Matteo Civitali, Bildhauer der Fruhrenaissance in Lucca.

Martina Harms. (Beitrage zur Kunstgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, 1) Munster: Rhema-Verlag, 1995.76 b/w illus. 280 pp. n.p. ISBN: 3-930454-00-9.

This book, which originated in a dissertation presented to the Julius-Maximilians-Universitat Wurzburg, is a thorough comprehensive study of the work of Matteo Civitali, the most important and influential Lucchese sculptor of the last three decades of the fifteenth century. Harms's approach to the subject is very much within the connoisseurship tradition of art history. She is concerned above all to establish Civitali's artistic sources and connections, especially his degree of dependence on contemporary Florentine sculpture, and to assess his stature as an artist.

It cannot be claimed that Civitali has been totally neglected. Steven Bule published a study of four of his major commissions in 1987, and Civitali has long been an object of interest to local art historians and antiquarians. Such documentary sources as are available for his career have therefore been thoroughly explored, so Harms has little that is new to offer in the way of documentation. In any case her discussion of a council decision to promote "artes" as an effort to encourage artistic production suggests that documentary research is not her forte. Her treatment of the historical and artistic background of Lucca in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is perfunctory and inaccurate, and the bibliography could have been extended. The strengths of the book lie elsewhere. It is above all a thorough treatment of Civitali's entire oeuvre, describing and evaluating each work in detail and discussing its artistic antecedents and affinities.

Her organisation is straightforward. After a critical review of the literature on Civitali and a brief account of what is known of his life she gets down to her real concerns. In discussing the vexed question of his artistic training, she is able to present more convincing evidence than has ever previously been adduced for his training in the workshop of Antonio Rossellino on the strength of a relief of the Madonna and Child in Prato. The book is in two main sections. In the first she discusses each of Civitali's documented or firmly attributed works, major and minor, one by one in chronological order. The second is arranged typologically in groups such as Ecce Homo and Man of Sorrows, Saint Sebastian, the Annunciation, and is concerned primarily with attribution and dating. There is also a catalogue, arranged in alphabetical order of the present location of the works.

Her approach involves much comparison with the work of other artists, raising interesting questions regarding Civitali's knowledge of developments outside the Lucchese area, but the proper evaluation of these arguments is seriously handicapped by the book's illustrations. There are seventy-six good quality black and white plates, but these are entirely confined to Civitali's own work. This limitation was presumably the decision of the publisher rather than the author, but neither she nor the reader is well served by it. Comparisons between different works of Civitali himself can be instantly illuminated by reference to the illustrations (for example plates 16 and 26), but few readers are likely to be able to call to mind Antonio Rossellino's figure of St. Sebastian in Empoli sufficiently clearly to make much sense of her comparisons with Civitali's version and even in the case of works as familiar as the tombs of Leonardo Bruni and Carlo Marsuppini it would be useful to have an illustration to refer to for comparisons of minor details. The book is valuable as a comprehensive discussion of the work of a significant and talented though not major artist, and it is a pity that one needs the resources of an art history library to be able to appreciate it fully.

CHRISTINE MEEK Trinity College Dublin