Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women. .

David Alan Brown, ed. Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 236 pp. + 99 color pls. and 76 b/w pls. index. append. illus. chron. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-691-09057-2.

The events of September 2001 grotesquely upstaged the opening of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (Washington) dedicated to "Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women." Fortunately we have this splendid catalogue to serve as an independent record of the event. Edited by David Alan Brown, the gallery's curator of Italian Renaissance paintings, who also organized the exhibition, this volume will remain an important anthology of images of women to supplement the growing scholarly literature on the construction of female identity in the early modern period.

Full-color illustrations of the forty-seven works are complemented by detailed catalogue entries by David Alan Brown (Quattrocento paintings and drawings), Eleonora Luciano (sculpture), and Elizabeth Cropper (who as Dean of the Gallery's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts supplied the entries on the Cinquecento). In addition, a series of introductory essays outlines the larger questions raised by these arrworks: Dale Kent gives an overview of the status ofwomen in Renaissance Florence, Victoria Kirkham traces the literary tradition that influenced the representation of women in the visual arts, Joanna Woods-Marsden elaborates on the

Renaissance female portrait genre, and Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westerman Bulgarella provide useful background on jewelry and costume.

Originally conceived as a small show focused on the National Gallery's prized portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, this exhibition evolved into an ambitious and revealing survey of Italian Renaissance portraits of women. Most of the works are panel paintings, although there are some examples from other media (marble busts, medals, and drawings). The overwhelming majority are Florentine (Lippi, Botricelli, Ghirlandaio, Bronzino), although some prototypes and parallel works from outside Florence are also represented (Pisanello, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling).

One's first impression of this volume is that it's all about the clothes. Sumptuous fabrics and jewels are rendered in exquisite detail: ropes of pearls, veils, magnificent brooches, and sleeves of crimson brocade seem more important than the sitter herself. This was of course the case. Many of these were marriage portraits, intended to record the wealth of the natal and conjugal families. In an unrepentant culture of display, donora and counter-donora were exchanged in the form of clothes and jewels to embellish the bride. Marriage was the moment when a woman acquired social visibility, if only as a mannequin; later she would be divested of her wedding clothes and jewels and they would revert to the possession of her husband, who was then free to invest them in other transactions. Recent studies such as Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass analyze the role of clothes in Renaissance society as liquid capital; luxury textiles and jewelry were a form of cu rrency.

There is a certain monotony in the stylized, decorative, heraldic profiles of the mid-Quattrocento, a gallery of adolescent brides with extravagant headdresses and high-plucked foreheads. Later works show an important change: a gradual rotation of the figure from profile to a three-quarters or even a frontal pose. Leonardo's Ginevra is emblematic of this transition toward a more naturalistic and expressive rendering of the sitter as an "individual." This should not, however, be oversimplified; Ginevra's image remains highly coded in humanist, Neoplatonic, and Petrarchan terms. She appears in a halo of prickly juniper branches (symbolizing chastity, but also punning on her name). A sprig ofjuniper recurs on the painted reverse, entwined in a scroll reading VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT; both are encircled by a laurel and palm, familiar icons of the lyric and visual tradition but also the personal emblem of her platonic admirer Bernardo Bembo. This portrait, possibly commissioned by Bembo, literally frames the sitter in his own image.

One of the most significant innovations in female portraits of the late Quattroand early Cinquecento is a byproduct of the rotation of the pose: the sitter is in a position to return our gaze. In her introductory essay Woods-Marsden examines the implications of this development, first analyzed by Patricia Simons in an influential article in 1992.

The exhibition usefully includes several portraits of men, which remind us of the implicit presence of men in all the female portraits. Husbands in conjugal (double) portraits were almost invariably placed on the more important heraldic dexter side. This helps to explain why even "independent" profiles of women generally faced left. (A conspicuous exception to this convention is Piero della Francesca's famous diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, where the male and female positions are switched to hide a disfiguring injury on the count's face.)

The introductory essays are lively and thoroughly accessible to the general reader, while individual entries (and especially their bibliography) will be useful to specialists. Handsomely produced and (in a paperback version) affordably priced, this is an elegant and intriguing book.