Our Accustomed Discourse on the Antique: Cesare Gonzaga and Gerolamo Garimberto, Two Renaissance Collectors of Greco-Roman Art.

The subject of this first volume in a new series, the Garland Studies in the Renaissance, is the bellissimo antiquario e studio . . . pieno di statue e di teste antiche di marmo seen by Vasari on his trip to Mantua. The study deals with the collecting of antiquities during the third quarter of the sixteenth century by two minor collectors, the ruler of a very small North Italian state and a minor church official: Cesare Gonzaga of the collateral Guastalla branch of that family and his chief advisor, the antiquarian Gerolamo Garimberto, Bishop of Gallese, who lived in Rome.

Those who have followed Professor Brown's earlier publications will not be surprised to learn that his book consists largely of archival documentation, including several inventories and over 100 letters, for the most part from the State Archives in Parma. Indeed, one of the primary aims of this book is to make this material, hitherto ignored, available to other scholars. Thus, the core of the book lies in its series of catalogues of the correspondence between the two collectors and the supporting documentation for each of their collections - Cesare Gonzaga's Galleria di marmo in Mantua and Garimberto's antiquarium in the Gaddi Palace in Rome - and, in so far as possible, identification of the works discussed. The study also includes a biographical dictionary dealing with 60 odd collectors, agents, and courtiers mentioned in the correspondence, some of whom have hitherto been only shadowy figures. Particularly valuable for art historians, not to mention historians tout court, will be the transcriptions of many documents, transcriptions that were checked in Mantua against the originals by Anna Maria Lorenzoni, who shares the honors on the title page but whose important role is only fleetingly mentioned in the preface. These catalogues are preceded by two chapters in which the author fleshes out all this material with a very detailed chronological account of the formation and development of the collection of ancient sculpture that Cesare, despite the disadvantages of poor health (he was overweight and died at 40) and scant financial resources (he occasionally had to pawn the family silver to pay for a choice piece) was able to create.

This is very much a specialist's book, and the author assumes familiarity on the part of the reader with the history of collecting and the major collections of the period. The book would have gained from an introduction giving the wider context of the major collections and collectors in the Cinquecento, against which these two self-described "minor" collections could be measured.

"I continue to gorge myself with acquisitions [of antiquities]," wrote Garimberto to one who gorged himself with other sustenances as well, and the study raises many questions about the emotions these men invested in the content of their collections, questions not posed in the text. What did the physical possession of Greek and, especially, Roman artifacts represent for their owners in the Cinquecento? If, as seems likely, the famed historical Romans, whose sculpted bodies and carved heads Gonzaga and Garimberto, among others, collected, had an overwhelming emotional reality for their Cinquecento successors on Italian soil, should not any construction of the sixteenth-century construction of antiquity also tap into its resonances of glamor and romance for collectors? It has often been argued that the Caesars and others served as potent political exemplars to territorial Renaissance rulers. But what about the mythological gods? Could they not also be said to have nourished a rich fantasy life by encouraging the Renaissance male to yearn for Hercules' muscles or dream of emulating Jupiter's sexual adventures?

But to seek a discussion along these lines is to seek a different book and another scholar, and we have indeed reason to be grateful for the volume that Professor Brown's very remarkable skill in archival research has produced. In giving us access to these important sources, he has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the highly specialized world of antiquities and antiquarians, a subject of overwhelming importance for the period.

Now it only remains for the cultural historian to provide the imaginative context for collections such as these, and suggest some of Cesare Gonzaga's aspirations and dreams as he walked back and forth in his Galleria, happily counting the 156 marmi that he had wrested from the glorious past - not to mention competing collectors - in the hope that they would endow his present with reflections of that glory.

Joanna Woods-Marsden UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES