Michelangelo and the Reform of Art & Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500-1550. . - book review

ALEXANDER NAGEL

Michelangelo and the Reform of Art Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 320 pp.; 105 b/w ills. $80.00

DAVID FRANKLIN

Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500-1550

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 272 pp.; 80 color ills., 140 b/w. $55.00

If we are accustomed to thinking that the "reform of art" in Italy began with academic, anti-Mannerist programs of study, with post Tridentine attacks on artistic license, or even with more direct Catholic responses to Protestant dissent, Alexander Nagel's debut book will prove provocative. The book not only focuses on Michelangelo, the artist against whose example such reformist critics as Ambrogio Cattarino, Giovanni Andrea Gilin da Fabriano, and Federico Borromeo all inveighed, but also devotes nearly the first two-thirds of its pages to events prior to 1517, a date that might seem to mark the start of artistic reform tout court. In its very conception, the book jars some of the basic antitheses on which constructions of the period tend to rely--Renaissance/Baroque, Reformation/Counter-Reformation--and as such, it has the potential to reshape our thinking about 16th-century central Italian art.

Michelangelo's inventiveness, Nagel argues, cannot be understood without also considering the artist's remarkable sense of moment: as a modern, he was confronted with the new ideals of the istoria; as an antiquarian, he was guided by the ancients' newly recovered examples of corporeal action and expression; as a man of deep piety, finally, he was moved by calls to sustain a' religious imagery that had its own canonical models. His impulse to "reform," accordingly, came from more than one direction. On the one hand, Michelangelo sought to restore the devotional image, strengthening its hold on a new cut of viewer; on the other, he aimed to sanctify the modern aesthetic, linking Renaissance techniques hack into archaic types. It was a project, Nagel suggests, that forced Michelangelo to explore the edges of the familiar. Whether he was making a quadro, the type of painted panel he had inherited as an altarpiece format but which would, even in his lifetime, provide the basis for the "gallery picture," or a fini shed presentation drawing, a variety of object that was becoming increasingly secular but which offered a uniquely fitting vehicle for investigating new manners of devotion, Michelangelo consistently worked between the holy image and "art." Not just in subject, but also in genre, in other words, Michelangelo's undertakings confronted, and even defined, the nonoverlapping and often competing values that governed his artistic culture.

The crucial painting for the book's argument is Michelangelo's Entombment, a work of about 1500, now in London, which accommodates a frontally presented image of the Savior to a laterally arranged scene of transport. This composition, to follow Nagel's compelling analysis, reconciled two formats, the Man of Sorrows (the popular quattrocentro Andachtsbild) and the Meleager narrative (the ancient subject, known from sarcophagi, that Leon Battista Alberti specifically recommended as a model for moderns)--and with these, two functions, the cult requirements of the altarpiece and the diachronic action of the history painting. Such a reconciliation, Nagel suggests, was groundbreaking, inasmuch as it made manifest the notion that Christian history had both a literal and a figurative dimension, consisting simultaneously of events that actually transpired and of transcendent occasions that fulfilled a larger purpose. The sacred subject of the painting, which illustrates a singular occurrence while at the same time pr oviding material for repeated, meditative viewing, works both as a narrative and as a suprahistorical presentation of the holy body. While it may announce its expansion into or extraction from a dramatic scene (one situated, importantly, in the moments after Christ's deposition from the cross and before his resurrection), it is also a cult image, and one, moreover, that uses internal, historical characters to guide external, ritual use. Both the painting's story and its interpictorial allusions, finally, are continuous with its function: if Christ's vacated body appears, paradoxically, as animated, this is both because Michelangelo has modeled his figure on ancient renderings of the swooning yet triumphant hero Bacchus and because the efficacy of the Mass, said at the altar that the painting would decorate, itself depends on Christ's offer of life through death.

