The Art of Ercole de' Roberti.

Joseph Manca's monograph on the fifteenth-century Ferrarese artist Ercole de' Roberti (d. 1496) bridges a very significant gap in the art historical literature. It provides the first extended discussion of this important Quattrocento figure since Mario Salmi's Ercole de' Roberti (Milan, 1960). As an archetypical "artist monograph," Manca's text not only offers a review of the literature and a general discussion and evaluation of Roberti's artistic development and contribution, but also provides a thorough catalogue raisonne, including an inventory of accepted and rejected works, and transcriptions of ninety-two relevant documents, several of which have not previously been published.

Roberti was an artist at the center of north Italian late Quattrocento culture, working not only for private and ecclesiastical patrons, but also for the Bentivoglio in Bologna, and as a salaried employee for the Este in Ferrara. Born in Ferrara in the mid-1450s, Roberti's first teacher was almost certainly Francesco del Cossa, who, along with Cosine Tura, was one of the founding fathers of Ferrarese Renaissance painting. Roberti's first commissions can be traced to his association with Cossa, whom he followed to Bologna in the early 1470s. His earliest style, most clearly visible in the predella which he contributed to the Griffoni Altarpiece (Vatican, Pinacoteca), exhibits an episodic approach to narrative and reveals the artist's Ferrarese roots. However, as Manca has observed, as an artist, Roberti was nothing if not flexible. In a career which spanned barely twenty-five years, his style reflected first Cossa's influence, then Venetian and northern European sources, and finally the monumental forms and compositions which anticipated the High Renaissance.

Manca's book is in many respects very old-fashioned. Although he does make minor forays into the world of patronage and iconography, these tend to be cursory. Instead, the text concentrates chiefly on visual sources and stylistic development. This is not unreasonable when sorting the artist's oeuvre is one of the book's principal goals, but it does raise some important questions regarding the scope of the artist monograph genre.

A monograph like Manca's brings together a large amount of visual, documentary and bibliographic material in a convenient and accessible form. It is invaluable for that reason. Furthermore, a well-crafted monograph can shed light not only on the question of the contributions of a single individual, but also on much larger cultural issues (an excellent example of this is Richard Spear's monograph on Domenchino [New Haven and London, 1982]). At the same time, because such works concentrate on a single artist, whom the author is often inclined to view as central to the history of art, monographs are susceptible to the pitfalls of epideictic rhetoric: praising modest paintings as masterpieces of their genre (32), and blaming rejected works for qualities seen as unworthy of the master (the anonymous Saint Jerome in Ferrara [cat. R8] is characterized as "petty" and arid).

In placing the emphasis on sifting the authentic from the inauthentic, the author of a monograph may also fail to ask other broader, relevant questions. I suspect that my disappointment with Manca's effort derives not from its exorbitant price and muddy, almost indecipherable black-and-white illustrations, but from the fact that he only very occasionally addresses many of the larger social issues which are now critical to our discipline. Roberti's career and documented oeuvre may be intrinsically interesting but, more to the point, they provide many natural entrees into larger issues of Renaissance culture. For example, how was it possible for a painter to serve as godfather to the child of one of his patrons? (Catherine Turrill has kindly pointed out that Francesco del Cossa and Francesco Francia also stood as godfathers to children of the Garganelli family.) Wouldn't this have constituted an unusual elevation of Roberti's status? What did it mean to be a court artist in the Quattrocento? How does what we know of Roberti's career compare with that of other court artists like Mantegna? Why was an individual identified consistently as "depintore" employed to design sculpture and even architecture? (Although this may not have been unusual, it still offers an opportunity to discuss the question of the division of the arts in the Quattrocento.) How does the artist's late Pieta, with its purported portrait of Eleanor of Aragon fit into the broader patrician fascination with this particular theme, and aristocratic concepts of public piety? Such questions demand a more ample context, one which is inclined to define meaning in terms of function rather than text and visual context, and to see the artist as a person working and acting in a larger historical environment; an individual whose art, though significant in itself, was also a means of negotiating perceived political, religious, and social circumstances. Manca's monograph, then, may be good as far as it goes; it just doesn't go quite far enough.

Charles M. Rosenberg UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME