Painting and Sculpture for the Tuscan Household.

Crisrelle L. Baskins. Cassone Painting Humanism, and Gender in Early Mod ern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 264 pp. $80. ISBN: 0-521-58393-4.

C. Jean Campbell. The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano, 1290-1320. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xvii + 294 pp. $57.50. ISBN: 0-691-01210-5.

Cecilia De Carli. I deschi da parto e la pittura del primo Rinascimento toscano. Torino: Umberto Allemandi & Co., 1997. 254 pp. IL 150.000. ISBN: 88-422-0541-9.

Graham Hughes. Renaissance Casssoni, Masterpieces of Early Italian Art: Painted marriage Chests 1400-1550. London: Art Books International, 1997. 256 pp. [pound]60. ISBN: 1-874044-24-4.

Anna Jolly. Madonnas by Donatello and his circle. (European University Studies, Series 28: History of Art, 319.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998. 360 pp. DM 98. ISBN: 0-8204-3538-4.

Sarah Blake McHam, ed. Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvi + 287 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-521-47366-7.

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xiv + 212 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-300-07629-0.

When in 1915 the industrious and prolific scholar Paul Schubring published his impressive compilation of household paintings Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder tier italienischen Fruhrenaissance, it was truly a tour de force. Not only was he working under wartime conditions, but the works he illustrated and catalogued (some 900 in all) had long since been scattered throughout the Western world. The earliest American collectors of Italian primitives, Thomas Bryan and James Jarves had purchased a few and so had, among others, many English private collectors both in England and in Tuscany during the ninenteeth-century revival of the Florentine Renaissance. Most of the pictures had been stripped from the battered chests of which they were formerly a part, while others had been "restored" and imaginatively reincased for wealthy purist collectors as splendid display pieces by astute dealers, such as William B. Spence and Stefano Bardini. Yet others hung simply and anonymously in less visited small art museums.

Schubring's work, for its sheer scope still the standard reference, blurred the distinction, however, between marriage chests (cassoni, or forzieri perhaps), wainscot paneling (spalliere), birth trays (deschi da parto), and even ceremonial shields (for example, Castagno's David, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). In total, the collection provided a fascinating glimpse (something like 20% is a usual estimate) of what decorated the innermost chambers of affluent citizens (largely Tuscan) from the late Trecento through the early Cinquecento. To be sure, Eugene Muntz, Attilio Schiaparelli, and even the cultural historian Aby Warburg had begun to take scholarly notice of these tantalizing bits of cultural insight prior to Schubring; however, the inter-war years saw only occasional mention of these pieces by such authorities as Raimond van Marle (The Italian Schools of Painting and Iconographie de l'art profane), Martin Wackernagel (Der Lebensraum des Kunstlers in der florentinischen Renaissance), and Richard Offner (Italian Primitives at Yale).

After World War II, interest grew, spurred on by such controversial books as Frederick Antal's Florentine Painting and its Social Background and a seminal 1955 article by Ernst Gombrich on Apollonio de Giovanni, which took steps to identify this key cassone painter with "humanistic" tendencies. From the 1970s onward there has flowed a series of dissertations, articles, and several books. Chief among these have been the continuing efforts of the doyenne of cassoni studies, Ellen Callmann, whose 1974 monograph on Apollonio di Giovanni continues to serve as a foundation stone for scholars in the field. Because of its exploration of literary source material, Paul Watson's The Garden of Love in Tuscan Art of the Early Renaissance (1979) has likewise inspired subsequent writing even beyond the study of deschi da parto. Powerful influences upon those art scholars who have begun to focus more profoundly in recent decades on what was for centuries minor art have been the work of social historians, like Richard Trexler and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, and economic historians, such as Richard Goldthwaite.

There have been other forces at play as well, but those who wish to approach the world of domestic painting because of its visual delight and its special character would do well to open some of the beautiful pages of Graham Hughes's Renaissance Cassoni. Twenty-five double-page spreads in good, accurate color give one a superior sense of some fine examples in comparison with what one could find in any other book, or, for that matter, from travelling to most of the many museums that have examples on display. The book is the outcome of decades of enthusiastic study by an author who, while residing in both England and Italy, has seemingly gone to every site, private and public, to view at first-hand hundreds of pieces. His determination to bring before his readership all the basic knowledge he has acquired is admirable, but in the end, because his presentation tends to be discursive and occasionally anecdotal, one feels a certain lack of analytical discipline. The author, while providing a multitude of detailed i llustrations -- some of them full-page, others too tiny to be of genuine use -- is hesitant to explore and evaluate them beyond simple description. Indeed, the book's unusual page design permits pleasurable study of the large plates but crowds out the lesser, complementary, informative images.

