Gesta Dipinte La grande decorazione nelle dimore italiane dal Quattrocento al Seicento.

The beguiling ways in which patrician Italians paid homage to their ancestors by memorializing their dynasty's political ontology on their walls and ceilings is the theme of Julian Kliemann's analysis of painted programs from 1450-1650. His book is abundantly illustrated and fills a lacuna in the scholarship on narrative painting, a gap resulting from lack of access to the works and, he claims, from a scarcity of written records. Kliemann creates a loose typology of public/private secular histories and treats them as a distinct genre.

This hermetic approach allows for a plausible interpretative structure in which he weaves together over two hundred projects, from late medieval chronicles to seventeenth-century apotheoses. Less well-known works illuminate familiar ones. Antoniazzo Romano's external fresco of the ceremonial encounter between Piero de' Medici and Gentil Virginio Orsini, at Bracciano, belongs with other early dynastic and martial tableaux, such as those in the Castello Colleoni at Malpaga where the famous condottiere is literally furnished with a place in history. After such exceptional "hagiographies' as those of Sixtus IV in the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, Rome, and of Pius II in the Piccolomini Library, Siena, individual biographies cede, according to Kliemann, to a concept of genealogy embodied by an ancestor in whom the noble aspirations of the dynasty are made manifest. In the period of transition from Republic to Principate, the Medici initiated this more abstract commemorative model even though - or perhaps because - they were not themselves properly aristocratic. Leo X's frescoes at Poggio a Caiano, honoring Lorenzo and Cosimo il Vecchio, are dissimulating in their fictitious classical episodes, audacious in proportion to the precariousness of the dynasty.

The Farnese programs in Rome and at Caprarola were aristocratic variations on the Medici theme. Subsequently, Taddeo Zuccari's Caprarola designs and Vasari's absolutist inventions in the Palazzo Vecchio were the inspirations for succeeding genealogies discussed by Kliemann, such as the remarkable cycles by Bertoia at the Castello dei Rossi at San Secondo Parmense (c. 1570), and by Circignani at the Palazzo Vitelli, Citta di Castello (1571-1573), and the Palazzo della Corgna, Castiglione del Lago. With the Medici and the Farnese, the Gonzaga complete a kind of dynastic triumvirate. Kliemann also sees Tintoretto's canvases for Duke Guglielmo at Mantua (1578-1580) as reflecting contemporary debates on the quintessence of nobility wherein personal virtu is subsumed by the glory of one's forbears. The author then turns to less familiar examples - such as the ambitious canvases of Teodoro Ghisi (now in Opocno) and of Giambattista Zelotti for the Obizzi near Padua - and notes the greater prevalence of self-representations among nobles on the Venetian terraferma as opposed to Venice itself, and the cosmopolitan grandeur of the rivalrous Genoese. As Kliemann demonstrates, by the later Cinquecento, the genre had become diverse. In Florence, elaborate familial statements, such as those of Bernardino Poccetti for the Capponi, competed with, while simultaneously affirming, the "official" Medici works. Particularly intriguing are the ways in which one's predecessors, such as Lorenzo de' Medici in Francesco Furini's Pitti Palace decorations, materialized as variations of literary allegories in this instance from Orlando Furioso. By the seventeenth century, grandiose narratives were mostly on the wane, dissolving into dizzying mythical hierarchies of divine authority, the culmination, perhaps, of the trajectory initiated by the first illusionistic piercing of the wall.

Along the way, Kliemann alights on the associated arts of tapestry, print-making, ephemera, and relief, but he might have used them more extensively. He attempts, in addition, to articulate the development of a uniquely secular narrative style without reference to currents outside the palace walls. Yet it is precisely where these more conspicuously secular arts intersected with the more obviously religious - where the same artist, for example, altered his style - that the most provocative conclusions might be drawn. These painted historical biographies, furthermore, clearly resound in contemporary textual narrative, confronting us with singular self-portraits within the theater of the past. This, too, is a realm left untouched. Nevertheless, Kliemann has ushered us into the great halls where the accoutrements of diplomacy and warfare gleam; he has made more accessible the aesthetic projections of the social matrix of the later Renaissance.

MEREDITH J. GILL University of Maryland, College Park