David Rosand. Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxviii + 420 pp. index, illus. bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-521-77330-X.

Scholarship on early modern drawings has traditionally sought to clarify matters of authorship, chronology, and function. But, David Rosand asks, "what then? Is there a discourse beyond the catalogue raisonne?" (3). Drawing Acts includes an eloquent defense of connoisseurship but seeks "to extend the study of drawings beyond the limits of its conventional agenda" (3) by looking at the very act of drawing, the "fundamental pictorial act" (1). It is an art-historical commonplace that we witness the "genius" of the master most directly in the sketch. Rosand acknowledges how uncomfortable such statements are to the postmodern critic but suggests that the idea deserves further scrutiny, for drawing retains openness and evidence of its construction, which is often absent in painting. The experiments and gestures of an artist remain visible in drawings and engage our visual attention. So too, Rosand posits, these acts should command our critical attention.

Setting the stage for this discussion, Rosand introduces the lines of Apelles and Parrhasios, two drawings particularly celebrated in antiquity. Apelles' line was nonrepresentational but was of such extreme delicacy that his rival Protogenes recognized it as the self-referential index of the master artist. Parrhasios' line, in contrast, was notable for its representational ability: it was the perfect contour, disrupting the surface, trailing into space, and suggesting even what it concealed. These lines are presented as the embodiment of the two "basic polarities of picturemaking: the mark on the surface and the illusion behind, the gesture and the contour, graphic reality and representational fiction" (8). Drawing Acts often returns to these two poles, reminding us that great drawings cultivate ambivalence between the twodimensional mark and three-dimensional representation, and that we should recognize and appreciate that quality. Rosand's theme "is the phenomenology of drawing, the complex interrelation of marking and meaning, making and viewing. Just what does drawing signify? How does it mean? How is it experienced?" (2).

Working from this framework, the following chapters concentrate on artists and ideas that make the book far more particularly relevant to scholars of the Renaissance than its title or dust-jacket (showing a Rembrandt self-portrait) would lead one to believe. For example, a chapter entitled "Disegno: the Invention of an Art" puts the act of drawing alongside broader Renaissance theories of design and invention, and shows how important drawing was to the early Renaissance world of Alberti, Cennini, Pisanello, Bellini, and others. Subsequent sections concentrate on Leonardo, Raphael, Durer, Titian, and Michelangelo. Printmaking, so closely related to drawing practice in the sixteenth century, rightly receives much attention. The Renaissance is at the heart of this study, but later chapters also examine the evolution of drawing practice in Rembrandt, in the eighteenth-century capriccio (Hogarth, Piranesi, the Tiepolo, and Goya), and, as an epilogue, in Picasso. This is a lot of ground to cover, but the book is so tightly organized that the parts cohere; the argument gets stronger as one reads further into the text, especially as Rosand discusses Titian and Michelangelo, two artists whose graphic corpora have long interested him.

For all of Rosand's originality of approach, the book also has the distinction of serving as a summary of drawing scholarship up to the present. The footnotes are a mine of information, and in them Rosand replays (and continues) some of the hotter connoisseurial questions of recent decades: his and Peter Dreyer's debate over Titian's drawings, for example, or the challenges to Michelangelo's oeuvre made by Alexander Perrig and others. There are fewer such notes in the later chapters, but the reader is rewarded instead with eloquent and evocative formal analysis.

If Drawing Acts has one shortcoming, it is that it focuses almost exclusively on those masters mentioned above, all of whom stand out from their contemporaries. Discussing Titian, for example, Rosand makes the point that the RedSea is "a studied response to the sophisticated printmaking of Durer" (164), and that in this selfconscious mode Titian developed "an essentially Venetian graphic dialect" (168). This potent idea might have been developed further by looking at the drawings and prints of Domenico Campagnola and others who responded to Titian's example. Yet, in raising questions like this, in considering qualities of line and meanings of marks, and in asking what "motivates" a line or graphic style, we have become the careful observers that Rosand hopes to inspire. In short, both as guide to the theory and history of Renaissance and Baroque design and as a stimulus to new kinds of critical analysis, Drawing Acts deserves the same close attention that Rosand would have us pay to his subject matter and is the rare book that will interest scholars, critics, and artists alike.

JOHN MARCIARI

Yale University Art Gallery