Graham Hughes writes like a veteran student of the subject who has read much of the major source material such as Schubring and Callmann. He seldom goes beyond, however, relating the facts he has learned to provide us with some further insight into the subject he so dearly loves. His book contains short chapters on such topics as patrons, sources, and artists but mixes in deschi daparto and spalliere, thus diffusing his main subject. There are also a few startling suggestions, such as his likening Sigismondo Malatesta's Tempio at Rimini to cassoni because they each "offer a junction of sacred and profane," respectively, and calling the building "a unique evocation of the motives of cassoni patrons" (71). He is closer to the mark, on the other hand, when he separates out earlier cassoni and those of regions beyond Tuscany as more utilitarian in shape and function compared with those of the Quattrocento Tuscan type, which resemble ancient sarcophagi with narrative friezes on their fronts (20). A major drawback of this style of writing arises from the author's distaste for scholarly quibbling and his refusal to footnote his sources. There is, however, a set of informative appendices in the final fifty pages of the volume, which include useful bibliographical information with comment, and an interesting list of where the most important cassoni are currently to be found. In sum, Hughes provides a convenient, visually appealing guide, or introductory handbook, to the subject, and he is to be commended for doing such.

A further factor encouraging the study of cassoni in the last quarter century has been the burgeoning academic field of gender studies. Not only have some scholars in these programs a curiosity about conditions of domestic life in general but the feminists among them are essentially concerned with how "sexual identity" was conditioned. Hughes, along with other male writers on cassoni, readily concedes that some themes on painted marriage chests seem to have been selected to educate, if not indoctrinate, young females on such subjects as chastity, childbearing, and submission to male authority. Bruce Cole has even suggested that the low placement of cassone scenes was ideal for instructing the small children of the household.

Cristelle Baskins, writing in the Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism series, however, takes the didactic motivation to the ultimate in her book Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy Her intended purpose is to go beyond the iconography of "Renaissance humanism" begun by Gombrich and his generation and "incorporate the revisionist approaches to humanism articulated by Renaissance historians and literary critics" (16). Baskins credits this "next generation of art historians" for wholeheartedly embracing humanism while facing down "the longstanding prejudices against craft and the scorn of connoisseurs" (17). Could this latter characterization be a bit unfair, or could her purpose be to promote a point of view rather than to examine objectively this art form that still badly needs careful study? She goes on to say that revisionists critique Renaissance humanism for "its claim to universal human values through examinations of elitism, political chauvinism, and gender bias" a nd that "gender emerges through [revisionist] studies as central to the history of humanism rather than marginal, constitutive rather than incidental" (19). There may be many readers who will agree with this assessment; but given a review of the author's lengthy bibliography, footnotes, and prefatory credits, one suspects that her views may be welcomed chiefly by other feminist scholars.

Whatever else may be said in this regard, Baskins's limited selection of the six literary themes that make up all but the introduction to her book is perhaps telling: Theseus and the Amazons, Dido, Camilla, Hersilia and the Sabine Women, Lucretia, and Virginia. In her successive chapters she diligently reviews ancient texts for the stories of these exemplary women as well as how they may have been passed on through Boccaccio and Petrarch. She disagrees with Gombrich's "split between educated male and uneducated female viewers," saying "patrician women recipients of historiated cassoni were, in fact, likely to be literate and conversant with the classics, even if they read them in vernacular versions" (63). This significant contention does not hold up very well in fact: Klapisch-Zuber's statistical data show daughters of the Florentine wealthy were most likely to be married by the tender age of 16 or 17 in 1427. Moreover, Paul Grendler's researches into Quartrocento education find only a tiny minority of fema les from wealthy and professional families had Latin educations in fifteenth-century Florence, and that coming from private tutoring by their fathers in the home. One must also be mindful that vernacular sources did not become widely available in printed form until far into the century, well after many of the subject panels had been painted. Young women of the period were thus being prepared for the simple practicalities of life and, need it be said, their religious and family obligations rather than studying the ancient classics. And, of course, virtually all agree that the choice of cassone subject matter was made by males. It would thus seem improbable that young women would be very aware of any subtleties contained in the narratives of ancient histories until perhaps the early Cinquecento when painted cassoni had become a dying art form.

If we are also to imagine these painted panels likely existed in the thousands during the Quattrocento, the above points are worth keeping in mind, as we turn to one of the subjects specially chosen by Baskins. Because of the legacy of Roman antiquity in Florence (Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae Urbis of 1404 connects the city's ancestry with the race of Romulus), we may examine her methodology and sample some of her observations and conclusions concerning the story of the Sabines.

Of the six exemplars specified in the book only the Sabine Hersilia, probable spouse of Romulus, is not mentioned in the most likely source, Boccaccio's De Claris Mulieribus, where 104 heroines are described. Baskins selects her because there are two surviving pairs of panels, attributed to Scheggia and dated to about 1460, where she has identified a female mediator in the reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines. Not even Christine de Pizan, Boccaccio's emulator, mentions such a mediator by name in her account of the Sabine ladies. Only Petrarch in the "Triumph of Chastity" briefly mentions Hersilia in a passage which Baskins, in absurd fashion, tries to interpret as a double entendre (106). For the rest we are led through five ancient sources (the earliest possible in printed vernacular being 1476, according to Bolgar, The Classical Heritage, 530). The ancient writers, it seems "disguise Roman vulnerability" (106). Cinquecento writers, like the Roman M. A. Altieri (discussed in a 1981 article by Klapisch-Z uber, reprinted in English, Chicago, 1985) and G. Lomazzo (writing as late as 1584) are cited for their emphasis on the horrors of rape. This wide-ranging search through literary sources, whether or not contemporary or accessible, leads the author to her major point that the Renaissance iconography of "Sabine imagery on domestic furniture" (109) can be read in many ways.