What Nagel aims to demonstrate is how, in the first half of the cinquecento, the categories that guided the making of imagery themselves changed: departing from the example of Michelangelo's early altarpiece, Nagel develops a series of arguments about Michelangelo's approach to art more generally. The second part of the book jumps ahead several decades, to the years when the artist returned to the image of the dead Christ, first in a group of drawings and then in a series of sculptures, all works that, in Nagel's account, saw Michelangelo reevaluating the very media he could use. The finished drawing, made as a gift, constituted "a new category of artwork" (p. 146), one that appealed to Michelangelo because it circumvented the commission, liberated the artist's pictorial investigations from the patron's surveillance, and put the artwork itself outside the economics on which the institution of art making depended. In making and donating the drawing, Nagel suggests, Michelangelo followed the principle of Christ 's beneficio, the idea that a sacrificial gift made salvation independent of its recipient's own offerings. As Nagel sees it, Michelangelo's whole undertaking with these sheets was an experiment, one that his medium uniquely enabled, but one also doomed by the fact that drawings themselves were becoming objects for collectors; the notion of art as a gift was providing "the basis for an even more radical marketing of art as a commodity." It was the failure of the experiment that led the way to the late Pietas. Having realized that his hope of creating a new art through drawing was a "dead end," Michelangelo had no other option left in his search for a reformed art but to commit himself exclusively to sculpture, a field that, having historically preexisted painting, represented in its very medium "an earlier period of a purer and a more pious Christian art" (p. 199). Together, Nagel suggests, Michelangelo's late drawings and marbles mark a series of "retreats," retreats from the altarpiece, retreats from painti ng altogether, and, ultimately, retreats from the idea of art that collecting itself had engendered.

Throughout the book, Nagel's perceptive readings of individual images are models of exposition, though his larger theses and intuitions merit close attention as well. This is particularly true of the last section of the book, which is, to my mind, one of the best discussions of Michelangelo and the paragone in the literature. Nagel's reflections on the relation between the late drawings and sculptures pick up on his earlier pages: just as he had described Michelangelo's London Christ as marmoreal" (p. 100) and had suggested that Michelangelo's eschewal of landscape and other pictorial settings generally turns his painted figures into "freestanding blocks" (a phenomenon that Nagel relates to the use, after 1500, of antique statuary in chapels and altars), so does he propose that Michelangelo's eventual concentration on sculpture was motivated by a sense of that medium's superior "integrity." It is, to be sure, now a commonplace that sculpture ex uno lapide became a principle for the ambitious 16th-century Ital ian marble carver. What Nagel adds to the usual story is a sense, first, of how the aesthetic of the monolith might bear even on a medium like drawing, in which artists do not (as they might with marble) shape a single object, and second, of how the impulse to integrity might be more than an impulse to virtuosity, growing rather out of a historically specific devotional sensibility. Focusing on Michelangelo's continuing interest in one subject as he moved between materials enables Nagel to offer insights into the nature of those moves themselves. For Michelangelo studies, the book may reopen questions that the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel seems momentarily to have closed, such as whether Michelangelo, even as a painter, thought "sculpturally." For art history more generally, the book illustrates the importance of contemplating the shape of a larger career when examining how an artist deals with any particular medium.

