Guido Rebecchini. Private Collectors in Mantua: 1500-1630.

Brown, Clifford M.

Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2000. Pbk. 490 pp. + 43 b/w pls. index, illus. append. tbls. 60.50 [euro]. ISBN: 88-8498-049-6.

From its inception at the end of the nineteenth century, research concerning the Gonzaga clan has been based on those chancery records which are found in the Mantua State Archives. Dating from the late fourteenth through the early eighteenth century, this rich corpus provides an abundance of information regarding all facets of life in Renaissance Italy, from the political to the familial as well as the commissioning and collection of works of arts. If they have one outstanding shortcoming, it is that these records say little about the possessions of the members of the Mantuan elite. Accordingly, the books they owned, the paintings they commissioned, and the antiquities they acquired have gone largely undocumented. The situation has taken a dramatic turn now that attention has been focused on the offerings of the Notary Archives where, for example, Rodolfo Signorini located the 1510 inventory of the possessions of Andrea Mantegna's son (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 [1996]: 103-18). More recently vols. 60 (1997) and 61 (1998) of the same journal included Guido Rebecchini's account of the Maffei family inventory as well as the listing of what Camille Castiglione inherited from his famous father, Baldassare.

In the book under review, Guido Rebecchini examines 130 years of Private Collectors in Mantua, and he does so in a work that inaugurates a new and exciting era in Mantuan archival studies. Other matters aside, he has established that the Correggio Venuses in London and Paris came into the possession of the Gonzaga family from Nicola Maffei's heirs and also that Nicola Maffei was the patron of the Titian Supper at Emmaus. As a result of painstaking and systematic research, Rebecchini has shed new light on the sections of the Michelangelo Battle of Cascina cartoon that belonged to the Mantuan branch of the Strozzi family. It remains unlikely that Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga's apparent failure to obtain the "cartoni di Michelagnolo," can be used, however, to support the assumption that the duke indeed had "little enthusiasm (...) for collecting art." But this is a minor point of disagreement with an author whose conclusions are by and large beyond reproach.

Given their length, and with the notable exception of the one belonging to Castiglione, the transcriptions of the other inventories do not include the approximately 1,600 titles owned by the Calandra family or the some 1,200 books in the collection of Marcello Donati. There is reason to believe and hope that the author will attend to them on another occasion. A lucid overview of artistic patronage in Mantua during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries prefaces the chapters devoted to the Maffei, Castiglione, Strozzi, and Calandra families whose family's inventories are transcribed in the appendices. In addition, an accounting is given of the early-seventeenth-century accountings of the Donati, Petrozzani, Avellani, and Chieppio collections. By way of conclusion the author sets the Mantuan situation in the larger contexts of North-Italian collectors; there is also a chapter on "Art and Display" which contains a number of tables that graphically show the number and type of objects in the collections owned by various individuals. The inclusion of genealogical tables and biographical information on the main collectors is particularly useful.

Depending on interests, the individual reader will focus on different aspects of this publication. For this reviewer the discussion of the foundry in the Calandra palace was particularly fascinating; it being Federico, for example, who wrote that oft-quoted letter of 1498 regarding the devices prepared by Gian Cristoforo Romano for the ornamentation of a cannon.

Private Collectors in Mantua is a book clearly destined to have a long shelf life, pointing as it does in the direction of bringing the discourse out of the Ducal Palace and into the residences of the citizenry. At a time when archival work is increasingly being done by "committee"--such as the Florentine Medici Grand Ducal project and the Mantuan team that has prepared the Mantuan databank dealing with the reigns of Guglielmo and Vincenzo I Gonzaga, which have appeared in published form as the Fonti, repetori e studi per la Storia di Mantova--it is comforting to know that there are those such as Rebecchini who are unwilling to seek out shortcuts (which contain inherent dangers) but rather fix on a subject and systematically follow through with all its twists and turns.

CLIFFORD M. BROWN

Carleton University

Ottawa, Canada