In Scheggia's Copenhagen Reconciliation and Triumph panels, where one is better off studying the fine color photos in Hughes's book, one can see the heroine standing as peacemaker between Romulus and Tatius, the Sabine king. These paintings are filled with typical mid-century detail and an extraordinary presentation of pageantry. Within the second set, now at Ecouen in abraded condition and reproduced in faint gray reproductions, a like figure appears on a balcony dealing even-handedly with the two tribal chiefs in a similarly crowded scene. Beneath the balcony Baskins finds one of two boys grasping (almost unnoticeably) his penis. This gesture "may indicate precocious or disrespectful sexuality" or it suggests "a defensive hypermasculinity in response to a peace negotiated by women" (118). It is here that the psycho-sexual bent of the author comes into play (as it does in several other parts of her book). Males misbehave or are defensive about their "transgressiveness." But as will be shown below, where suc h similar grasping of genitalia and other unseemly behavior will be found among boys, Scheggia also had some peculiar quirks when painting birth trays. Besides the fertility aspect, could not these improprieties be simply a manifestation of the artists odd personality? These are also the years, after all, of Poggio's Facetiae. Such simple answers are not enough it seems; the boys raise the questions of "indeterminacy of parentage" (118) -- though fathered by the Romans seen on the ground nearby, they might be reclaimed by the Sabines and their mother standing alongside Hersilia on the balcony above. The presumed Roman patriarchy thus proves "vulnerable within the very first generation" (119). All of this may be, but couldn't the placement of the boys be explained for compositional reasons? The youngsters sit symmetrically along the baseline of the central triangle, at the outer edges of the balcony structure.

If the author's many suggestions and inferences (she makes use of these and like words more than ten times in this short chapter) are to be credited, why then would men ever commission or paint such imagery which runs counter to male dominance? The "anxiety" provoked by women like Hersilia playing roles in public life while having ambivalent kinship offered "a fantasy of joint possession, if not polyandry ... it could also serve the aims of the father patrons of the Florentine state, justifying territorial expansion and military aggression in terms of Roman precedent and humanist historiography" (127). Other, later pictures of the Romans and Sabines, however, do not show a singular prominent female like Hersilia; indeed, soon after some paintings tend to include extreme sexual violence (e.g., Bartolommeo di Giovanni panel ca. 1500 in the Galleria Colonna). Possibly for a time a few spectators thought of such a woman as a beneficent figure, helping to create harmony, as a good mother might, during the turbulen t times of internecine strife in Quattrocento Tuscany. Alberti or Francesco Barbaro may have preferred their women quiet but they wanted harmony and even authority from the women of the house as Alberti encouragingly said in his I Libri Della Famiglia: "A woman of authority such as I hope you, dear wife, will gradually come to be ... maintains dignity of manner" (trans. Watkins, 1969, 220).

Baskins's methodology may be seen, then, to suit her feminist thesis but lacks convincingness because of its sketchy and arbitrary evidence and her propensity to use a code of her own to decipher a code. Despite her wide familiarity with examples, she neglects the art in favor of preconceived notions expressed in a contrived polysyllabic vocabulary and indulges in the very practice which she admits many critics now fault (20).

Schubring's invaluable 1915 compilation touched on spalliere, oblong paintings somewhat larger than those found on cassoni, which were fitted into the upper wall paneling of chambers. This small category of pictures bad a brief vogue in the closing years of the Quattrocento and into the opening decade of the Cinquecento and often employed such significant talents as Botticelli. Anne Barrinult's excellent 1994 monograph on these elegant decorations has already been reviewed (RQ 49.2). Yet another class of painted panels, surveyed by Schubring and also surviving in diminutive numbers, is the round or polygonal utilitarian tray thought to be gifts for young mothers at the time of their delivery. Deschi da parto, which were fashionable from about 1370 to 1530, being both utilitarian as well as decorative were more obviously subject to the vicissitudes of time and later surpassed by more practical substitutes, just as painted cassoni were followed by carved chests. The decoration of these deschi seems to have been carried out in much the same workshops as painted cassoni, except that their format, if effective aesthetically, required more cleverness in design. As Roberta Olsen recently has noted (Florentine Tondo, 2000, 29), their history is intertwined with the much larger tondi of Lippi and Botticelli, but in the majority of surviving examples the designs are infrequently exceptional.

Since an 1894 article by Muntz there have been only sporadic mentions of birth trays, or salvers, in the published literature on art. Articles such as Pope-Hennessy's (with Keith Christiansen) in the Metropolitan Museums Bulletin "Secular Painting in 15th Century Tuscany" on their superb grouping of cassoni and deschi helped raise American awareness back in 1980. Now Yale University Press has brought out a beautiful book by Jacqueline Marie Musacchio which carries the inclusive tide The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy, and which devotes 36 of its 156 illustrations to birth trays. As the book is a rather wide-ranging documentary study, addressing issues surrounding childbirth and the associated material culture over a more than two-century period, the "art" of the salvers does not quite get the attention it deserves. Musacchio's thorough ransacking of the archives turns up but few specific references to painted trays; but she generally regards them as routine workshop productions, something f or the "middle class" (35).

