The Florentine Tondo & "Cassone" Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. . - book review

ROBERTA OLSON

The Florentine Tondo

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 408 pp.; 12 color ills., 297 b/w. $145.00

CRISTELLE BASKINS

"Cassone" Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 278 pp.; 59 b/w ills. $80.00

Italian Renaissance art history has its version of literature's "genre studies--monographs focusing on particular categories of visual representation such as the altarpiece, the portrait, and tomb sculpture. (1) The two books under review here are studies of this kind: Roberta Olson looks at tondi--autonomous circular paintings and sculpture--while Cristelle Baskins concentrates on painted cassone panels that once adorned paired chests made for patrician weddings. It is usually assumed in art historical studies that these categories were recognized classifications during the time period and that significant cultural values were invested in the conventionalized formal features and characteristic typologies. In a contribution to a recent volume on the altarpiece, Paul Hills calls attention to some of the problems attending this approach to Renaissance art in an essay entitled "The Renaissance Altarpiece: A Valid Category?" While acknowledging that the altarpiece was a functional category in the period, he point s to a significant elasticity in design and designation and notes the absence of any discussion about altarpieces in theoretical writings about art. Furthermore, he cautions that the isolation of a representational genre "privileges paradigmatic relations (altarpiece as member of a class of objects) over syntagmatic relations (altarpiece as part of a larger whole--either the physical one of the chapel and church that houses the altarpiece, or the 'mental' one of contemporary needs, beliefs and attitudes). An art history that is to get beyond the stage of cataloguing needs to attend to both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, and it needs to be rather careful not to box itself within its own categories." (2) Hills does not propose that art historians abandon the study of categories, which he considers a valid tool of inquiry, only that these limitations be kept in mind. Another matter to consider is the ideological investment in this approach. Tracking the emergence of new representational forms and the ra dical transformation of traditional ones in Italy from the 14th to the 16th century is a hermeneutical enterprise intricately linked to perceptions about what is distinct and significant about this historical period. Determinations about artistic categories are fashioned by and, in turn, fashion "the Renaissance"--whether conceived of as a chronological demarcation or an episteme demonstrating pivotal cultural developments. The study of portraiture, for example, negotiates conceptions about the individual, identity, the self, and subjectivity--critical terms in Renaissance historiography. Furthermore, category designations are inevitably graded classifications that are privileged within the disciplinary practice of art history, and they do their job in mapping the cultural terrain. Portraits, altarpieces, and equestrian monuments receive considerable scholarly attention; other kinds of representational objects--engraved armor, ex-votos, and coins--find validation within a lower strata of classification as "or nament" or "material culture." (3) One can thus add to Paul Hills's script for effective art historical genre studies the need to reflect on the currency and ideological purchase of the categories tinder consideration, both within the historical culture and in modern art historical discourse.

Both the tondo and the painted cassone panel were treated in comprehensive, cataloguing monographs early in the 20th century: Moritz Hauptmann's Der Tondo: Ursprung und Bedeutung und Geschichte des italienischen Rundbildes in Relief und Malerei (Frankfurt, 1936) and Paul Schubring's Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienische Fruhrenaissance (Leipzig, 1915, 1923). These new publications by Roberta Olson and Cristelle Baskins represent timely reexaminations of the respective categories and highlight the diversity of historiographic perspectives and methodological approaches used by historians of quattrocento and cinquecento Italian art today.

Olson's study is the first extended account of the tondo since Hauptmann's monograph, published in 1936. While Olson narrows the geographic scope to Florence (perhaps too exclusively), she strives for comprehensive coverage. She chronicles the emergence of the independent tondo in Florence in the 1430s and its relatively brief apogee from 1480 to 1515. She provides a prehistory and an epilogue, explores the cultural significance of the circle, looks at the different media used and the typical subjects represented, and includes an appendix that falls just short of cataloguing the numerous extant tondi executed by painters who specialized in the form.

The tondo, much more so than the altarpiece, was not a clear-cut category in quattrocento and early cinquecento Florence. Olson devotes a chapter to the philology and usage of the term tondo, noting that the earliest textual incidence of the word is found in dolce stil nuovo verse, where it connoted the cosmos, completeness, and perfection. In reference to painting and sculpture, tondo was fundamentally a shape descriptor that was applied to a range of conventional subjects when they were composed in a round format. Paul Hills, when faced with terminological imprecision and diversity among the objects competing for classification in his consideration of altarpieces, reflected on the relative authority of the category designation. Olson responds by devising her own taxonomy. She makes a distinction between independent tondi--the principal focus of her study--and circular compositions that are embedded within larger decorative programs, which she terms "roundels." "Medallions," in turn, are round sculptural rel iefs that are larger than medals but smaller than the average independent tondo. Within Olson's classification, independent tondi can encompass round portraits, but the majority are what she calls "devotional tondi" representing the Madonna and Child, alone or with accompanying angels and saints. While there is little documentary information about the production and use of these tondi, inventories, commission records, and visual sources suggest that most were displayed within Florentine patrician residences, most frequently in the bedchamber and antechamber.

Olson begins her investigation with a standard preoccupation of art historical genre studies: the search for the origin of the form and the identification of influential precedents. Here she casts her net quite wide, exploring a variety of circular representations from classical antiquity through the 15th century: gems, mirrors, coins and medals, historiated stained-glass oculi windows, sacred figures within roundels in mural decoration, and birth trays (deschi da parto), among many others. She concludes that the tondo had a mixed lineage but considers the dominant prototype the classical imago clipeata, which displayed human figures against a round disk and was implicated in a cycle of creation, renewal, and apotheosis. (4) She also points to circular associations that quattrocento Florentines might have brought to the tondo, found in Neoplatonic thought, the writing of Dante, descriptions of visions of the Virgin Mary, and architectural theory and practice. She argues that these analogous circular associati ons carried with them connotations of divine perfection, harmony in the universe, the heavenly sphere, and theophany. Her treatment of both formal precedents and cultural analogues is superficial, however, and she makes little effort to suggest the mechanisms of transmission and association.

Olson's principal corrective to Hauptmann is a tighter contextualization in her discussion of the tondo. Contextual study has dominated recent quattrocento and cinquecento art history, enriching our understanding of the circumstances attending the production and use of works of art and their significance within the historical culture, but without necessarily putting pressure on traditional conceptions about the Renaissance. Olson sets out to show how "specific cultural, social, intellectual, and religious trends in Florence encouraged the flourishing of the form" and "when they ceased to exist as dominating forces its popularity declined" (p. 1). These trends include "the active involvement of the laity in religion ... and the growing piety of which the Savonarolan movement was only the tip of the iceberg" (p. 227). The cultural transformation that Olson is charting is "the complex and often contradictory privatization of the devotional image that accompanied the laicization of religious experience and a grow ing cultural pluralism" (p. 3). 0lson proposes that within the domestic secular environment where so many of the tondi were displayed, the circular form functioned to define a sacred space, articulate specific religious themes, and prompt devotional protocols.

Olson then confronts the problems endemic to any contextual account of art history--those of determining the relevant contingent historical conditions and related cultural practices, and of forging convincing connections between the works of art and their productive circumstances. Taking her cue from the domestic display and Holy Family subject matter characteristic of most tondi, she looks briefly at the patrician family in quattrocento Florence; attitudes toward childhood; the cults of the Virgin, Joseph, and the youthful Baptist; religious didactic exempla and pedagogy; and rosary devotion. I was persuaded that these contexts are all potentially relevant to the tondo, and only wished that she had explored them in greater and more nuanced detail, with more effective use of 15th- and early 16th-century Florentine primary source material. She constructs a web of suggestive interrelationships among tondi, historical events, cultural practices, and related texts and images but fails to give depth and dimension- -a sense of embeddedness--to her social history of the tondo. She is to be commended, however, for expanding the notion of the domestic environment to include residential suites in monastic institutions and in government buildings where tondi are documented, although this raises the question of whether different modes of viewing and devotional protocols would have operated in these spaces.

Context gives way to formal and symbolic analysis in the final chapters of the book, dedicated to sculpted and painted devotional tondi, and in the appendix on the painters of tondi. Here Olson proceeds tondo by tondo, providing extended readings of each work, into which she integrates observations about the setting, function, and circular significance of the tondo made in earlier chapters. She is very sensitive to the challenge that the circular composition posed for the artists and is aware of the complex formal dynamics at play within the works. Her general thesis is that through their circular shape and formal conventions, tondi signify the perfection, beauty, and harmony of the heavenly realm in a secular religious devotional context, where the sanctity and theological significance of the sacred figures are elaborated through symbolic metaphors. Too often Olson's approach to deciphering the language of visual representation is to offer linear symbolic equations, with a tendency toward overinterpretation, particularly where numbers are concerned. An arbitrary sampling is this passage on Luca Signorelli's fascinating Medici Madonna in the Uffizi (fig. 7.32): "It is significant that there are four [youths], the number of the earth and the material world from which Christians require cleansing. Moreover, to the right

