La Poesia Scolpita. Danese Cataneo nella Venezia del Cinquecento.

Massimiliano Rossi. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1995. 129 illus. + 308 pp. IL40,000. ISBN: 88-7246-180-4.

This book is a welcome contribution towards the reevaluation of previously neglected Renaissance artists, those victims of our adherence to the "great master canon." An impoverished view of certain eras has been the result of oversimplified comparisons between the so-called "creative" periods, such as the early sixteenth or seventeenth centuries and the middle and later Cinquecento. Danese Cataneo, usually overshadowed by his prolific and famous mentor, Jacopo Sansovino, is one such artist. Massimiliano Rossi's book is the first full length study to consider Cataneo as an independent artist. It is also the first in a new series entitled "Morgana," devoted to studies and texts of the Renaissance.

In his reevaluation, Rossi uses Cataneo's literary works in conjunction with his sculpture to reposition him in his milieu. Cataneo was a major participant in the Venetian literary culture of the mid-Cinquecento. He was praised by Aretino, among others, for his poetic as well as his sculptural talent. Apropos of Danese's bust of Bembo, and his poem, the Teseide (unpublished in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, cc. 17r-96v, Cod. Chis. I. VI. 238), for example, Aretino in a letter advises the artist to exercise both arts equally and exclaims that ut sculptura poesis has been truly realized in Danese's work. Further contemporary appreciation came from Torquato Tasso who credits Danese's Dell'Amor di Marfisa as a major influence on his Gerusalemme Liberata. Rossi's long analysis of the Bembo monument draws an insightful but often neglected analogy between the edicola of the Bembo bust and printed architectural frontispieces, which according to Rossi alludes to the distinction of all literary art. In a further correlation between sculpture and literature, in particular Danese's Marfisa, Rossi points to the use of mythological inserts as moral exempla in both media.

As he himself states in his preface, Rossi's is not a conventional monograph; it has no catalogue raisonne, nor are all of the documents regarding Danese cited. Nevertheless the book is laid out in a monographic format. Cataneo's works, both sculptural and literary, are discussed in chronological order. Rossi sets the stage for an appraisal of Cataneo by giving an account of sculpture in Venice around 1540, in which Sansovino's Loggetta figures heavily. He goes on to examine Cataneo's major works: the Sole for the Zecca, the Venere ciprica for the Loggetta, the portrait of Pietro Bembo for the Santo in Padua, Fracastoro and the Fregoso monument in Verona, the San Girolamo in San Salvador, and the Loredan mausoleum in SS. Giovanni e Paolo, both in Venice. Cataneo's literary works are inserted in their appropriate chronological places in relation to the sculpture. Rossi argues for a viewing of Cataneo's works from the standpoint of "intertextuality," highlighting the element of stratification which he finds in Cataneo's work. The application of this literary paradigm to the visual arena makes possible a new perspective, one that has not previously been taken. Rossi's implicit point that the language used to analyze works of art constructs meaning is well taken.

In the summary of his study, Rossi draws a further parallel between literary and visual images. Literary studies, he suggests, have taught us to recognize that the codified, conventional language of the later cinquecento had an evocative and mental function which transcended its repetitive contents. In a similar way, the standardized arrangement of the funerary monument of the second half of the cinquecento had meaning beyond its formulaic structure: it was intended to evoke love, reflection, memory, and praise.

It is a pity that a book with so many good points, many of which I have indicated, has no general or selected bibliography, an omission which forces the reader laboriously to dig these items from the extensive footnotes. The plates are adequate, if not fine, but there are lamentably none in color. Such an addition would strengthen the visual component of the book but would no doubt raise excessively the modest price of IL40,000.

MARY WEITZEL GIBBONS New York City