She is at pains to highlight the largest and most splendid example extant: the desco which was recorded in the Medici palace as "painted with the Triumph of Fame" (73). This work, long at the New York Historical Society and now a showpiece in the Metropolitan's collections, was inventoried in Lorenzo's camera along with marble busts of his parents, Piero di Cosimo and Mona Lucrezia, and nearby in the same camera was a pair of gilt forzieri 3 1/2 braccie long that depicted the "Triomfi del Petrarcha" (Spallanzani and Bertela, Inventario: 1992, 26-27). As far back as 1905 Aby Warburg had tracked down this marvelous piece after perusing the inventory, and it was briefly described in the 1980 Pope-Hennessy article. Musacchio devotes some seven pages to the Medici-Tornabuoni salver (as compared with the fifteen-page article she wrote just prior to the present book). It is no doubt the most fascinating desco to survive because it was produced to celebrate the birth of Lorenzo il Magnifico in 1449. Almost certainly the work of Scheggia, brother of Masaccio, it is painted front and back with its frame entirely intact. This example is surely a candidate for a full-blown analysis. Yet the reader will find no discussion of its precise dimensions, arguments about its authorship, comment on its style or what makes it such a successful composition, and the like, in the text and footnotes. Rather, there is an extended discussion of its whereabouts following the Medici auction and the questions of its iconography; she conjectures strangely that Pupilli officials called it a hunting scene in 1579 because the triumphal imagery and references to Boccaccio and Petrarch "were no longer popular as they has been" (79). It seems a pity that not even this picture is fully treated as art, nor as having an aesthetic dimension.

Much the same disappointment may be felt by art scholars as they peruse the entire volume. There are many maiolica ceramics, relevant to the childbirth theme, certainly, but hardly the work of skilled draftsmen. Paintings by Uccello, Ghirlandajo, Piero della Francesca, Andrea del Sarto, and Veronese are nicely reproduced but dealt with only routinely to document a point in a sentence or two. What may be said of the "ritual" of Musacchio's book title? Here we are dealing with a loosening of the overused term, apparent in much recent social history. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sense of a solemn rite (ritualis) does not apply to birth confinement situations notwithstanding the considerable expense, which Musacchio shows could be involved. The all-important sacrament of baptism had to occur at the font, within a church enclosure, no matter how young the infant, as she notes. The delivery of gifts, the special costuming, the comforting of the still-reclining new mother, the bathing and socializing were related to status and custom dating back to Byzantine times (81). The dilution of terminology carries with it a kind of modernism that is not altogether consonant with the spirit of the time.

Musacchio's book is a fine piece of work in many respects. For the student of the Renaissance and its material culture, there is an array of information, including a glossary of Italian terms, twenty pages of document transcripts, lengthy accounts of lucky charms, and so forth. In our age of open discussion of matters sexual, the author, in contrast with Baskins, seems at times uncomfortable with her subject. The Renaissance period was by no means so squeamish. The interior of a maiolica bowl (scodella) which shows a scene in profile with the midwife reaching under the skirts of a fully dressed mother-to-be is characterized as "vividly" accurate to a high degree, and "somewhat indiscreet" (4). Although very graphic views are not to be expected, in the close quarters of late medieval and Renaissance Italy the birthing process was doubtless observed at a very early age, just as adult male genitalia were openly displayed in ecclesiastical settings from Giotto onward.

Where the Musacchio volume illustrates a desco da parto, the photo is of high quality and shows the work in its most recent state. Thus, we are actually able to discern some evidence that supports her claim that these pictures were hung on walls. The reverse of the fine Judgement of Solomon salver by Scheggia, for instance, shows evidence of a nail hole in its frame which indicates that at one time, at least, the piece was used as wall decoration (61). A fairly careful review of Peter Thornton's well-illustrated The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400-1600, however, reveals no such pictures on walls of chambers or ante-chambers. The average size of a birth salver was only about 60 cm., as we discover from Cecilia De Carli's I deschi da parto, published in 1997 and dismissed somewhat unfairly by Musacchio as a mere catalogue. The authorship, dating, and size of these pictures are important, and in this instance give us data that is suggestive as to whether deschi were regularly hung or not, i.e., were they tak en sufficiently seriously to be on regular display.

De Carli's volume should be in any library that contains basic reference material on Tuscan Quattrocento painting. The core of the book collects seventy-three deschi which are arranged in chronological order, dating from 1380 to 1580 -- the last half dozen, according to her thinking, post-dating 1520. There are twenty-nine pages of introduction, a lengthy bibliography, and a short section of rejected works. The color plates are sharp and clear but the black and white illustrations are a bit duller and in a few cases taken from outdated sources when compared with those found in Musacchio's book. Her catalogue entries are carefully thought out and, importantly, refer to and illustrate all the underside decoration to be found on each tray. As is well known, many trays lack not only their original framing but back panels have been separated and frequently lost. Among the five rejected works are some copies, or fakes, made for the nineteenth-century antiquarian market and also one especially delightful piece now at I Tatti. It was painted in mock Renaissance style in 1901 by the artist-critic Roger Fry to celebrate Bernard Berenson's marriage to Mary Pearsall Smith.

