Florentine Drawings at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

These 22 papers, delivered at Johns Hopkins University's Villa Spelman in Florence in 1992, celebrate the 500th anniversary of Lorenzo il Magnifico's death. Collectively they represent the state of the art, as it were, for the modern study of Renaissance drawings. The contributors, mostly American, but also from Europe and especially Italy, are of varying ages, experience and orientation so that the publication offers a pretty solid indication of current directions with regard to the study of Italian Renaissance drawings. Elizabeth Cropper's introduction is a remarkable overview of the individual offerings, with a succinct digest of the contents. On the formal side, the book is handsomely produced and printed. Although small the illustrations are readable reminders for the points raised in the errorless text, which has been prepared with utmost skill by Gloria Ramakus.

Classic problematics, including the origins of printmaking, the practice of drawing from the model, grotesques, the emergence of crosshatching as a drawing technique, selected problems and classifications regarding the main personalities of the period including Pollaiuolo, Rosselli, Botticelli, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Verrocchio and Leonardo, the last mentioned a subtheme of the book, are treated in the individual papers. When all is said and done, the reality of the situation is not so different than it was in Berenson's heyday: connoisseurship remains still the principal tool, one that necessarily is always intuitive to a certain extent. Such is the case due to the almost total lack of solid contemporary documentation about drawings, beginning with such elemental questions as authorship and dating. Nevertheless a current surfaces, the "scientific" approach, based upon the newer technical and technological tools, like infrared reflectography and the study of pouncing, which also mirror an interest in techniques, as the kinds and combinations of instruments used by the artist to produce his drawing, for example. Still, as in the more remote past, the "eye" remains a basic guide.

We have a new attribution to early Raphael of a sheet purchased by the Getty Museum in Malibu, an object presented with little paraphernalia. How one reads a drawing is what really counts, its author George Goldner seems to be saying. Richard Harprath discusses what is purported to be a Michelangelo drawing in Munich related to a lost work. In a difficult but rewarding reconstruction of an oeuvre of an artist or shop active in Florence around the turn of the century, Catherine Monbeig Goguel offers the generic name "Master of Santo Spirito" whom she associates with one or both brothers "del Mazziere." Her starting point is a drawing in the Louvre sometimes attributed enthusiastically to Michelangelo (especially by M. Hirst) and connected with a painting in London's National Gallery taken by many as the master's. Here the drawing is rightly removed from Michelangelo and in so doing the author has weakened the tenuous attribution of the painting to that Renaissance master.

The contributions are full of insights on individual drawings and problems, like David Alan Brown's "Verrocchio and Leonardo: Studies for the Giostra" who proposes a drawing as a collaboration, and are generally informative and engaging for the specialist.

JAMES BECK Columbia University