Stephen John Campbell. Cosme Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara.

Ed. Alan Chong. Milan: Electa, 2002. x + 294 pp. index, illus, bibl. 70 [euro]. ISBN: 88-435-9665-9.

The career of Cosme Tura (ca. 1430-95) presents considerable challenges, not least because, although richly documented, very few of his major works on mural, panel, and canvas survive. None of them are signed, and only one can be dated with any certainty, the monumental canvas organ shutters of 1469 for Ferrara Cathedral (Ferrara, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo). As the volume title indicates, Tura was not only a painter, but carried out commissions throughout his career making designs for luxury domestic items, drawings for decorative objects, and cartoons for tapestries, and through documentary evidence is known to have been a prolific and accomplished draughtsman. Virtually nothing has survived of these either. The subject of three major monographs since 1997, Cosme has now been the focus of an exhibition, the first to be entirely devoted to this Ferrarese painter and designer. This volume, published in conjunction with the exhibition, comprises six essays which address various less-explored aspects of his artistic output: why Tura was so successful when his paintings look so peculiar and the particular Ferrarese milieu in which he flourished; his activities as a designer of decorative arts; his relationship to Netherlandish paintings, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts; the materials and techniques of his paintings; his skill as a draughtsman, reconstructed mostly through the revealed underdrawing of his paintings; and the fortuna critica of Tura and Ferrarese art, with special reference to the early interest shown by the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. A catalogue by Stephen Campbell of twenty-one works considers a range of drawings, panel paintings, bronze medals, manuscript illuminations, and tapestry designs associated with the artist. A further brief section is devoted to a reconstruction of the dismembered and dispersed Roverella altarpiece for S. Giorgio fuori le Mura, Ferrara of the 1470s. An appendix by Alan Chong presents information resulting from the technical examination of a painting fragment of Saint George and three narrative tondi panels which are believed originally to have formed part of the work.

There is much to reflect on in this excellent book, which has managed to go beyond what has already been said about Tura's art. In the essay by Lorne Campbell, for example, Tura's knowledge of Netherlandish art, and in particular his response to the paintings of Rogier van der Weyden, are examined. From Campbell's profound and sensitive observations, it is apparent that Tura's absorption of northern European art did not result in mere imitation but appeared in more complex and subtle ways; the expressive possibilities of the human figure and the skewed compositions, as well as the decorative possibilities of opulent brocades. Although personal contact between Tura and Rogier is discounted, the intriguing hypothesis is made that van der Weyden supplied cartoons for at least two of the paintings of Muses made for Leonello d'Este's studiolo in the villa of Belfiore. The series of Muses, and their complicated history, are the focus of Jill Dunkerton's examination of Tura's painting techniques, drawing on material obtained from the scientific examinations of a number of his paintings. Through her close analysis, it is possible to trace, with greater precision than previously, the successive painters who worked on them, Angelo Maccagnino, Michele Pannonio, and Tura himself, and the radical transformations these enigmatic female personifications underwent.

The essays provide an interesting and thought-provoking group, which demonstrate the existing divergences of view by their expert authors. For example, different hypotheses are presented as to the way in which knowledge of the new oil painting technique arrived at Ferrara, a major development in the history of Italian painting--via the Hungarian Michele Pannonio, as postulated by Dunkerton, or via a Sienese connection between the Flemish tapestry maker Arnold Boteram and the painter Angelo Maccagnino, both of whom then came to Ferrara and collaborated with Tura, as proposed by Lorne Campbell.

From this study, a more rounded picture of Tura's oeuvre emerges, integrating as it does the reciprocal relationship between his varied activities as designer and painter. Beautifully produced, with numerous high-quality images of Tura's astounding and powerfully expressive paintings, as well as comparative works of Ferrarese painting, manuscript illuminations, and decorative arts, this book is a further important contribution to the continuing re-evaluation of this highly creative and original Renaissance artist.

HELEN GEDDES

University of Warwick