Although recommended as a reference, De Carli's book lacks an index or even a separate itemizing of the seventy-three entries. A review of the subject matter of extant deschi, however, is well worth undertaking. As one might expect, confinement scenes predominate: some eleven can be counted scattered over the entire period. Second in importance is a diverse category about love: whether gardens of love in the earlier period, various allegories based on Petrarch, or classical Venuses. Further, the Judgement of Paris, and Diana and Actaeon as classical subjects are about equaled by the Old Testament stories of Solomon and Sheba along with some others also found on cassoni. Finally, we notice stories from Boccaccio, which Watson expounded upon, as well as the Christian virtues, notably chastity; among the most common of surviving examples. Only one or two deal with everyday life.

Best known of these images of contemporary realism is the panel in the Palazzo Davanzati showing a street scene and a group of lively young men and boys engaged in a game of civettino. It is so out-of-the-ordinary that some have claimed that the picture was excised from a cassone or spalliera. A cleaning of the verso completed in time for a 1999 exhibition of Scheggia, the purported artist, has revealed that beneath marbellized overpaint were well-preserved two naked boys struggling to reach for one another's penises. Misbehaving or "unruly" (to quote Musacchio's term) young males were not unusual subjects on the backs of birth trays. Indeed we find others in De Carli, but none with so clear a reference to fertility and perhaps, some would say, a preference for male offspring. De Carli does, in fact, catalogue several pictures (really separated deschi backs), of infant boys engaged in impish activity reminiscent of some manuscript illuminations, popular prints, and even, in a subtler form, the boys on Luca de lla Robbia's Cantoria. Little boys urinating are also to be encountered, for example the tray in the Metropolitan (De Carli, tav. 6) that shows a seated male infant urinating silver and gold and who is so described in the surrounding inscription. It is now known to have been made for a goldsmith who apparently was hoping for a son to follow his trade. Thus, notions of fertility, male succession, and simple uncontrolled infant behavior are combined. At the same time, the sexual attraction of naked, nubile women can also be found in the several scenes of Diana with the nymphs, and strikingly in the famous Triumph of Venus in the Louvre (De Carli, tav. 1).

De Carli's book also is useful for seeing the evolution of the general style trends of the period -- from the international Gothic which works so well in decorating the overall flat surface, to the centralized perspective strongly present in the third quarter of the century, to the more sculpturesque forms evident in some of the later examples. Although many trays were painted by lesser artists, a few can be assigned to Masaccio or a very close follower; Scheggia, Apollonio di Giovanni (praised in his own time), Sodoma, and Pontormo. The lengthy debates over lesser painters responsible for the vast majority of extant deschi are well chronicled by De Carli (who tends in the final analysis to side with her mentor Miklos Boskovits). The grandeur of the settings in the Berlin "Masaccio" and that of his brother in the Musee Jacquemart-Andre compare very favorably with contemporary paintings many times their size. And later on, in Pontormo's Birth of the Baptist extraordinary original forms twist to conform to the circular format just as well as any large tondo of its time.

In his 1927 publication Italian Primitives at Yale University, Richard Offner wrote about a lovely Garden of Love cassone panel stating "this kind of narrative already existed in frescoes three generations before, which are still to be seen in the 'Novella della Castellana di Vergi,' at the Davanzati Palace, and in the still earlier cycle in the Communal Tower at S. Gimignano" (23). The former cycle had been explained by Bombe in 1912; the latter published by Schubring in 1925 and van Marle in 1926, following its restoration in 1921. While the Council Hall at San Gimignano can be connected in part to the courtly and chivalric imagery of the Sala del Mappamondo in Siena, the extraordinary domestic and erotic subject matter of the adjoining tower room has yet to be fully explained. C. Jean Campbell's book The Game of Courting bravely takes on this precursor to the kind of domestic and amorous decoration we have seen scholars trying to interpret in recent years. But here the problem is that the main room in que stion is a bed chamber for the podesta, or chief magistrate, of the Commune who held office for only six months under strict moral prohibitions (110).

The scenes of greatest interest surround a window on the north wall facing the main piazza in front of the Collegiata, where we see the story of the Prodigal Son and beneath it the parallel tale of Aristotle's seduction and humiliation. On the west wall there is a sequence (partly lost) called the "Bathhouse Romance" which shows a couple meeting, bathing together, and, still naked (except for night caps), bedding down. For those writers who find an occasional reclining nude male or female on the underside of cassone lids startling and provocative, these murals, painted a full century earlier within a civic building, clearly may come as a surprise. (The most audacious scene of the couple bathing together where the man is reaching toward the lower regions of the woman was selected by the editors for a color detail on the book's dustjacket!) Indeed the scenes pose a paradox that requires some explanation. Campbell's first idea is to turn to Boccaccio, for the "Bathhouse Romance" seems similar to one of his nove llas, whereas the other north wall stories are rather standard (the Humiliation of Aristotle appearing quite often in later deschi of the Triumph of Chastity). She concludes that the painter, whom she believes is Memmo di Fillipuccio, might be drawing on a tradition known to Boccaccio (153-54). This is logical since she dates the frescoes circa 1305-1315. She then examines a number of similar romances but finds no compelling connection.

