The Italian Renaissance Interior: 1400-1600.

The title of this beautifully illustrated and enjoyable volume, about what used to be called the decorative arts, is slightly misleading, in that the book is devoted exclusively to the material culture of the ruling classes in Italy. Synthesizing much material previously only available separately, Peter Thornton bases his analysis of how the elite lived on written and visual sources, and on surviving artifacts: careful reading of contemporary household inventories, fleshed out by study of contemporary images (drawings by Heemskerck, Perino, and Zuccari, and paintings by Carpacio, Crivelli, and other Venetians are particularly informative in this respect), both interpreted in relation to artifacts surviving in museums.

The material is divided into four sections. Part one deals with embellishment of the architectural shell (walls, ceilings, floors, windows, doors, and chimneypieces [with which, somewhat puzzlingly, the text starts]), part two with the furnishings placed within this shell (textiles, leather, woodwork, metalwork, ceramics, beds [a particularly rich section], chairs, chests, tables, cupboards, desks, mirrors, candlesticks, kitchens and cooking implements, and items relating to sanitation and hygiene). These two indispensable sections on the appearance of the palace and the objects to be found in it - the area of Thornton's expertise - form the bulk of the book. Two shorter chapters deal, respectively, with architectural ground plans, resulting in a very valuable discussion of the distribution of the camera, sala, anticamera, etc., and with the realm of social history in the form of relations between clients and architects, officials in charge of household activities and maintenance, the economic base, and a section rather quaintly entitled "The Influence of Women," as if the earlier consideration of the palace interior had somehow been irrelevant to them. The text is addressed to a general public, but this factor does not affect Thornton's detailed grasp of the scholarship surrounding the artifacts. Only on subjects where more than clear, expository prose is required - consideration of patrons, architects, gender roles, etc., where the discussions are not always grounded in the most recent and/or most sophisticated scholarship - does the content leave something to be desired by the specialist. Each of the 379 illustrations (many in color) has its own caption, so that the book can be perused on two levels: text and captions.

But how literally should the rooms offered in the visual sources be taken? What was the relation between life in the Renaissance as it was actually lived, and life as it was presented in art? For obvious reasons, Thornton relies greatly on images of religious subjects taking place indoors, and the book contains multiple Feasts of Herod, Births of the Virgin, and many, many Annunciations. (Thus, ironically in view of the comment above, these interiors are overwhelmingly peopled by women.) One is struck by the level of fantasy involved, and how relentlessly up-scale were so many visual constructions of the Virgin's life in this period. She is consistently presented as a wealthy patrician, living in the most sumptuous of surroundings: walls revetted with marble, beautifully intarsied woodwork, prayer books worthy of inclusion among the manuscripts in the Getty Museum, no fewer than three mattresses on the bed, itself covered by the finest and most delicately embroidered colored silks - all surely interiors for the gods, the rooms of Renaissance dreams, not so different perhaps from those shown today in such journals as House and Garden, in short, the Magnificenza with which the commissioner of the painting identified, and for which he or she yearned. Not even the most affluent patron, however, no matter how many architects he consulted - and one wonders whether Alberti's advice extended beyond his desire to dictate politically correct subjects for secular frescoes-could surely have succeeded in creating the breath-takingly beautiful room invented by Filippo Lippi in his Palazzo Barbarini Annunciation. One wonders at the reaction of members of the underclass as they gazed at those rich rooms which were available to them as frescoes on chapel walls.

It will come as a shock to many to learn that these dream secular interiors did not feature fresco cycles. Not one of the illustrated rooms, each as luxurious as its artist could devise, includes a figurated mural. One must conclude that this means of wall decoration, to which art historians have devoted so much more attention than all other aspects of the room combined, was considered, not just less desirable, but much less desirable and prestigious, than wall decoration by means of luxurious tapestries and hangings. Had we but known!