Is it fair, with all of this, to ask how Nagel's approach, and even his choice to focus on the image of the dead Christ, suits the conjunction of topics announced in his title? Certainly Nagel could not have taught us all he has about Michelangelo and the reform of art had he not thought so hard about the Man of Sorrows. Still, it is not always clear whether a consideration of that theme alone is sufficient for drawing conclusions about Michelangelo's attitudes toward the different media in which he worked. In discussing the Pieta that Michelangelo made for Vittoria Colonna about 1540, for example, Nagel suggests that the artist's interests both in making the work and in making a gift of it arose in relation to specific religious beliefs, above all the belief that salvation was a matter of divine grace rather than one of reward or exchange. The drawing, in other words, documents Michelangelo's commitment to the doctrine of justification by faith alone; it embodies Michelangelo's interest in making works of ar t "that would, so to speak, cease to be 'works' " (p. 175). Nagel is persuasive on the point, though it would be helpful to bear more about how that notion squares with Michelangelo's "retreat from painting to drawing," especially since much of the existing literature both on the artist's connections to Vittoria Colonna and on his involvement in reform movements focuses on the Last Judgment, a painting on which he had been working for years, and which was still under way when he made the drawing at issue. Whether Nagel were to follow Charles De Tolnay, who suggested that the fresco's depiction of the saved ascending through prayer "may be directly inspired by the doctrine of justification of faith alone," or Charles Dempsey, who noted that Gilio himself took the same details to represent acts of faith and who proposed that the fresco ultimately suggests Michelangelo's belief in the value of works, it would be useful to see how Nagel would position his views about the artist's "inclination to pursue these expl orations in a private sphere" (p. 169) within the literature and take Michelangelo's longest-thought-out and most monumental Christocentric painting into evidence. (1)

A related question might be raised with regard to the connection between Michelangelo's drawings and statuary. In considering the drawings, Nagel adduces some lines of poetry by Vittoria Colonna: "Con la piagata man dolce e soave/Giogo m'ha posto al collo, e lieve il peso/Sembrar mi fece col suo lume chiaro" (with his wounded hand he placed a sweet and gentle yoke on my neck, and with his bright radiance he made its weight seem light to me). He uses the lines to make a brilliant observation about Christ's yokelike form in a number of the drawings, though the nature of the connection is somewhat confused by an infelicitous translation of the Italian. Nagel's rendering of the lines-"with his wounded hand, soft and sweet, he placed a yoke on my neck, and his weight seemed to me to become light to me with his clear radiance" (p. 167)-displaces the modifiers and obscures the poem's reference to the "gentle yoke" of Matthew 11:30, a metaphor for submission to the Christian faith that reappears everywhere from the F ioretti of Saint Francis (36.5) to Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (41.55). If Colonna's poem is related to Michelangelo's drawings, and if its conceit treats the acceptance of Christ as a "sweet" yoke, it will be tempting to compare Colonna's poem with Michelangelo's own verses, wherein subjugation, ligature, and even "yoking" feature prominently (I think, for example, of his madrigal "Perch'e troppo molesta"--a version of which was dedicated to Colonna--which takes gift giving as its subject and begins with a reference to the "sweet grace that binds the soul). (2) Though the dates of these poems are still subject to question, positing such literary relationships may inform our impression of how Michelangelo's interests developed from one project to the next. Does the image of the desirable fetter, emerging as it does in Michelangelo's Pieta drawings, mark a withdrawal, or does it elaborate and refine themes Michelangelo had worked out earlier, in such ostensibly less devotional works as the Tityns or the so-called Slaves? And if there is a continuity between those sculptures and the drawings, just what kind of a "retreat" does the late sculpture, in its turn, represent? Nagel's claim that the Florence Pieta "was to be the first multifigure group carved from a single stone" (p. 202) is, in a certain sense, true, though we may wonder whether this way of putting things overinscribes the separation between that work and Michelangelo's earlier sculptural practice. (3) Is the integrity of the Piet & fundamentally different from the interlaced figures that had occupied Michelangelo earlier, in, say, the marble Victory or in the widely known and much-copied model he made for a monolithic Samson Slaying Two Philistines?

Michelangelo lived a long life and left a vast, dense oeuvre; it would be misguided to criticize a book, especially one as capacious as Nagel's, for not considering all of the artist's productions. Inasmuch as he takes Michelangelo's project of reform to hinge on the confrontation of Christian mysteries and pagan ones, however, Nagel's investigation into the image of the dead Christ is bound to raise questions for all aspects of Michelangelo studies, and even for our understanding of Renaissance art as a phenomenon. If it sometimes now seems that the monograph, as a standard art historical exercise, is falling from grace, Nagel's book may well exemplify the sort of study that can redeem it: not a survey of the artist's output, nor an illustrated biography, but a critical exposition of the artistic problems that occupied an age, and of the way those problems mattered for the individual's practice. Unsatisfied with the view that art can be accounted as an expression of personal circumstances or as a transparent fulfillment of a patron's interests (Nagel's reflections on the gift, in fact, raise the possibility of an art without patrons), Michelangelo and the Reform of Art demonstrates that media and formats have histories of their own, and that the relation between these and the individual objects that belong to them may be anything but easy.

David Franklin's new book illustrates a different sensibility and a different set of convictions about how the historian might get from an account of the artist to an account of the culture. Whereas Nagel's book is ultimately about genre, Franklin's is about style. Whereas Nagel looks to track the success and failure of the categories in which images exist, Franklin watches for the rise and fall of schools. Whereas Nagel tends to read sources for ideas, Franklin looks first for information. And whereas Nagel is concerned with eliciting a kind of coherence-what holds Michelangelo's early and late work together, what connects it to the painting around and before him-Franklin announces from his opening pages that he is more interested in heterogeneity than in general historical trends.

This is not to say that Franklin's book is not guided by a consistent set of interests. Painting in Renaissance Florence broadly follows the model of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, generating a canon by collecting a group of monographic portraits, and, as with the Lives, the book's patterns are frequently as fascinating as its anecdotes. Franklin's attention to the place of art in Florence, for example, allows him to demonstrate how a few locales evolved, over the years, into the city's major artistic crucibles. We read, for instance, about the Dominican church and monastery of S. Marco, the place where, earlier in the previous century, Fra Angelico had painted and Cosimo paler patriae had prayed, and whence, some decades later, the preacher--cum-civic leader Girolamo Savonarola emerged. In the early 16th century, the most important painter affiliated with the order there was Fra Bartolomeo, and Franklin argues that the workshop he assembled developed with such coherence and distinction that it could be associated w ith a "Dominican style." Similarly important, in Franklin's account, is the church of the 55. Annunziata. He suggests that the Annunziata, the church that would eventually become a base for the Accademia del Disegno, had served right from the start of the century as a venue for innovative painting. Leonardo, we learn, exhibited a cartoon, now lost, showing Saint Anne, the Virgin, the Christ Child, and John the Baptist in the church in 1501-an extraordinary event in its own right, and made all the more so if it is true, as Franklin allows, that Leonardo was not even making the work for that site. Vasari writes that when Perugino completed his Assumption of the Wrgin for the high altar, the Servites found it so boring that they turned it to face away from the public congregation space. While the story, as Franklin suggests, is probably untrue, it fits his account of how styles like Perugino's lost their force in the new century and contributes to an understanding of how the lay public (Vasari included) perceive d the importance of the site. These episodes make it easier to grasp why later in the century, it was in the Annuoziata that powefful court artists like Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Bologna wanted to erect their burial monuments and how, when Alessandro Allori unveiled a chapel in the same church in 1564, the paintings could provoke a phenomenon seldom associated with the unveiling of such works: an exchange of art critical sonnets. Franklin suggestively compares what was happening in the church, especially the series of frescoes that Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, and Jacopo da Pontormo executed in the atrium, with the challenges presented in another key space, the Sala del Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, where, from 1504, Leonardo and Michelangelo were working side by side on ill-fated large-scale paintings.

Another topic pursued throughout the book is that of the artist's curriculum. When, for example, Franklin underscores the importance of Leonardo's experimentation for Sarto's later exploration of the unifying effects of sfumatura, he also notes that the painters ultimately moved in opposite directions: whereas Leonardo tried to incorporate oil into his mural paintings, Sarto approached panel painting with a free, open handling that could have derived from his training as an affreschista. Though Francesco Salviati's greatest Florentine works are the monumental frescoes featuring Furius Camillus that he painted in the Sala dell'Udienza in the Palazzo della Signoria, Franklin points out that Salviati began as a goldsmith and suggests that the "decorative" nature of his style, his horror vacui, and his tendency to crowd spaces with ornamental detail might reflect that background. Beyond this, Franklin insists on the importance of following not only the Bildung of individual artists but also the development of lon g-enduring workshops. Not everyone, he asserts, shared Leonardo's conviction that it was the role of the ambitious artist to rethink the means and ends of painting. Denying that innovation was a universal value not only licenses Franklin to include less original artists, like Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, in his history, but also enables him to acknowledge the premium that extraordinary painters like Pontormo placed on the collective out of which they had come. Ultimately, the topic helps Franklin justify the boundaries he creates for the period his book treats: if Vasari's arrival in Florence marks the end of a tradition, one reason for this was that Vasari reorganized the painter's enterprise. Operating on a scale unprecedented in Florence, Vasari assigned the execution of his designs not to artists he himself had formed but to the most skilled young painters he could find. In many ways, Franklin observes, "Vasari had become a type of artist never before seen" (p. 240).

To follow the history of workshops and workshop training is to look at the nuts and bolts of period style, and it is not surprising that Franklin is critical of some earlier approaches to his subject. Franklin sets out, for example, to undermine the reductive, historically groundless stylistic categories that, as he sees it, continue to control our understanding of the period. We should not, he argues, categorize any of his book's paintings as "classicist" or "anticlassicist," as "High Renaissance or "Mannerist." Most of these concepts, he insists, are anachronistic, and none has satisfactory descriptive purchase for the art he is dealing with. "High Renaissance," for example, is inadequate because artists like Fra Bartolomen and Ridolfo Gbirlandaio, traditionally counted among its best representatives, do not actually bring any "Renaissance" to a culmination. Rather, they spin out conservative versions of an already entrenched style, pointedly resisting the challenges presented by artists like Leonardo. "Cla ssicism," for its part, fails because the qualities that define it have nothing to do with antiquity: "If there was an orthodoxy," Franklin writes, "it was best represented by the Umbrian Perugino and among Florentines Ridolfo and to some degree Fra Bartolomeo, but how their styles could be considered 'classical' in any very specific sense is most problematic, since the formal balance and unity of their work [were] largely the result of a repetitive working practice, rather than a distillation of qualities from ancient art" (p. 2). "Mannerism," finally, comes in for special abuse, on grounds that its Italian cognates, as used in the 16th century, point to styles that are actually antithetical to those normally associated with the phenomenon: "for Vasari and other contemporaries like Lodovico Dolce writing in Venice, the word [maniera] was most specifically elaborated relative to their critique of a routine art practice that produced monotonous images, such as those by Perugino, and not as a singular or positi ve term of style." It is misleading, he adds, when scholars today "expand on a term used in the period in a specifically pejorative sense to mean quite another style than that exemplified by artists such as Rosso or Perino del Vaga" (p. 14).

Such a challenge to the language of Renaissance art history is, at the very least, of potential heuristic value, for it steers us away from superficially appealing but ultimately vacant labels and forces us to look afresh at the relations between different pictorial projects. Many of the best passages in the book, moreover, are those in which Franklin offers his own descriptions of the interests that do characterize the most ambitious painting in the period. Franklin notes, for example, that the 16th century is distinguished by a new concentration on the creative process, or, as he puts it in a memorable formulation, on "design at the expense of execution" (p. 202). This, as Franklin sees it, was among Leonardo's fundamental legacies in Florence, demonstrating that one could, say, contemplate every brushstroke in a fresco or present drawings to a public. That virtually all the works both Leonardo and Michelangelo left to Florence were unfinished highlighted the processes by which those artists worked and sugg ested to their successors that the operations preliminary to a work's completion could themselves be so absorbing as to be endless. It is such a lesson that, in practice, led Pontormo to draw interminably in preparation for his fresco program in S. Lorenzo and that, in theory, underwrote Vasari's condemnation of Perugino, dependent as he was on cartoons recycled from other works, for his lack of invention.