grazes a white horse, which evokes a pastoral setting, but symbolizes baser qualities, like pride or lust, of the world ante legem" (p. 210). This mode of symbolic interpretation has a historical validity--in relation to medieval image theory (and its 15th- and 16th-century Italian variations) and to iconographic and iconological analyses inspired by Erwin Panofsky. It is most effective in art history when applied with a sensitivity to the historical specificity of symbols and their signification within particular discursive traditions; Georges Didi-Huberman's analysis of Fra Angelico's frescoes in S. Marco with reference to the Dominican exegetical tradition comes to mind. (5) Olson could have esta blished historically relevant symbolic associations by exploring the language of Marian devotion in contemporary prayers, laude, sermons, and popular devotional manuals. Furthermore, traces of the discursive contexts of these comparative symbolic references needed to be integrated into the fabric of Olson's argumentation, as she moved between images and texts--what will appear in Baskins's study as "intertextuality." Olson could also have found similar visual imagery in another category of religious representation: the Marian colmo da camera, a framed rectangular devotional panel, sometimes surmounted by an arch ("mezzo tondo"), which was often mounted on the wall in patrician bedrooms. The colmo da camera is the closest coguate to the tondo in the quattrocento in terms of subject matter and display, and artists generally produced both image types. The manner in which the standard Marian compositions were (or were not) altered to accommodate the tondo framing could potentially have enriched Olson's argument a bout the meaning of the tondo being bound to its circular form.

The history of the Florentine tondo as described by Olson is also a history of the visual arts in transition from the "Early Renaissance' to the "High Renaissance," with celebrated artists, successful works, and canonical masterpieces. According to Olson, the artist presiding over the heyday of the tondo's popularity was Sandro Botticelli, with his Madonna of the "Magnificat" in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, his supreme achievement. Important forays into the form were made by "all three stellar artists of the High Renaissance who worked in Florence": Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael (with Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolomeo appearing curiously as "smaller stars"; p. 1). Michelangelo's Doni Tondo uniquely has a subsection unto itself. This is an account of the tondo that privileges the classical revival and humanism. Olson's very compelling argument for the classical imago clipeata as the prototype for the autonomous tondo gives the genre an antique pedigree--although she herself demonstrates that th e imago clipeata was taken up in Early Christian art and also influenced 13thand 14th-century representations of the mature Christ and of the Virgin and Child. The use of the circular form in the architecture of Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi is also discussed, with a long digression on Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy in S. Lorenzo. Olson's Renaissance culture aspires toward "the simple perfection and harmony expressed by the circle" (p. 228). It is characterized by "the prevailing naturalistic aesthetic and increasing secularity" and witnessed the "lessening of religious demands made on works of art and an increased sensitivity to artists (the individual creativity factor)" (pp. 83-84)--an odd assertion given that the majority of tondi represent the Virgin and Child, and in highly repetitive and conventionalized formulas. This overarching interpretative framework prevents her from adequately exploring the cultural pluralism that she claims to be chronicling and from providing a more diversified a ccount of the production and use of tondi, for what emerges from brief passages in the text, the illustrations in the appendix, and throughout her excellent and thorough notes, is that tondi were implicated in an explosion in the Florentine market for domestic devotional works of art. By the middle of the 15th century, sculptural tondi were executed in multiple copies in terra-cotta, gesso, and cartapesta (papier-mache). Painted tondi were increasingly available by the 1480s in what must have been less expensive serial products that may have been within the means of low-ranking patricians and upwardly mobile artisans. One painted tondo by Domenico Ghirlandaio exists in six close copies and sixteen variants. A workshop organized by an artist known as the Pseudo Pier Francesco Fiorentino efficiently produced tondi with the aid of cartoons derived from paintings by Francesco Pesellino, Filippo and Filippino Lippi, anti Leonardo da Vinci. The market, during this significant moment of change in constimption habits and the technologies of artistic production, is surely another relevant context for the tondo.

Olson's Florentine Tondo, with its broad coverage and ample illustrations, should replace Hauptmann's earlier work as the authoritative study of the tontlo. Olson is partially involved in a cataloguing operation, but she also strives to situate the tondo within a representational tradition and in relation to specific social and cultural practices. From a taxonomic and semantic point of view, however, Olson's isolation of the tondo for consideration raises certain questions. Was the tontlo really a distinct discursive form that performed a unique series of cultural functions through its circular composition and framing and characteristic imagery? Or does the tondo sit more comfortably when understood as a compositional variation available within diverse categories and modes of visual representation--Marian devotional panels and relief sculpture (not intendeti for altars), painted portraits, sculptural busts, heraldry, and architectural embellishment--where the circular element was exploited, to a greater or le sser extent, as a means of structuring formal articulation anti as a carrier of significant cultural meaning?