Campbell is well justified in her search for literary and artistic sources descending from the courts of France because the adjoining council hall portrays an enthroned Charles of Anjou flanked by a frieze of falconers, huntsmen, and knights on horseback along with other trappings of court life which fill most of the murals. At the far end too is Lippo Memmi's variation on Simone Martini's Maesta (postdating the tower room by just a few years) with all its outward signs of courtliness. Her search among these materials, while interesting, yields no definitive answers. The close links with nearby Siena tie in very nicely with that city's early tradition for secular painting, witness the decorated Biccherna covers that extend back well into the Duecento. "Like the Decameron," she says, "the decorations for San Gimignano's Communal Palace were conceived in what might be called a vernacular spirit, a spirit that was, by definition, concerned with the experience of life and language in this world" (197). It is poss ible that Memmo's "Bathhouse Romance" was illustrating some lost story, or that he was telling one of his own; such tales could be found in many sources "all of which themselves recorded age-old oral traditions of improvisatory storytelling" (171).

It is difficult, of course, to say whether the artist created the "Bathhouse Romance" himself. Campbell, noting the line of Sienese trained artists who worked in San Gimignano throughout the Trecento, credits Memmo with perhaps undue skills:" ... the painter has succeeded to a remarkable degree in portraying pregnant glances and suggestive actions, which give the characters an apparent psychological life of their own" (162). While that may be, the woodenness of his figures and the clumsiness of his settings are also apparent. It is the daringness of the subject matter of these murals that is quite remarkable. The three scenes are "charged with sexual tension" (160); on the other hand, the stories are entertaining and would have fostered "such ideal courtly qualities as jocundity" (123). The tower room in its isolation, the author tells us, allowed for the "earthly pleasure of storytelling" concerning "the greatest of all earthly pleasures" (175). The podesta could also enjoy the entertainments of buffoons at mealtime while being reminded of his own humanity (195). Are we looking at object lessons or private entertainment? Much of Campbell's kind of explication comes down to a form of socio-political psychology. In her conclusion she sees the Communal Palace frescoes as the beginning of the answer to a problem facing "the Tuscan communes: namely how to define their sovereignty from outside the established structure of authority" (199-200). In a certain sense the art and poetry of San Gimignano prefigure the poetic fictions of the time of Lorenzo il Magnifico and "the courtly/civic ideal of sovereignty" of his court (200). Campbell has written an interesting book which is well annotated and finely produced. Whatever the reader may think about her answer to the riddle of why a podesta's room was decorated in this way, the book has delved into a very early stage of how erotic, perhaps meaningful imagery entered the living quarters of important Tuscans well before the appearance of cassone painting.

It would not be proper or correct to leave our subject of the private, domestic sphere without also recognizing the place of various forms of sculpture. Sarah Blake McHam would not have it so; for it is one of her chief goals, in assembling what she feels is a collection of some of the best writing on that branch of art in the last thirty years, to call attention to its usefulness and diversity in a variety of settings. Looking at Renaissance Sculpture, a book of eleven essays gathered by her, contains at least five that shed light upon how sculpture secured a place in Renaissance life, largely out of the public eye. Editor McHam writes an essay as well as a seventeen-page introduction in which she laments the lack of in-depth surveys of Renaissance sculpture apart from Pope-Hennessy's (though she is seemingly aware of Avery, Olson, Seymour, and Poeschke) saying "that today's audience...anachronistically underestimates the importance of sculpture by viewing it in terms of painting" (9). She also feels there i s a "paucity" of literature about the subject. It seems a pity, then, for a book entitled Looking at... that either she or her publisher did not make full provision for the illustration of the writings. Indeed, one is frequently referred to other publications while conventional views of such obvious works as Michelangelo's Pieta. David, and Louvre Slave, just to name a few, occupy entire pages.

Before moving on to those essays which are most pertinent for our purposes, some idea of the book's other content may be in order. McHam states that her book is about "the objects of analysis not the mode of analysis and its theoretical basis" (5). There is, however, a conscious variety of approach to content. An opening piece by G. H. Helms offers basic information about materials and technique. H. W. Janson's "The Revival of Antiquity in Early Renaissance Sculpture" with notes revised by the editor (who finds in it glimpses "of social attitudes of a different time") is largely about, as might be expected, Donatello. Following the next four chapters, which we will return to, is McHam's own account of the Piazza della Signoria and the political implications of the statuary there. Paul Barolsky looks at the fifteenth-century sculptors down to Michelangelo through Vasari's eyes, William Wallace chronicles a week of that great sculptor's activity in the year 1525, and James Saslow examines the sexual issues surr ounding Michelangelo's personal and artistic life. These six essays are solidly written and generally well footnoted. Regrettably for those keenly interested in relief sculpture, there are a scant half-dozen represented (excluding a few medals) among the 113 photographic illustrations. The book clearly leans toward sculpture in the round.

