The Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence.

Marvin Trachtenberg, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 240 illus. + xx + 358 pp. $65. ISBN: 0-521-55502-7.

These volumes are assured an immediate and substantial impact in the fields of urban and architectural history and, in the case of the Trachtenberg book, in that of visual cultural studies in general. Both authors situate a series of major urbanistic interventions in a wider cultural and political history and in relation to prominent instances of artistic and architectural patronage. In his study of fourteenth-century Florentine urbanism, Trachtenberg explodes the model of periodization that had obscured its vitality and originality in contrast to the "Renaissance." Rosenberg studies a celebrated episode of Renaissance or indeed early modern European urbanism, the "Herculean Addition" of Ferrara, but only in terms of longer-term processes and strategies for assigning or transforming signification within a complex urban environment.

Trachtenberg is implicitly indebted to innovative recent work in cultural history and theory, but his book exemplifies and explicitly champions a specifically art historical hermeneutics engaging with "phenomenologically accessible" objects that "seem to be saying something" (24n). He applies this approach to artworks of a more familiar kind, but only in the light of case studies of urban development hitherto never regarded in terms of artful making, as opposed to statutory regulation. Rosenberg also moves between discussion of urban development and artwork, mostly monumental statuary, seeing the latter as more accessible in terms of its symbolic values, though drawing on connotations inherent in the former. He focuses first on a sculpture of modest size adjoining a very large textual inscription; proceeds to monuments increasingly reliant on the expressive resources of the medium of statuary itself; and concludes with an effectively autonomous planning project, in the absence of the cues that a grandiose projected monument, never completed as planned, would have supplied.

These are strikingly different historiographical and intellectual projects. Trachtenberg presents a republic engaged in an often ruthless demonstration of authority, Rosenberg a princely state working in part through explicit accommodation with subordinate constituencies. Trachtenberg mainly explores a transitional period, Rosenberg successive moments of transition. Rosenberg embeds analytical discussions in a historical narrative, while Trachtenberg expounds, often with a high degree of abstraction, a specific, highly cohesive political and cognitive world. Neither author seems influenced by prosopographical method and theory, though a strength of Rosenberg's book is his emphasis on the intersection of princely power and its milieu, in which he emphasizes the role of collective memory, embodied in public monuments, buildings, and spaces.

Rosenberg's fine account of the evolution of Renaissance Ferrara is based on a firm command of archival and visual resources and draws on important but (at least in the U.S.) little-known Italian scholarship on the city. The opening chapter examines the city's early history, in part to establish the frameworks within which monuments and memories alike were later situated and/or shifted. Rosenberg then discusses four major monuments (one twice, because it was moved), all associated with the symbolic and or physical transformation of the city, and progressively liberated from engagement with specific buildings - the first anchored to the cathedral facade, the last designed for a Maidan-like public space. Two of the monuments are in the public square, and associated or aligned either with city hall or with the complex series of buildings and spaces occupied by the court.

Rosenberg reconstructs the circumstances and implications of each project, notably the famous triumphal arch carrying an equestrian statue, and associated with a leading patron, Leonello d'Este, and humanist, Alberti. He reviews the evidence for the latter's involvement, which he thinks likely, though he curiously downplays the role of a Ferrarese associate of Leonello, whose status as the latter's uncle he fails to mention. He contextualizes the innovative spatiality of the famous Herculean Addition in relation to an earlier development also involving a concentration of noble houses and an association of a princely palace with significant religious centers. He suggests a shift toward a scopic regime evident not only in "suburban" spatial development but also in the qualification of the main square as a theatral space through a remarkable "loggia of appearance," accommodating the prince's distanced gaze. This invites elaboration.

As a sustained intellectual and rhetorical performance, Trachtenberg's book is a remarkable achievement, a cultural history of power relations as inscribed in space but also in the cognitive world and perceptual faculties of the Trecento. This is Baxandall's "period eye" through the lens of Foucauldian and Althusserian theory, backed by reference to the tough-minded historiographical current dealing with Florence, whose impact on a still idealizing Renaissance art history Trachtenberg finds disappointingly small. He examines the design of two great public spaces, the cathedral precinct and the Piazza della Signoria, following the implementation of three principles: the imprint of a major building on surrounding space, the creation or at least emergence of a formal order governing that space, and the concern with the optimal view of a building as integral to the design of the space associated with it.

The three principles lead into different orders of discussion. Trachtenberg examines the coherent remaking of the compact center through a concatenation of spaces he calls a sort of Ringsstrasse. He studies the sophisticated application of geometrical surveying and design procedures evidenced in manuscripts as well as in the layout of the east end of the cathedral. And he studies the evidence in contemporary paintings for attention to the selection of viewpoints. The challenge is to reconcile such distinct orders of historical reality and historiographical interest. Where some might see distinct registers of operation or attention as alternatives, Trachtenberg insists on the possibility of combination, as solutions emerged incrementally in response to a fluid economic environment and occasional instability in the political order. Trachtenberg uses a remarkable discussion of the combinatory, multi-media dimension of major Florentine artistic achievements (e.g., the whole east end of S. Croce) to document the Florentine capacity for long-term monumental bricolage.

This is an always compelling and often polemical book. Trachtenberg seems to dismiss micro-history as inadequate editing, a position consonant with his equanimity about two candidates, of contrasting professional and institutional backgrounds, for authorship of the piazza scheme. His identification of a single privileged point of view toward a major monument raises the question of the possibility of other viewpoints, e.g., from a monument, or from another point in the square, like the Tetto dei Pisani along the western edge of the piazza. He dismisses Friedrich Antal's attempt at a Marxian history of Trecento visual culture as "inept," but Antal's attention to disparate currents of artistic expression suggests an alternative to Trachtenberg's emphasis on framing devices and conditions that, ironically, tend to dissolve the "phenomenological accessibility" of individual artworks. And, finally, both the argumentation in the book and its argument (in the sense of subject matter) have undergone a rigorous process of unification and abstraction that is exciting to follow. Nevertheless, to an inveterate micro-historian, as I confess myself to be, questions linger about the nature of the correlation between so coherent a historiographical framing and the coherence of the history it frames.

CHARLES BURROUGHS Binghamton University, SUNY