Paintetl cassoni--known own as forzieri in the 15th century-represent a more circumscribeci category than the tondo. Cristelle Baskins is concerned with a particular variation of ornamented wooden chest that was commissioned exclusively at the time of marriages, displayed within the nuptial bedroom, and associated with the bride's trousseau, which constituted part of the dowry. The significant cost of these cassoni restricted their circulation to the patrician rank. Documentary and physical evidence suggests that the chests were ordered in pairs, predominantly in Florence, from the late 14th through the end of the 15th century. The narrative subjects that frequently adorned them were secular, taken from a range of sources: classical history and mythology, chivalric romances, vernacular novelle, Florentine military history, and l4th-century literary classics by Giovanni Boccaccio anti Francesco Petrarch. There is a much more extensive literature on the cassone narrative panel than on the tondo, including two m onographs published just prior to Baskins's book. (6) Baskins notes, however, in an excellent historiographic section, that as early as the mid-l6th century in Vasari's Lives, there has been a tendency to dismiss cassoni as ornamental furniture unworthy of serious consideration, in spite of the fact that the painted narratives represent subjects that were of interest to quattrocento humanists and to modern scholars.

In contrast with Olson's comprehensive treatment of the tondo, Baskins is very selective. She focuses exclusively on narrative representations of female heroines from classical antiquity. Her stirdy is broad-reaching, however, in the range and diversity of the historical material that she brings to her analysis of the cassone imagery and in the interpretative methods used. She is interested in how female exemplarity and heroism are constructed in texts and images and how these constructions functioned ideologically within humanist discourse and in relation to the Florentine patrician family. Influenced by poststructuralist discourse theory, she exposes contradictions, tensions, and overdeterminations of meaning embedded within the painted narratives. Baskins's book is published in the series Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism; it is an interdisciplinary study drawing on feminist and gender theories, narrative studies, and reception history.

In the introduction, appropriately entitled "Object Lessons," it becomes immediately evident that for Baskins, cassone panels do not exist in isolation as members of a class of paintings but are "always already" situated within an elaborate historical, cultural, and interpretative matrix. It is this syntagmatic embecldedness that interests Baskins and is the focus of her study. Succinct terminological clarification and morphological definition are provided, but only after Baskins has glossed a passage from Alberti's Della famiglia to demonstrate how a cassone could function as a metaphor for the household and its management, a synecdoche for the wife within the domestic economy, an occasion for moralizing instruction, and a manifestation of the tension in normative gender roles. Self-conscious about her position as an interpreter of 15th-century Florentine culture, she qualifies the nature of her critical intervention. Her account of cassone narratives works to resituate the genre from the margins to a more c entral position within 15th-century Italian art history because the paintings "have something to teach us about iconography, humanism, and identity in early modern Italy." She emphasizes that her interpretations are tied to the particular set of interests that she brings to her inquiry and "do not preclude readings generated in other contexts and by other viewers" (p. 25).

Baskins focuses on a different classical female protagonist in each of the six chapters: the Amazon Emilia, the Carthaginian queen Dido, the Volscian warrior Camilla, the Sabme wife Hersilia, the Roman matron Lucretia, and the Roman maiden Virginia. Each chapter also addresses important social relationships and passages associated with 15thcentury Florentine patrician marriage and related cultural discotirses, presaged in the clever chapter headings. "Hersilia and the Sabine Women: Piece Making," for example, examines cassone panels depicting the conflict between the Romans and the Sabines attributed to the Master of Marradi, Lo Scheggia, and Jacopo del Sellaio. Baskins reconstructs the critical reception of the Sabine story through readings of Livy, Saint Augustine, Petrarch, and Giovanni Lomazzo. Passages from texts by the Florentine humanists Leo-nardo Bruni, Matteo Palmieri, and Lorenzo Valla are analyzed that link the Sabine rape and the foundation of ancient Rome with the institution of matrimony and th e stability of the Florentine Republic. Baskins considers the representation of the women peacemakers and the male abductors in the story from Roman history in light of 15th-century Florentine social anxieties about female empowerment and masculine aggression. She sets the dealings between the Sabines and Romans--hostile tribes joined through marriage--alongside 15th-century patrician lineages negotiating matrimonial union, preoccupied with property exchange, patrilineal continuity, and legitimacy. Baskins's implicit argument throughout the book is that the cassone narratives produced for marriages engaged with contemporary social practices and attitudes related to both matrimony and the patriarchal order that it sustained. Humanist rhetoric is shown to have provided a moralizing framework within which the classical subjects were perceived.

Baskins treats painted cassone narratives as polysemic configurations that are also social "sites of contestation, negotiation, or transformation among makers, recipients, and viewers" (p. 19). The paintings veil, mask, condense, mystify, offset, and reveal tensions and contradictions in the competing ideological positions that they are called on to uphold. The multiplicity of meanings is also presented as a product of a varied spectatorship. She considers the gender of the viewer, her or his level of education, familiarity with the classical and vernacular sources, and familial role in relation to the matrimony commemorated by the cassoni. The viewing of cassone narratives is conceived of as an active process, through which patrician men and women absorbed moralizing messages, reconciled conflicts by sublimating desires and displacing anxieties, and projected their own fantasies and desires into the stories by constracting particular meanings from a range of possible significations that had currency in the p eriod. But qoattrocento viewers could also "read against the grain" of normative misogynist rhetoric, and Baskins, with her highly nuanced, complexly layered analyses, encourages modern readers to do the same.

