Joyce de Vries . Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy . (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2010. Pp. xviii, 303. $124.95.

Abstract

Despite the recent surge in scholarship on the political agency and cultural patronage of Renaissance court women, such figures (for example Isabella d'Este of Mantua and Caterina Sforza of Imola and Forlı`) have not until very recently been subjects of modern, critical, monographic treatment. The publication of Joyce de Vries's study on Sforza helps to close this gap with respect to one of the most well-known but, as the author makes clear, least understood female figures of the period. Its treatment of the totality and power of court culture, which interwove the arts and patronage, ceremony and ritual, and policymaking, strongly recalls Gregory Lubkin's A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1994). Unlike Lubkin, de Vries focuses on a peripheral rather than central and female-rather than male-centered courtly environment. Although not strictly speaking a biography, de Vries treats Sforza (the illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza) as both wife of Girolamo Riario (1477–1488) and later widow/regent (1488–1500) of his territories in chapters on court ceremony, architecture, the splendor of material culture, and religious and literary patronage. Crucially, de Vries shows in several examples how these categories worked in tandem to foster courtly magnificence, illustrating that the plastic arts of silver, ceramics, jewels, and textiles formed a significant portion both of the culture of display, and of the overall financial value of goods. Further, as she shows, such materials, together with painting, sculpture, and architecture, set the stage for rituals of power: weddings, funerals, and entrances.