Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d'Este (1471-1505) and the Invention of a Ducal Capital.

Thomas Tuohy. (Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxxii + 534 pp. $95. ISBN 0-521-46471-4.

At the very beginning of his study of Herculean Ferrara, Thomas Tuohy quotes William Hazlitt's rueful description of nineteenth-century Ferrara "... an ideal of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow of itself" (1). Subject to despoliation and benign neglect after the devolution of 1589, the city of Ferrara gradually declined from the sparkling centerpiece of the Este dynasty to a city of empty streets. In his study of the patronage of Ercole I d'Este (1471-1505), Tuohy has sought to dispel the clouds of time which have obscured the material history of Renaissance Ferrara and to reconstruct with extraordinary detail and richness its lost splendor.

A meticulous and astute archivist, Tuohy has drawn a dense picture of Ercole's Ferrara, the nature of his court bureaucracy, and the character of his artistic patronage. To do so Tuohy has combined an exhaustive reading of the remarkably abundant but often frustratingly terse records of the Erculean bureaucracy - hundreds of account books and inventories - with an equally thorough examination of the much scarcer remains of official and familial correspondence; comments by "foreign" observers, such as the Gonzaga agent, Bernardino Prosperi; and surviving painted, sculpted, and architectural artifacts. The resulting book is a treasury of information about the material culture of Renaissance Ferrara, the language of crafts and of the court, the structure of the ducal bureaucracy, and the history of specific churches, palaces, and villas (discussed not only in the body of the book but in even greater detail in an appended gazetteer), This is an invaluable resource not only for its comprehensive description of late fifteenth-century Ferrara, but also its role as a reliable foundation for future, comparative studies of Renaissance courtly culture.

Tuohy's virtues are also his vices. His careful attention to detail at times creates a thicket of seemingly undifferentiated minutiae in which everything from the macro politics of the Italian peninsula and Ercole's alliance with the French to bathing practices and the location of bathrooms (84-87), from Savonarola's influence on the duke to the geography and economics of brick production (187) and the materials, cost, and fate of sugar sculptures (273-75) is given equal weight. Nonetheless, the author's thoughtful reading of the documents (many of which are published in a second appendix) does result in some very significant conclusions. For art historians, among the most interesting of these is the picture he paints of Ercole's personal role in architectural patronage. From the account books and comments of contemporaries, it becomes clear that the duke was a very involved patron who took an active part in the planning and construction of the numerous building projects which he commissioned. In fact, according to Tuohy, it was Ercole, not Biagio Rossetti, who was the principal architect of the famous Erculean Addition. In contrast to Bruno Zevi's classic monograph, which hailed Rossetti as one of the first modern city planners, Tuohy's book characterizes the Ferrarese architect as an engineer, entrepreneur, and court functionary often simply executing the plans of others.

Tuohy concludes that the face of fifteenth-century Ferrara was determined by a theatrical point of view, that appearance, not permanence, was paramount. Many of the brick facades which today define the character of the city, for example, would have been stuccoed and painted to bring them into harmony with a taste which was often more Gothic than Renaissance. And the great historical cycles which once decorated the walls of Belfiore and Belriguardo may have been regarded as ephemeral images, not as records intended for posterity. If this is so, then the fact that so little survives as concrete testimony to the splendor which was Herculean Ferrara is not simply a matter of historical accident. If Tuohy is right, the city which Ercole shaped and embellished was made not for the future but for the moment and was, therefore, fated to fade from sight with the passage of time.

CHARLES M. ROSENBERG University of Notre Dame