The interpretation bolstered by critical theory that Baskins offers leads to a more complex and multifaceted account of the objects under scrutiny than Olson's approach yields. An example can be seen in their different treatment of how images may have served as exempla within the Florentine patrician domestic sphere. Olson argues that tondi representing the Holy Family functioned as didactic exempla prescribing ideal comportment for family members within the context of a nuclear family structure. This conclusion is presented uncritically, in a positive light, with some confusion about the relevance of the nuclear family configuration to the patricians who owned these images at a time when the patrician domicile was occupied by an extended family. Olson celebrates the family values promoted by the tondi: paternal nurturing; maternal piety, chastity, and fertility; and health, beauty, and innocence in children. There is little attempt to understand how these particular values functioned ideologically. Baskins l ikewise observes that the antique heroines represented on cassoni potentially could have provided instructional examples for women in the home: Camilla as a model virgin daughter; Hersilia as an exemplary wife and kinswoman; and Dido as the ideal chaste widow. Baskins, however, presents these readings as open-ended, dialogic, and unstable, demanding further critical scrutiny. She emphasizes that there were multiple interpretations of these heroines available to quattrocento viewers in the divergent literary treatments of the classical heroines in circulation at the time. Dido appears in Petrarch's Trionfi, in Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women, and in the writings of early Christian theologians as the chaste widow of Sychaeus who refuses remarriage; in Virgil's Aeneid and Boccaccio 's vernacular amatory verse, she is the passionate, spurned lover of Aeneas. The cassone panels, in turn, tend to emphasize "an empowered and propertied Dido," shown as the ruler of Carthage responsible for ennobling the city with architectural monuments, with her suicide rarely represented. This depiction of Dido, however, is presented not as an affirmative example of female worth but as a textual negotiation. Dido and Carthaginian splendor provide a "feminized refuge" for the Trojan heroes in the narrative, and for 15th-century viewers, to reflect on history, although it ultimately must be resisted in the process of "interrogat[ing] political and sexual manhood" (p. 68). "Domestic pictures, then, do not fit into an iconographic type exclusively celebrating or condemning Dido; rather, they veil the patrilineal succession of empire in an amatory narrative where desire might appear to operate independently of power" (p. 74).

The broader sociohistorical and cultural context for understanding the cassone narratives emerges directly out of Baskins's readings of the classical sources and the 15th-century texts and images featuring the antique heroines. Context is built up through the analysis of the discursive negotiations manifest in the texts and images--but it is not the more familiar context of Italian Renaissance art history constructed around the documentation of the patronage, production, and display of works of art and affixed to the specific identity of artists, clients, and institutions. Baskins's context involves a linkage of "the social and the textual," but one where the social is defined in terms of depersonalized structuralist configurations like the family and the state, and it is embedded within discourse--in textual formations and inter-textual relationships and at enunciation sites. While she is interested in the painters, patrons, and viewers of painted cassoni, they appear in her discussions as abstract positions rather than as documented, historically situated Florentines. Nor does she relate the cassone panels to specific patrician marriages--although this would have been difficult, given that the particular paintings that interest her are not documented. (7) Such a lack of attention to historical specificity suggests that Baskins is privileging discursive formations in language, and institutional and social formations in society, as determining factors in the shaping of historical incident. This becomes problematic in her account when her subtle readings of texts and images and provocative intertextual juxtapositions seem insufficiently anchored to differentiated quattrocento Florentine social configurations, documented examples of visual literacy and reading practices (particularly regarding "low-brow" literary forms), synchronic events, and topical concerns. It is also curious--although rather refreshing--that in this study of quattrocento patrician culture, marriage, and humanism, the Medici family is rarely me ntioned. The Medici sponsored humanist endeavors, arbitrated in cultural affairs, and brokered patrician marriages. One example where Medici interests are clearly articulated within quattrocento Florentine marriage imagery is in Botticelli's spalliere (painted wainscoting) depicting Boccaccio's tale of Nastagio degli O-nesti, painted to commemorate a marriage between members of the Pucci and Bini families in 1483. The Medici arms appear at the center of two of the four panels, asserting Lorenzo de' Medici's role in bringing together the two patrician lineages. Furthermore, many of the cassone and spalliera narratives that Baskins discusses can be considered manifestations of what has been called the "Latinate vernacular expression" that was fostered by the Medici--particularly by Lorenzo--whereby classical authors and more recent Tuscan poets and artists were celebrated within a rhetoric of Florentine cultural renewal (renovatio). (8)

