The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome.

By Ingrid D. Rowland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. [pounds]40

This innovative study explains the vital interaction of familiar monuments such as Bramante's St Peter's, the Sistine ceiling, and Raphael's Stanze and Logge, with the still unpublished writings of humanists like the banker Agostino Chigi, Tommaso Inghirami, papal librarian and orator, and Angelo Colocci, publisher and historian of science. They communicated through manuscripts and public speaking rather than printed books, so that a third of the illustrations in this book depict, unusually, manuscript notes.

Chigi aimed at an international economic monopoly akin to Pope Julius II's assertion of a universal church exceeding the Roman Empire in scope. In literature and architecture Colocci and Bramante sought a common vernacular language, a process in which Vitruvius' treatise, dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, played a vital part: in 1511 an edition was dedicated to Julius II by Fra Giocondo who had appreciated that Vitruvius was essentially writing a planning manual for Empire.

DAVID WATKIN