Titian's Portraits Through Aretino's Lens.

This study focuses on a selection of mature portraits by Titian, all painted between about 1537 and 1550. During this period Titian enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Pietro Aretino, who was tirelessly active as his agent and publicist; as her title suggests, Freedman's purpose is to make the fullest possible use of Aretino's voluminous Lettere as a means of evaluating the various ways in which Titian's contemporaries - especially his sitters - responded to his portraits. The book also has the wider aim of contributing to the Rezeptions-geschichte of Italian Renaissance portraiture in general.

The rather concise text comprises six chapters, the first of which provides a useful sketch of Aretino's biography and relationship with Titian and analyzes the rhetorical devices of the Lettere. This chapter already reveals how innovative and perceptive Aretino was as a critic; this is especially evident in his responsiveness to portraiture as an art rather than merely as a record of a likeness. Each of the subsequent chapters is concerned with a particular portrait, or rather, with a group of related portraits. Chapter 2 discusses Titian's portraits of Aretino himself: not just the two autonomous portraits in the Frick Collection (which Freedman, following Hope, dates to c. 1537) and in the Palazzo Pitti, but also in the Vienna Ecce Homo and the Prado Allocution of Alfonso d'Avalos, in which Aretino is dressed up to play a part in the narrative. Chapter 3 is concerned with Titian's Duke and Duchess of Urbino portraits in the Uffizi; chapter 4 with the portraits of Pope Paul III; and chapter 5 with the portraits of the Emperor Charles V. In the final chapter the author returns to the topic of her previous short book, Titian's Independent Self-Portraits (Florence, 1990), but here concentrates on the only self-portrait by Titian that would have been known to Aretino: the image recorded in Giovanni Britto's woodcut of 1550.

The existing literature both on Titian's portraits and on Aretino's criticism is extensive, and it is perhaps inevitable that much of Freedman's book, despite its novel angle, should retrace familiar territory. It is to the author's credit, therefore, that she succeeds in offering a number of new interpretations, not all of which are ultimately convincing, but are invariably intelligent and thought-provoking. I am not, for instance, convinced by her identification of portraits of Alfonso d'Avalos, Doge Pietro Lando, and Sultan Suleyman in the Ecce Homo, nor, therefore, with her interpretation of the picture "in terms of the contemporary political situation" (62). I also find it hard to agree with her identification of two works of classical sculpture (including a relief from the Arch of Constantine) as sources for the pose - and hence also for the proposed meaning - of the portrait of Charles V Seated in the Alte Pinakothek. On the other hand, Freedman's analysis of the Duke of Urbino portrait, in which she demonstrates in the light of Aretino's letter to Veronica Gambara how Titian sought to evoke the choleric and leonine personality appropriate to a heroic warrior, is most revealing. Intriguing, too, is the suggestion that Aretino's head in the Pitti portrait is deliberately made to approximate that of an antique satyr statue, as a way both of punning on his profession as a satirist and of alluding to the ambiguities within his complex personality.

PETER HUMFREY University of St. Andrews