The theoretical apparatus is very much in evidence throughout Baskins's book, as the author situates herself within critical debates and highlights her interpretative strategies. While she employs the vocabulary of post-structuralist critical theory, she avoids unnecessary jargon and, given the density of the material, she writes with impressive clarity. Readers unfamiliar with this kind of methodological approach, however, may experience some resistance, but I would encourage them to persevere. Baskins does not lose sight of the material objects and the broader historical context in the course of her analysis, and she impresses on the reader the importance of the social and cultural problems addressed by the interpretative schemes that she employs. Deconstruction offers a more complex account of the process of signification within quattrocento texts and images than do traditional literary and iconographic analyses. Social anthropology is called on to explain the role of women within matrimonial exchange in p atriarchal societies. A conception of ideology derived from Louis Althusser facilitates movement between the representational and the social orders. Psychoanalytic theory demonstrates how certain representations of classical heroines register male fears of disempowerment in their constructions of female sexuality. Nor does a chapter stand or fall with the relative success of a particular application of critical theory. Anyone not convinced by the full extension of one of Baskins's polemics can find ample satisfaction in the richly layered arguments within each chapter.

Baskins's study is heavily dependent on textual analysis, and her principal model for interpreting representation is a literary one. She participates in a highly informed and articulate dialogue with feminist and post-structuralist revisionist studies of classical and early modern Italian literary culture. When she turns from primary and secondary literature to the cassone panels and 15th-century Florentine visual culture, her analysis is not always as thoroughgoing or suggestive. Part of the problem may stem from the fact that she lacks scholarly accompaniment when she engages in critical deconstructions of the visual narratives; in the field of quattrocento art history she is a pioneer. The "readings" of the paintings that she does offer can be illuminating. In her interpretations of the visual images, she appropriates deconstructive techniques and literary concepts like "intertextuality," and art history's traditional tools of formal analyses are redeployed. Baskins points to discursive strategies like "na rrative dilatation" in the Dido cassoni, where "the ornamental or 'trivial' elaborations of the plot" (p. 59) are prominently featured and a "dilatory space" (p. 59) is created by architectural structures to keep the beholder's attention lingering on particular scenes. She views the centralized focus and bilateral symmetry within Lo Scheggia's long horizontal frontal The Reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines as a visual form of the "unification rhetoric" found in Livy's and Plutarch's accounts (p. 117). Spalliere and cassone panels representing the story of Virginia are shown to utilize the vanishing area and peripheral zones of perspective constructions to articulate different points of view and levels of dramatic awareness among the protagonists. The treatment of the visual material in the chapter on Virginia is particularly satisfying, with Baskins maintaining that the pictorial cycles functioned differently from textual accounts in suspending narrative closure and offering the viewer "an unrelieved spectacle of immanent pain and torment" (p. 184), rather than aestheticizing Virginia's death within a rhetoric of consolation. Still, Baskins could have illustrated more intertextual and dialogic relationships between cassone imagery and other forms of visual representation throughout the book, demonstrating how artistic influence and style can also be understood as discursive maneuvers and textual effects. Why, for example, is a cassone panel depicting the story of Camilla (in the Fine Arts Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, fig. 26) so evocative of Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano scenes (painted after 1432)? Does the cassone imagery enter into some kind of dialogue with Uccello's acclaimed spalliera decorations? It is possible that the cassone panel reflects a recirculated design from Uccello's workshop where cassoni were painted. (9) Even so, Roman battle in the cassone scene and contemporary Florentine victory in Uccello's spalliere are staged in a similar visual idiom, suggesting a 15th-century Florentine conflation of ancient Roman and modern history linked to ideas about historical succession and Florentine destiny--a subject that Baskins develops elsewhere in the book. Another example concerns the little boy fondling his genitals in Lo Scheggia's Hersilia Reconciles the Romans and the Sabines in Ecouen (fig. 39), interpreted by Baskins as a manifestation of anxieties about legitimacy and the succession of the paternal line. This is a possible reading in the context of the Sabine narrative. However, this kind of figure appears throughout Lo Scheggia's cassone panels and birth trays and was to become a standard feature on decorated objects related to childbirth. (10) In Lo Scheggia's paintings young boys grapple and tug at each other's hair and genitals, boys' bare bottoms are in abundant display, servants fall asleep, and dogs nip at hosing. While Baskins understandably avoids extended discussions about the authorship of cassone panels, given that so many of the attributions are debated, Lo Scheg gia, as he has emerged in studies published after Baskins's book appeared, would seem to be a painter who employed ludic transgression as a means of enlivening and enriching his pictorial imagery. (11) Transgressive play at the margins of more serious narratives is found in other representational genres, including manuscript illumination and monumental figure sculpture, such as Donatello's Judith and Holofernes, where classical putti cavort in the reliefs along the triangular base, thematizing the drunkenness of Holofernes. In the dialogic play in Lo Scheggia's cassone panels, the humorous vignettes--some of which feature a prepubescent inversion of male sexual potency--have the potential to undermine the seriousness of the presentation of classical history and the corresponding moral high ground and gender politics. They function somewhat like the depictions of the lovesick Virgil mocked by Febilla in domestic painting that Baskins discusses, reverberating against canonical representations and enhancing the possibility of reading against the grain while generating pleasure and delight in the beholder. The representation of vigorous and healthy male children associated with the imagery of childbirth also placed the cassone paintings more directly at the service of the reproductive needs of the patrician family.