This is not to say that Franklin's take on the period will convince everyone. His often polemical dialogues with the historiography of Florentine art, in fact, occasionally press their claims to the limits of the evidence. Franklin refers, for example, to "the definitions of 'mannerism' as outlined in the period by Paolo Giovio and Vasari" (p. 96), though he is certainly aware that Vasari never used the term manierismo (mannerism), only the term maniera (manner), and this in various senses, including one that Franklin himself implicitly follows when, on the book's first page, he notes that Vasari's maniera moderna "groups together artists from Leonardo to Francesco Salviati." When Franklin suggests that "devout classicism" is "something of an oxymoron" (p. 82) and that the ideal Dominican art was uncomplex, "lacking in formal artifice or distracting ornament of any kind" (p. 83), he illustrates the point with a woodcut from Savonarola's Verit & della Fede Christiana (published 1516), one that dedicates more s pace to the grotesques, spoglia, and all'antica decorations in the margins than it does to the image of the crucifix these frame.

While Franklin rejects broad stylistic labels in favor of chronological complexity and artistic diversity, furthermore, he draws provocative conclusions about who are and who are not the preeminent members of the Florentine school. It is striking, for example, that Bronzino is not a major player in the book. Certainly this cannot be because Bronzino was not Florentine through and through, or because his major works fall outside of Franklin's chronological guidelines: Bronzino was born in 1503, and many of his most celebrated paintings were completed in the 1530s and 1540s. While Leonardo and Michelangelo each get chapters, moreover, Raphael does not, though Raphael left far more paintings in the city than the other two combined. In this case, Franklin insists on the correctness of the omission, remarking that "Florence could not boast examples of Raphael as a mature public artist of real significance" (p. 3), that Raphael's Florentine works, predominantly paintings of the Holy Family, did not "change the face of art in that city," and that Raphael's real influence in Florence came only later. Such charges may be true, but as criteria, they set the bar for admission into the Florentine canon rather high, tending both to discount paintings Raphael made for other cities while working in Florence and to privilege monumental public commissions over works in other categories. They also discourage an interesting test of some of Franklin's broader theses: Raphael's Entombment, made for a church in Perugia, may not have changed the face of Florentine art, though Nagel, at least, contends that it represented a revolutionary fusion of the "classical" and the "devout"; Raphael's Florentine Madonnas, made for private homes, may have done little for Raphael's public standing as an artist, but inasmuch as they treat the devotional subject of the Holy Family in a pictorial language worthy of Venus and Cupid, they raise similar issues. If, to follow Franklin, the crucial conflict that launches the period is that between the obsti nate, nonprogressive style of Perugino and the relentlessly experimental naturalism of Leonardo, just where do works like these fall? Do they, in their sweetness and clarity, adhere to the retrograde manner of Perugino--an assertion that would raise questions about whether Perugino's style, in those years, could really count as a failed one--or do they, with their complex narrative actions, represent a kind of synthesis between Perugino and Leonardo, thus qualifying, at least as a matter of reception, the apparent irreconcilability of Perugino's and Leonardo's manners? The Florentine Raphael seems germane both for Franklin's periodization and for his interest in the complex relations that all of Florence's great visitors had with the city: surely it is remarkable that Leonardo's cartoon, exhibited in the Annunziata, and Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, the one major pictorial work he completed in the city, both belong to the genre in which Raphael, while in Florence, specialized.

In part, Franklin demotes Raphael in order to demarcate the Florentine and Roman schools, challenging the prominence Rome has had in the historiography. By dramatizing the arrivals in Florence of Salviati and Vasari, Franklin is able to sharpen the edges of his periodization; the chapter on Salviati is subtitled "Rome in Florence," because the Romanization of Florentine art is an interruptive event, bringing to an end a tradition that had previously been distinctive. There is, no doubt, an argument to be made for the insularity of Florentine Renaissance art, even if it will not always be an easy one. A good case study here might be Pontormo, an artist to whom Franklin attributes a "Florentine mindset," whose "desire for routine ensured that he never left Tuscany" (p. 208), and who, according to Franklin, is now marginalized by a historiography that has shifted the origins of the Mannerist style from Florence to Rome. It may be true that Pontormo never went to Rome and that he did not see firsthand the Roman w orks of Michelangelo (at present, the documents alone cannot settle the question). Is it possible, though, to imagine the S. Felicita Piela apart from the background of Michelangelo's Roman works (Nagel, for one, asserts that the painting is "polemically in the tradition of Michelangelo"), or the fresco designs for S. Lorenzo apart from the Sistine Chapel?

