Nicola Pisano's Arca di San Domenico and Its Legacy.

The primary goal of Anita Moskowitz's study is to reinstate the Arca, or sculpted tomb, of St. Dominic in Bologna as "a key monument in the history of Italian sepulchral art' (4). Although one might wish to demur with the evolutionary model such a project supposes, Moskowitz is eloquent in demonstrating the grandeur and sophistication of the tomb, commissioned by the Dominican Order from Nicola Pisano around 1264 and completed by 1267. Her great achievement is to rescue the Arca from the sterile obsession with issues of stylistic development and attribution to which it has all too often been consigned, where Nicola Pisano's role as designer is virtually ignored and the sculpture is seen as the production of several assistants working as more or less independent agents. Instead, in a densely argued first chapter ("The Arca di San Domenico: A Tomb for a Preacher"), Moskowitz analyzes the way in which the tomb's structure and program was brilliantly calculated to meet the needs of its varying audiences, especially those of the Dominican Order. This is the strongest section of the book, ably building on the pioneering researches of Joanna Cannon into Dominican artistic patronage. Although reconstruction of Nicola Pisano's design, which took the form of a marble sarcophagus sculpted with scenes from Dominic's life and raised on figural supports, is more contested than Moskowitz would have us believe, this is a minor issue that does not fundamentally impinge upon her perceptive exegeses.

The second chapter traces the influence of the Arca upon two later saints' tombs in Milan and Pavia. Here the author reprises arguments from two previously published articles, with some additions and corrections. Moskowitz's chief contribution to an understanding of the Arca of St. Peter Martyr in Milan, begun around 1335 and signed and dated 1339 by Giovanni di Balduccio, concerns the unusual presence of the nine orders of the angelic hierarchy on the sarcophagus lid and on either side of a crowning figure of the blessing Christ. Ingeniously, she relates this unparalleled elaboration of the heavenly court to heated theological debate in the 1330s regarding the Beatific Vision. Unaccountably, the brief survey of artistic conventions of this theme in her 1991 Arte Lombarda article is omitted, although further investigation would have been welcome. Nevertheless, her conclusion remains compelling. Postponement of the Beatific Vision until the Last Judgement, as suggested by Pope John XXII in 1331 before public recantation on his death-bed in 1334, would have had dire consequences for belief in the power of the saints as effective intercessors with Christ. Such doubts could hardly have been congenial to the Milanese Dominicans, intent on promoting the cult of their Order's newest saint. The upper levels of the tomb, where Dominic and Peter Martyr stand beside the enthroned Virgin and Child amidst the celestial choir, can thus be read as a pointed affirmation of traditional doctrine: the Dominican saints are even now in heaven, where they enjoy the direct, face-to-face vision of God.

Moskowitz is also convincing in situating the commissioning of the Arca of St. Augustine in Pavia (begun ca. 1350 and dated on the shrine 1362) within the context of local ecclesiastical politics. By papal decree, since 1327 the canons regular of S. Pietro, where Augustine's body was buried at an unknown site in the crypt, had been forced to share possession of the church with a community of Augustinian friars. The commissioning of the shrine was a strategic move on the part of the Augustinians, asserting their preeminence as sole custodians of Augustine's cult. Here the function of the shrine within the ambitions of the Augustinian Order could have been made more explicit; the commissioning of such a sumptuous tomb takes on greater resonance when set in the context of the Order's strenuous efforts to construct an ancient monastic heritage and to assert, against all evidence to the contrary, a direct continuity between the Order (founded in the midthirteenth century) with the person and Rule of Augustine himself. Moskowitz also comments on the unusual form of the Pavian shrine, which departs from the model of a historiated sarcophagus established by the Arca of St. Dominic in favor of an elaborate tomb chamber sheltering an effigy. As she notes, this is a tomb type more usually associated with royalty and high ecclesiastics and is thus appropriate for the famous bishop of Hippo. Given the uncertainty regarding the actual location of Augustine's remains in the church, the sculpted effigy might also be seen as taking the place of the absent body, offering pilgrims tangible proof of Augustine's saintly presence.

The final chapter, "Innovations, Derivations, and Variants," continues the argument for the originality and sophistication of Nicola Pisano's Arca by seeking to demonstrate its widespread influence upon later Italian tombs. For this reader, the first section, which sees the Arca as providing a "decisive impetus" towards the erection of a series of impressive tombs of popes, legal scholars, and other social elites in central Italy in the latter part of the thirteenth century, is ultimately unpersuasive, particularly in the light of recent studies of some of the same material by other scholars such as Julian Gardner. Also troubling is the assumed elision of the shrine of a saint and the tombs of ordinary mortals, when one might expect quite different functions and visual conventions to be in force. The rest of the chapter, focusing specifically on Italian tombs of saints (whether formally canonized or not) mostly from the fourteenth century, is more convincing. In each case, Moskowitz points to specific formal elements - caryatid supports, a sarcophagus sculpted with scenes from the life of the saint - that derive from Dominic's tomb. Yet the cumulative effect is repetitive and cursory, and one is left to regret that the author has so deliberately confined her analysis to the disappointingly limited compass of "the search for filiation" (4). One longs for more detailed historical analysis of this fascinating material, especially from the point of view of late medieval spirituality and the cult of the saints. Yet perhaps this would be to ask for a different author and a different study, and one should be grateful to Moskowitz for her contribution to this still relatively unexplored terrain.

LOUISE MARSHALL University of Sydney