The cassone panels in museum and private collections that Baskins considers are fragments and imaginative reassemblages. Very few chests still remain intact with their full array of painted panels and original carpentry. (12) In her readings of the narrative cycles represented on cassoni, Baskins might have done more to reconstruct and take into consideration the original physical disposition of the panels on the different registers of the low cassone--the long horizontal frontal, the backboard, the square terminal testate, and the underside of the lid--and the physical act of viewing the stories while moving around the three sides of the paired cassoni, looking down from above or squatting low to the ground. Furthermore, the fragmentary detached state of the cassone panels with which Baskins deals is potentially a severe limitation to the kind of fine-tuned readings that she is proposing, where the choice of episodes, their sequence and omission, and the cropping and framing of scenes are considered textual strategies and effects. She works against these conditions, however, by using paired frontals and related testate whenever she can and by establishing the prevailing narrative conventions with reference to as many surviving examples as possible. Her interpretations, though, assume a high level of articulateness, expressivity, and legibility within the formal vocabulary of cassone narration. But in viewing the actual panels the painted narratives on cassoni are not often easy to decipher (and can be close to illegible in the black-and-white illustrations arbitrarily cut along the center crease of this Cambridge University Press publication). The scenes displayed on the long front panels are packed with multiple vignettes containing crowds of small-scale gesticulating figures. The narratives are difficult to follow, and the subjects are hard to identify; for these reasons, painters sometimes included name labels above the principal protagonists. (In this regard, Lo Scheggia's humor may have functioned to create sites of fascination, rewarding the viewers' concentrated engagement with the cassone imagery.) Cassone panels are not drawnout predella narratives or extended fresco scenes. Nor are they composed according to Alberti's prescriptions for effective istoria. A different sort of representational economy is involved here. I would argue that there is some resistance within the form itself to narrative exposition. On the one hand, cassoni may have been domestic conversation pieces where viewers played together at working out the complicated subjects depicted. On the other hand, the pictorial narratives seem to compete with, or stand in tension with, the "objectness" and materiality of the chests. While Baskins argues that this kind of "positioning of ... 'splendor' against 'significance"' that I am proposing results from the conflation of gender ideology and aesthetics in scholarly discussions about costume and ornament (p. 13), when applied to cassoni it may constitute a valid reading of a representational confli ct within the form itself, tied to the function and status of the chests within the patrician palazzo. The multiplicity of incident in the narratives, the bright colors, and the heavy gilding and pastiglia decoration all signify that these are costly material objects, conspicuously calling attention to matrimonial expenditure and their status as familial possessions. In discussing the lavish ornamentation found within cassone narratives, Baskins considers the valence of ornament within artistic and rhetorical theory, sumptuary laws, and conduct literature. But ornament was also an articulate sign of monetary outlay. Expenditure could be read in the material and representational features of cassone: the costly gold and silver leaf, the investment of artisanal time evident in the elaborate pastiglia and sgraffito work, the intricate painted patterns, and the fictive architectural decoration. This imperative for material richness within cassoni may also explain why, by the early 16th century, painted scenes ceas ed to be represented on the chests. As a greater value came to be placed on the aesthetic and rhetorical powers of painting, pictorial narrative within the nuptial chamber was relocated to more prominent shoulder-level wainscoting (spalliere) and bed heads, and the painted figures became larger and the stories more legible. (And in fact, Baskins's most extended and penetrating discussions of pictorial narrative come about when she is dealing with paintings that were probably spalliere rather than cassone panels.) Cassoni continued to be manufactured in the 16th century, but with carved and inlaid all'antica ornament and grotteschi serving as the dominant representational idioms.

