Giammaria Mosca called Padovano, a Renaissance Sculptor in Italy and Poland.

Anne Markham Schulz. Giammaria Mosca called Padovano, a Renaissance Sculptor in Italy and Poland.

University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 2 vols. Vol. 1: xi + 347 pp. Vol. 2: xvii + 109 b/w illus. + 4 color pls. + 257 b/w pls. $125.00. ISBN: 0-271-01674-4.

Not long ago, the art-book editor of a prominent university press informed me that catalogues of artists' works were "old-fashioned" and therefore not worth publishing. This is comparable to declaring it old-fashioned to need information. In such a view, the Internet must also be classified as "old-fashioned."

Fortunately, Pennsylvania State University Press does not share such an attitude, having published this latest in Schulz's explorations of little-studied Venetan sculptors of the early sixteenth century. Unmentioned by Vasari, Mosca is a difficult subject; born in Padua circa 1495, he gained a fair amount of renown and patronage in both Padua and Venice by 1529, when he left Italy for Poland, remaining there until his death in 1573/1574. Hence, the art from his last forty years was not readily accessible during Communist rule, and much of the scholarship on him is in languages not normally at the command of historians of Italian sculpture. With the aid of Polish scholars, Schulz now publishes this pioneering first monograph on the artist, which provides the first catalogue, the first assemblage of documents, and the first full visual repertoire of works associated with him. All future research on Mosca, or on the environments in which he worked, will have to acknowledge and come to terms with this book.

Volume 2 is entirely photographs. Volume 1 has a 185-page text in six chapters, divided into two parts: "Italy" and "Poland." Each part begins with a biographical overview of "Mosca's Life and Times," with subsequent chapters focussing on the sculptures, examined item by item. A catalogue of 42 entries follows an appendix of 43 documents.

Schulz's primary task is to build her case for what objects she thinks are by Mosca. While several of his works are documented -- including the most important, the relief of the Unbroken Goblet, which forms part of the decoration of St. Anthony's Chapel in the Santo in Padua, the grandest sculptural undertaking of its time in Italy -- many are not. Style is thus her touchstone. While some have criticized her reliance on connoisseurship as subjective, this strikes me as basically unfair. If one only has style to go on, one must deal with style. Schulz lays out her criteria openly and consistently, often convincingly, sometimes less so. The artist she constructs as regards Italian works is not substantially different from that put forth by Planiscig in 1921. Mosca's Polish oeuvre here receives its first in-depth treatment in English.

Her second principal aim, having defined Mosca as a "perfect test case" (4) for the effect of emigration on an Italian Renaissance sculptor, is to ask: why are Mosca's Polish and Italian works so different? Different the Polish works certainly are, often distressingly so. While Mosca's Italian works are characterized above all by their energy, frequently expressed in a gauche, awkward manner, the Polish works tend to be simply dull. Mosca's output there was confined almost entirely to tombs, and their unfolding follows a continually increasing schematization and drop in quality. Schulz's explanation for this is that the love of money is the root of all evil: Mosca's Polish works are weaker than his Italian sculptures because he found his materials and patrons uncongenial, and was content to sign over more and more work to his (undistinguished) workshop, since he could charge good prices to his provincial patrons for less than first-class work. The explanation is quite likely; Schulz is in any case certainly right to point out the technical problems of working in red, Hungarian marble as opposed to white, Italian marble. Perhaps Mosca also makes a "perfect test case" for running a workshop? Whereas Raphael, Bernini, and Rubens all imposed a standard style of relatively high quality throughout large workshops, Mosca was dearly not up to the task. A further consideration is decorum. Schulz tellingly describes the qualities of Mosca's art that made him stand apart from his more decorous contemporaries, noting the artist's "jarring discrepancies of pose, gesture, and expression, as though figures were temporarily deranged" (60). Could such a style be adopted by Polish nobles for their tombs? Faced with the problem of modifying his idiom, Mosca fell back on platitudes.

The most controversial part of the book is that devoted to a series of reliefs of mythological subjects, the lion's share of which Schulz assigns to Mosca instead of the traditional attribution to Antonio Lombardo. At one point, Schulz posits that certain errors in perspective were deliberately made in the reliefs; perhaps, but this then makes attributions on the basis of quality highly problematic. In her discussion of the reliefs, Schulz concludes that their multiple versions indicate a market for which they probably were carved on speculation, not on commission. Her assignment of so many of the reliefs to Mosca leads her to suggest Padua as the nexus of this market. A university town where the forging of antique sculpture was apparently widespread during the Renaissance, Padua had indeed the requisite population of professors and other humanists who would want affordable emulations of ancient sculpture, such as these reliefs; a Paduan professor did own Mosca's relief of the Judgment of Solomon. (I would h esitate, however, to term such patrons "middle-class" [631.) In her conclusion, Schulz calls Mosca "the first sculptor in the Veneto to produce a large body of works in marble destined for a private domestic setting." Luchs has also discussed the phenomenon of the private sculpture made in the Veneto during the early sixteenth century in her book on Tullio Lombardo's ideal portrait sculpture. The topic deserves further thought and research.

I have emphasized the primary nature of Schulz's research. Her concern for defining and explicating individual works takes precedence over contextual matters, and understandably, therefore, it is sometimes hard to see the woods for the trees. Her work, nonetheless, gives us the "old-fashioned" knowledge we need for a significant player in early Cinquecento Venetian art.