Response: Nihil sub Sole Novum

Abstract

23. Petrarch, of course, wrote two sonnets {Rime sparse, 77 and 78) about Simone's portrait of Laura: Ma certo il mio Simon fu in Paradiso / onde questa gentil donna si parte; / ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte / per far fede qua giu del suo bel viso. Aside from her telltale blonde hair, the Madonna Simone painted in the Annunciation also follows other normative conventions describing the poet's beloved. See Demp sey, Portrayal of Love, 53-64; and the classic article by Elizabeth Crop per, On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernac ular Style, Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 374-94. 24. E. H. Gombrich, and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art His tory and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals, in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 81-98, esp. 96. The comparison is odd, for, while Raphael is famous for his Madonnas, the Protestant Rembrandt painted few of them. Gombrich was surely thinking, as Elizabeth Cropper has suggested to me, of the long gallery of the Zwinger in Dresden, at one end of which is hung Raphael's Sis tine Madonna and at the other, facing it on axis, Rembrandt's famous Self-Portrait in which he raises a roemer aloft and bounces Saskia on his knee.