The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance.

Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 258 pp., inc. 69 figs. $85. ISBN: 0-521-65324-X.

The longing for a portrait that speaks, and for a painting that portrays the soul, received eloquent voice in the sonnets of Petrarch and seized the imagination of Renaissance artists and their public. Jodi Cranston's study explores the poetics through which Renaissance artists strove to take portraiture beyond the recording of appearance, inventing poses, gestures, and attributes designed to make visible the sitter's inner self and interaction with the viewer.

Choosing examples from over fifty Renaissance paintings, the author considers how artists, in consonance with contemporary theory and literature, constructed portraits as visual dialogues between image and beholder. Often reflecting conventions that had appeared earlier in religious painting, the relationships include speaker-listener, lover-beloved, and survivor-departed. In these "dyads of exchange" (2), active and passive roles shift constantly as the viewer becomes the one observed and addressed by the image.

Giorgione's La Vecchia ("Col Tempo"), the focus of the first chapter, recurs as a leitmotif throughout the book, which is a revision of the author's 1998 dissertation. Cranston convincingly interprets it less as a portrait than as an "allegory of the passage of time that makes portraiture necessary" (10). She goes further to read it as an allegory of portraiture itself, a self-conscious image that simultaneously admonishes the beholder and observes itself in the mirror that the beholder becomes.

Chapter 2 deals with paintings of friends addressed to other friends, as well as "impersonation portraits" (86 if.) in costume and portraits containing other portraits that proclaim the sitter's "ethical identification" with the absent other whose likeness he/she assumes. In the third chapter Cranston turns to Titian's "non-autographic" self-portraits in Madrid and Berlin, arguing that the artist's subject was not limited to his appearance, or even his profession and stature. Through pose and technique Titian transformed himself into an other to "figure" his own act of painting.

A chapter on effects of mirrors examines how Parmigianino's 1524 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror "slides between the two poles of an accurate reflection and of a picture that makes the viewer conscious of his/her role as interpreter ..." (152). This section also considers paintings that can be associated with the neo-Platonic concept of the lover who reflects the image of the beloved like a mirror, even becoming transformed into an alter-ego of the beloved (relevant here would be Renaissance mirror-medals like those of Lysippus the Younger, in which the reflected face of the beloved on one side and the modeled face of his/her "servant" on the other are united in one object). Cranston concludes with Michelangelo's epitaphs for young Cecchino Bracci, in which the sculptor-poet acknowledges the incapacity of art to create a true likeness of the departed, which lives on most faithfully in the souls of those who loved him.

In this book about complex ideas, some material details receive relatively casual treatment. Rereading the documents on La Vecchia, Cranston makes a compelling case for its origin as the cover of a portrait of a (younger) man, yet buries half her crucial documentary evidence in a footnote (18-19 and 197 n.13). She does not examine the age and condition of the present frame, highly relevant for her argument. She opposes La Vecchia to Venetian half-length paintings of beautiful women, with which its first audience would presumably have contrasted it (45, 48). But in fact such half-lengths were a rare innovation, not a familiar genre, when La Vecchia was painted circa 1507 (see Junkerman, cited in notes and bibliography). In introducing the Parmigianino Self-Portrait she refers to it correctly as shaped wood (140), but goes on to call it repeatedly a canvas.

Discussing Michelangelo's commemoration of Cecchino Bracci, she gives short shrift to the tomb monument itself, focusing instead on the poems. This is legitimate in that Michelangelo's hand is absent, but it seems a pity not to have illustrated a detail of Cecchino's bust in a book about portraiture. The contrast between the bust as executed and the moving poems about Cecchino would reinforce her presentation of Michelangelo's argument for the power of the imagination over that of portraiture to confer immortality on the dead.

In such instances the author may not be seeing the trees for the forest. But her thoughtful readings and intense engagement with multivalent concepts about the point of a portrait make one return to the images with an attention that would certainly have pleased their makers. The book is also valuable for its rich bibliography of the literature on Renaissance portraiture.