Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past.

The Renaissance Society of America is pleased to announce that Patricia Fortini Brown's Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past has been awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize. Elizabeth Cropper's review of the book follows.

Patricia Fortini Brown. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 60 color + 260 b/w pls. + xii + 361 pp. $60. ISBN 0-300-06700-3.

In this beautifully produced book Patricia Fortini Brown provides a mine of information, both visual and verbal, concerning the history of Venetian culture. According to Brown, the Venetian sense of the past was conditioned from the beginning by the absence of a true Roman foundation, the plentiful supply of spoglie all around the lagoon city notwithstanding. Aquileia was the ancient capital of the region and the patriarchate. According to John the Deacon in the early eleventh century, the inhabitants of this first Venice fled to the islands of the lagoon to escape the Longobard invasions, carrying their relics with them. In 828 A.D. the relics of Saint Mark were moved from Alexandria not to Aquileia - the old Venice - where he had preached, but to the new Venice, which became Aquileia reborn. The Byzantine character of Saint Mark's complemented claims that the first Venice had been founded by Antenor: according to Brown, this Trojan pedigree laid the ground for universalist pretensions. When the time came for humanists and preachers to establish a new relationship with Rome they did so through the manipulation of a visual and verbal vocabulary designed to establish Venice's superiority, not its desire to compete or supplant.

An outstanding feature of Brown's book is the emphasis given to sculptural programs and to the evidence provided by manuscript illuminations and drawings. The insights into the Venetian world provided by Felice Feliciano, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Ciriacus of Ancona, and the artist of the woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili are given an importance equal to that of Mantegna or Bellini (and an appendix is devoted to summarizing the state of the question on the identity of Francesco Colonna, author of the Hypnerotomachia). Although there is mention of Venice's special role in the development of the pastoral, the reader will not find the Dresden Venus or the Concert Champetre illustrated here.

This is no bad thing in a work devoted to the reconstruction of the history of the Venetian imagination as such, rather than to the works of art that imagination expressed. In such a history, however, comparisons with Florence, Rome, and even Padua, might have been more finely drawn. The Venetians are said to be resistant to the appeal of Petrarch, yet Petrarch's friends and his own view of the past are often invoked. Castagno's designs for the Cappella dei Mascoli in San Marco, like Bruni's rhetoric, to give but two examples, had a great impact in Venice, recognised by Brown but not analysed. Perhaps, in the wake of her fundamental work, a consideration of the relationships between Florence, Padua, and Venice in the fifteenth century will follow. Such a comparison would have to take up the observations made here about Venice's special relationship with Greece, including the evidence of the earliest descriptions and excavations by Venetians.

Brown concludes that "the eclectic character of Venetian art and architecture was neither the product of unknowing indifference nor of deliberate ambiguity, but rather a conciliation: the appropriation of both the alien and the familiar in a new all-encompassing synthesis" (284). Her understanding is that Venice was made ex novo, and that it is both unique and eternal. In presenting Venice as "an empire of fragments," Patricia Fortini Brown challenges the reader to think about history in the broadest sense. The great merit of this book lies in the rich texture of its historical approach.

ELIZABETH CROPPER The Johns Hopkins University