We may now turn to those essays more central to our main discussion. John Paoletti's "Familiar Object: Subject Types in the Collections of the Early Medici" because of the abundant documentation, especially after the family moved into their new palace in the 1450s, gives a virtually complete idea of what families of the highest status might have favored in the way of sculpture. Very few other palaces in Italy would have housed two such statues as Donatello's David and his Judith and Holofernes, of course, and not just on account of the medium's costliness. Paoletti affirms that the two were placed "on a quasi-public axis within the courtyard" thus distinguishing these innovative masterpieces from other private commissions (94). Other bronzes included Bertoldo's Battle Relief and a number of statuettes, or table bronzes, which also recalled antiquity (but which are difficult to identify), and some famous medals that glorify and commemorate the family prominence. Paoletti, in his wide-ranging textbook Art in Re naissance Italy, warned us about qualities that "we might now view merely as aesthetically pleasing were intended as part of the moral or political content of the work" (1997, 14). The fine Pazzi Conspiracy medal, for instance, marks "an important moment in the iconography of relief sculptures as well as in medallic art and Medici propaganda" (101).

Sculptured portraits in stone and terracotta existed in relatively small numbers in what Paolerti calls "the restricted decorative vocabulary of Florentine interior spaces" (87) even after the mid-Quattrocento. Well known among them are three "heads," as they are usually described, those of Piero de' Medici, his wife Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and his brother Giovanni. Piero's of 1453 by Mino da Fiesole -- thought to be the first such bust -- was, as we gather from the evidence, placed above a doorway. The 1492 inventory lists fourteen sculptured portraits in addition to twenty life or death masks, which cannot have been quite so conspicuously displayed. Taken together these three-dimensional images reinforced the themes of marriage and birth evident on cassoni and deschi by adding the element of particularized family history popular in ancient Roman sculpture.

A final category of household decoration, well worth examining in its sculptural form, is the devotional image. By far the most indispensable and abundant type is the half-length Madonna and Child in low and high relief. Such venerable objects would be found in virtually all chambers in painted, if not sculptured, form by the later Quattrocento. Paoletti underscores this ubiquitousness with an old photo taken in the Bardini Museum where no fewer than thirty of them adorn one of the collector/dealer's walls. He discusses the way they were probably positioned, but we will return to the question of the challenge they posed to sculptors' workshops when reviewing Anna Jolly's book. Paoletri through his careful study of Medici inventories highlights, then, in a fairly comprehensive way how the Medici employed and often subtly exploited the sculptural medium within the confines of their residences.

One of the Medici busts, that of Piero, is featured in Irving Lavin's "On the Sources and Meaning of the Renaissance Portrait Bust." This scholar has authored many articles on the subject, particularly in the Baroque period, and it is valuable to read this insightful 1970 essay, in which he traces the evolution of the type from ancient through medieval times. He includes a useful list of twelve Quartrocento inscribed busts (without any claim to completeness). The essay concludes with some reflection on the analogous thinking of Renaissance humanists with regard to the "whole man" (68) and the contemporaneous appearance of the Florentine sculptural portrait cut off horizontally at the chest.

Paoletti. in passing, brought up the mention of a small wooden Gesuino found in the 1417/18 list for Cosimo's room in the old palace. This category of quasi-devotional figures, of "toys" as Chrisriane Klapisch-Zuber sometimes calls them in her essay "Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento" has puzzled scholars who on occasion have found references to them. In Italy such diminutive figures whether nude or in swaddling often represented the infant Jesus in triumph long before the many figures of the presepio became popular (113).

A small number of infant figures were made by major artists like Desiderio da Sertignano, Baccio da Montelupo, and possibly Benedetto da Malano. Those of the more common type are seen as an outlet for the recluse nun, both as an aid to mystical union and as a vicarious exercise of her maternal instinct (122). Such dolls, richly dressed, might also be placed on the conjugal bed to insure fertility (116). Klapisch-Zuber writes interestingly in the field of social and in this case pious practices but her place in McHam's sculpture collection seems curious, as the majority of objects she actually discusses are of marginal interest as works of art.

The exact opposite is the case where Joy Kenseth's essay "The Virtue of Littleness: Small-Scale Sculptures of the Italian Renaissance" is concerned. The love of the precious was virtually innate with the Florentines whose goldsmithing tradition was imbedded in their culture. According to Kenseth the earliest signed and dated bronze statuette was made by Filarere for Piero de' Medici, who was also the first great collector of such objects. His miniaturized version of Marcus Aurelius was emblematic of the new taste for classical antiquity and the love of exquisite workmanship, as described by ancient writers, and spurred the enthusiasm of Renaissance princes for generations to come. The ingenuity of Pollaiuolo, Antico, Cellini, and Giambologna, among others, was put to the test, not solely for leisurely enjoyment but also for tablewares of all kinds. Kenseth's paper helps us understand the process of how interest among wealthy patrons moved from the colorful painted decoration of cassoni and deschi da parto to ward the production of refined, costly, and more sophisticated forms of ornamentation within the household.

