obvious: namely, that neither the young Raphael who began painting the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura in 1508, nor his patron Pope Julius II who was busy at war and never deeply inclined towards scholarship, possessed the knowledge and the intellectual ability required to devise the iconography of this room. Yet, though several earlier art historians had recognized that a humanist advisor must have been involved and the names of three learned men active in Rome had been ventured by way of suggestions (Giovanni Battista Casali, Egidio da Viterbo, and Tommaso Inghirami), nevertheless the function of a humanist had never been scrutinized in detail. Joost-Gaugier, therefore, probes the linkages between humanistic practice in Rome ca. 1500 and the stanza's pictorial program. Furthermore, she identifies Tommaso Inghirami, the papal librarian during Raphael's period of activity in the stanza, as the humanist involved and she shows how Inghirami's interests are manifest in the painted scenes. Inghirami's classical education under Pomponio Leto encompassed Vitruvius and also the performance of Greek dramas. The grand classical settings for Raphael's pictures reflect this academic interest in Vitruvian architecture. Raphael depicts the heroes of classical learning in rhetorical postures within the all'antica scenography in a dramatic, painted language that Inghirami may well have orchestrated in part.

Joost-Gaugier, who is known for her previous articles on the uomini famosi series of the Quattrocento, conceives of the stanza iconography as a rich elaboration upon the earlier cycles of famous men included in humanist studioli and libraries, particularly the Montefeltro studiolo at Urbino. In Raphael's four major wall frescoes, however, the famous men of the past leave their rigid portrait stances and adopt dramatic positions in quasi-theatrical presentations concerning the nature of the disciplines of the humanistic education program. Although the tituli of the earlier cycles have been abandoned, Raphael's actors are intended, as Joost-Gaugier argues, to be recognizable by the parts they play as personifications of the knowledge imparted through their treatises. These representatives of classical empiricism (Aristotle), mathematics (Euclid), and so on, gesture to each other in ways that reflect the connections between their philosophical and intellectual achievements. Each figure thus has only one specific identity. For example, Joost-Gangier has convincingly identified the figures surrounding Euclid in Raphael's School of Athens as the mathematician-astronomer Ptolemy and the famous geographer Strabo. Ptolemy and Strabo would be understood to be closely allied to Euclid because the sciences of astronomy and geography were dependent on geometry, personified by Euclid. Joost-Gaugier posits that the spectator, in turn, was intended to ponder the association between one influential thinker and another. In the process, the solemn, still dramas would effectively be brought to life through a meditative exercise analogous to the patterns of reading within the humanist curriculum that the papal library embodied.

CATHLEEN HOENIGER

Queen's University

Kingston, Canada