What sort of 'Renaissance" surfaces within Baskins's study of cassone panels? She pointedly uses the expression "Early Modern" in the title of her study, suggesting a self-consciousness about recent debates over periodization and nomenclature. Uncharacteristic of mainstream quattrocento and cinquecento art historical scholarship are her inattention to problems related to the authorship and the dating of the cassone panels and her tendency to review a group of paintings representing similar narrative subjects together (as opposed to emphasizing the integrity of a single authorial product). The Florentine cultural scene that she elaborates is not shaped by outstanding or even second-rate artistic personalities--these are not the identity formations that interest her, nor is she trying to elevate the genre by demonstrating that Uccello and Botticelli were accomplished contributors. The painters appear as name labels attached to the discursive positions encoded within the paintings that she analyzes. Baskins does , however, engage directly with one of the most privileged subjects within traditional accounts of the Renaissance: humanism and the classical revival. While she acknowledges the importance of humanism as an influential and revealing cultural discourse in 15th-century Italy, she joins a growing number of art historians in offering a revisionist account of humanism as it relates to the visual arts. Baskins deconstructs the "notions of exemplarity, historicity, and feminine virtue" that are embedded within humanist discourse and within classicizing imagery from the period (p. 11). She moves beyond the conception of the antique revival as a dialectical process motivated by a sense of melancholic loss that is offset through an enabling recovery by considering "Renaissance encounters with ancient exempla in terms of psychic defense, as screens of mastery enabling the formation of identities" (p. 72). Baskins makes an important contribution to the study of the reception of Virgil and Livy in 15th-century Italy with her analysis of the transformation of the classical sources within 14th- and 15th-century texts and the reception of texts and images within the domestic sphere by learned and unlearned women and men. Furthermore, Baskins enriches the model for cultural transmission in the visual arts with the concept of "hybridity." Classical subjects appear in cassone narratives in a hybrid form, where the antique sources are reconfigured in relation to competing discursive forms and cultural agendas: humanist rhetoric, chivalric romance, Christian theology and hagiography, and a pictorial narrative tradition. The painted marriage chest, as a distinct discursive form and site of negotiation, is shown to be made up of permeable, flexible formal and syntactic structures that can accommodate a variety of representational modes and enter into dialogue with other representational categories. Considered from this perspective, challenges to the authority of the representational category or genre can be located within the painting s themselves.

While Baskins's "Cassone" Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy constitutes an important intervention in cassone studies, its considerable value lies in the challenging way that the author opens up art historical inquiry to new methodological approaches and considerations. Her book should have a substantial impact within the interdisciplinary nexus of art history, gender studies, history, and literature, Here she offers scholars a powerful model for incorporating into cultural studies complex readings of images that demonstrate a disciplinary training in, and understanding of, visual representation.

Notes

(1.) In contrast with literary genre studies, however, where the preoccupation with genre dates back to ancient Greek debates about poetics, in artistic discourse the critical evaluation of art according to object type and corresponding subject matter began in earnest in the 17th century, entering into academic debate in the following century.

(2.) Paul Hills, 'The Renaissance Altarpiece: A Valid Category?" in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 36.

(3.) For an example of an extremely insightful analysis of a category of visual representation outside the domain of traditional art history, see the readings of printers' signs by Paul Gehl and Kevin Stevens, "The Eye of Commerce: Visual Literacy among the Makers of Illustrated Books in Italy," to be published in the conference acts of "The Art Market in Italy: 15th--17th Centuries," organized by Syracuse University and Georgetown University (Florence, June 19-21, 2000).

(4.) The relationship between the tondo and the image clipeata has also been pointed out by Kim Butler in her work on Raphael's tondi: "'... la natura non cerca quasi altra forma': Concepts of 'Tondo' and 'Grace' in Raphael's Madonnas," lecture given at the Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies, Villa Spelman, Florence, a Johns Hopkins University forum, Apr. 27, 1998.

(5.) Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico; Dissemblance et figuration (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); translated as Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

(6.) Jerzy Miziolek, Soggetti classici sui cassoni fiorentini alla vigilia del Rinascimento (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki, Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1996); and Graham Hughes, Renaissance Cassoni; Masterpieces of Early Italian Art; Painted Marriage Chests, 1400-1550 (London: Art Books International, 1997).

(7.) For an example of a contextual analysis of a documented pair of painted cassoni, see Patricia Rubin's discussion of the cassoni by Biagio d'Antonio and Jacopo del Sellaio in the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London, commissioned by Lorenzo Morelli in 1472 to commemorate his marriage to Vaggia dei Nerli, in Patricia Rubin and Alison Wright, eds., Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s (London: National Gallery, 1999), 316-17.

(8.) See Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's "Primavera" and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorento the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

(9.) Laurence Kanter, "The 'cose piccole' of Paolo Uccello," Apollo 152 (Aug. 2000): 11-20.

(10.) Jacqueline Musacchio discusses representations of frolicking naked boys on birth-related imagery in The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 126-27.

(11.) Luciano Bellosi and Margaret Haines, Lo Scheggia (Florence: Maschietto e Musolino, 1999); and Laura Cavazzini, ed., Il fratello di Masaccio: Giovanni di Ser Giovanni delta to Scheggie (Florence: Maschietto e Musolino, 1999); both volumes were published on the occasion of an exhibition on Lo Scheggia in S. Giovanni Valdarno (Feb. 14-May 16, 1999).

(12.) See Ellen Callmann, "William Blundell Spence and the Transformation of Renaissance Cassoni," Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 338-48.

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