The final essay in McHam's collection takes us into that adjunct of domestic life, the garden. Claudia Lazzaro's "Gendered Nature and Its Representation in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture" is a revised version of a 1991 article by this acknowledged expert. She points out how gardens ornamented by large carved figures represented aspects of nature according to their sex. Males, ever since antiquity, might represent important rivers or mountains; females, as in the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, symbolized earth and springs with spurting water, the idea of generation. Poses of the figures could enhance their meaning: sensually and suggestively posed females, especially, could imply sexual coupling and nature's life-giving qualities. Although personifications could sometimes be represented by both sexes, writers of the later Cinquecento could disagree. Vincenzo Borghini, for example, implied that the female was sensual and static (259), while others associated female qualities with excess and "unbridled sexu ality" (251, 255). Lazzaro's essay makes fascinating reading and offers some correctives to present-day thinking about art and nature, while also reminding us of the reproductive themes found in the art of domestic interiors.

The eleven essays in McHam's book cover a good deal of ground; omitted, however, is a study that involves style and attribution -- a type of "old" art history that some revisionists doubtless find rather uninteresting. On the other hand, this sort of basic work is needed for all art history. As Paoletti acknowledges in the short section on devotional images in his essay, there is a need to rescue some of the works once thought to be by such artists as Donatello from art historical limbo and to separate out the forgeries (103, n.6). We may also add that the sparse treatment of theological matters and New Testament themes is rather conspicuous among the books we have been reviewing thus far, even in cases where the authors have been attempting to view the art in a contextual way.

Inasmuch as there is ample evidence that the houses of Tuscany, including those of the Medici, contained religious images of one sort of another, it makes sense to look into that situation, just as Paoletti recommended. Surely the domestic atmosphere of the Quattrocento was as informed by spiritual obligations as it was by the study of humanistic stories or the periodic festivities accompanying the arrival of a child. Anna Jolly, who studied sociology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge and wrote a thesis on Donatello's Madonnas, had the results of her researches published at the very time Paoletti wrote of the need for such a study. Her book Madonnas by Donatello and his circle speaks of the neglect of these reliefs, owing in part to the lack of documents; however, she has been able to connect nearly a thousand to Florentine sculptors of the 1410s-l460s period (14). These reliefs were placed in the bedrooms, or chambers, of married couples along with cassoni, and in family chapels or street taber nacles.

Jolly's monograph represents a formidable effort in connoisseurship, given the amount of material both surviving and lost. (Vasari listed at various locations seven such Donatello works that can't be identified.) H. W. Janson's painstaking study attributed but two Madonnas to the artist: the Pazzi Madonna in Berlin and the Madonna of the Clouds in Boston. These are accepted by all modern scholars, including Jolly; but these early works offer little guidance for the later style. A small bronze roundel in the Padua altar and a handsome circular marble Madonna in Siena Cathedral indicate something of Donatello's later style. Pope-Hennessy, who in a 1976 article claimed that the sculptor's Madonnas included some of the greatest works of the fifteenth century, expanded the oeuvre, heaping special praise upon his polychrome terracotta reliefs in the Louvre and Berlin. Jolly's Donatello corpus includes these among fourteen authentic works, with scores of derivatives. Altogether she catalogues some ninety-two example s, which she regards as "a selection of the most important and best preserved works" (89). In addition to anonymous assistants and followers, she brings in the names of Michelozzo, Luca della Robbia, Nanni di Bartolo, and Buggiano. The process entailed in this recherche endeavor is nowadays regarded as elitist, pedantic, and of only slight interest to the art-loving public, or, for that matter, even the cultural historian. Given this background, it is to Dr. Jolly's credit that she took on this exacting task; and in the course of it she became intimately familiar with the art, its weaknesses, subtleties, and with what was effective and truly innovative. For the artist's problematic middle period of the '40s and '50s, she looks for complexity, liveliness, and enthusiasm (85).

Beyond style she explains how workshops replicated certain types with molds and how there could be variations introduced for the large market of these sought-after devotional objects to meet the demands of an economically and socially diverse group of clients. Jolly warns against "the expectation of dealing with originals in the case of cast Madonna reliefs... Their large-scale production was an economically motivated strategy of the workshops..." (56). She thinks some were cast on commission but that a larger number was kept in stock in the workshop for clients to choose from... an important change towards a modern market" (15). The situation no doubt somewhat resembled the production of deschi and cassoni. To her trained eye, the false examples would almost always reveal some signs of later manufacture, especially when viewed at first hand. Certainly there are many nineteenth-century imitations, just as De Carli discovered with deschi or Callmann has found among reconstructed cassoni.

The evident interest of recent years in contextualization -- politically and sociologically motivated as it has been -- has helped in large measure to give impetus to further exploration of such a vast compilation as Schubring's Corpus. There remains, however, much housekeeping to be done in this category of the decorative arts. Some younger generation scholars, intrigued by the largely secular content, have succumbed to the temptation of hurried evaluation, or even exploitation of the subject matter, and to the pitfall that Martin Kemp has decried, namely, using pictures as "ambiguous texts" (Behind the Picture, 1997, 283). But others, using careful analysis, have worked to understand the art on its own merits and to place it more firmly in an art historical framework before venturing into personal interpretations. That being said, our view of the place of the visual arts in Tre-and Quattrocento life is happily moving into sharper focus after a lengthy period of selective and all too often excessively erudit e explication. The arts in early Renaissance Tuscan households were intended, in most instances, to be pleasurable, suitable, and functional ornamentation.

WASHINGTON COLLEGE