One must admire the rare combination of skills on which Franklin's book relies. It demonstrates long experience with primary documentary material, both published and unpublished, and with actual paintings, including many that are by relatively unknown artists and a few that are seldom on public display. That the book not only ventures substantial rereadings of the lives and work of many of the most important Florentine painters of the early 16th century but also offers synthetic presentations of figures like Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Franciabigio, and, not least, the painter Giorgio Vasari, should make it a basic resource for those in the field. Given the critical agenda Franklin sets, however, a word should also be said, finally, about another conviction that subtends the entire book, one concerning art history more generally and the way it should be practiced. As an argument, it emerges most explicitly toward the end, as Franklin comments on Lodovico Domenichi's dedication of his Alberti translation to Salviati: "Salviati earns the dedication of Alberti's book, not because he needs to read it, as Domenichi admits that the painter will even doubt the value of the text--an apparent admission of the futility of a literary source assisting in artistic practice and the sharp division between actual practice and what we might now classify as more academic art history" (p. 224). Franklin does not name his antagonists here, though it would be intriguing, given the oft-lamented rift between the practice of art history in museums and its practice in universities--and given Franklin's extensive experience both as a teacher and as a curator--to know more about what he objects to. Is it the idea that the notions about art that artists encountered in texts did not affect the way they approached their work? This would be an astonishing claim with regard either to Leonardo or to Michelangelo, the two fountainheads of the tradition Franklin is studying. Perhaps the idea is rather that theorists do not know enough about practice for their own texts to be useful--an idea that might explain why Franklin, though apparently sharing the dissatisfaction with terminology that, three decades ago, led writers like Michael Baxandall and David Summers to look to contemporary texts for language adequate to the period's art, does not wish to continue the project himself. Being an academic, I may not be disinterested enough to comment objectively on Franklin's comparison of the Renaissance translator and the modern art historian. I do wonder, though, whether readers will be convinced by a gloss on Domenichi's dedication that treats the text primarily as a condemnation of its own uselessness. An alternative (I owe this thought to Mary Pardo) would be to infer that Domenichi assumes Salviati has already learned the lessons Alberti's book contains. This reading, far from providing evidence for what Franklin calls "the theory-practice division in the period," would alert us to the importance of the new wave of texts. It would also grant significance to Do menichi's book as a publication, the first printing of Alberti in the vernacular, and just one moment in the remarkable emergence of a public art theory in the 1540s. (4) In my view, this phenomenon is difficult to separate from other circumstances Franklin discusses-the new interest in artistic process, the transformation of the artist's studio-but readers will have to decide for themselves how the writings and the paintings illuminate one another.

Notes

(1.) See Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 5, The Final Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 58; and Charles Dempsey, "Mythic Inventions in Counter-Reformation Painting," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 55-75, esp. 69-70.

(2.) See Cesare Guasti, ed., Le rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti, pillore, scultore e architetto (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1863), 29.

(3.) Nagel credits this idea to Irving Lavin, though there is no footnote, and no work by Lavin appears in the bibliography.

(4.) In a rare factual error, Franklin claims (p. 6) that Alberti's De Pictura was published in Latin in 1485 and in Italian in 1436. In fact, the first printed Latin edition appeared in 1540, and the first Italian in 1547, though the texts certainly circulated earlier in manuscript.

MICHAEL COLE teaches late Renaissance and Baroque art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author, most recently, of Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge) [Department of Art, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599].

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