Review: Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, by Fabrizio Nevola

Abstract

Fabrizio Nevola ; Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City ; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, 320 pp., 60 color and 190 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780300126785 In the collective imagination, the city of Siena is synonymous with the Middle Ages. This image is deeply rooted and continues to be cherished in tourist guides with titles like Mauro Civai and Enrico Toti's Siena: The Gothic Dream (Siena: Edizione Alsaba, 1992). Only in the last two decades has scholarly interest widened beyond the medieval to the Renaissance period. Important steps in bringing Renaissance Siena to the consciousness of a larger public were taken with the pioneering exhibition Painting in Renaissance Siena: 1420––1500 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988 and the comprehensive Sienese shows Francesco di Giorgio e il Rinascimento a Siena, 1450––1500 , and Francesco di Giorgio architetto , both held in 1993 (with catalogs published by Electa in Milan). Fabrizio Nevola's book is a welcome addition; it is the first to survey the architecture and urbanism of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Siena. Nevola belongs to a new generation of architectural historians who——like Fabio Gabbrielli in Sienese architecture and archaeology of the Middle Ages and Mauro Mussolin in Sienese late medieval and Renaissance architecture——have published important works in fields that deserve the highest consideration but which still do not enjoy the attention they merit in Siena. Nevola builds on the work of local scholars such as Petra Pertici (whose Cittaa Magnificata of 1995 (Siena: Il Leccio) was a fundamental contribution to the study of fifteenth-century urbanism in Siena), and historians like Christine Shaw ( Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006]), to which he adds considerable archival research, much of which has appeared in the numerous articles he has published over the past ten years. Indeed, Nevola's book is a sum of his former contributions. At first glance the volume may be misleading. Here, too, we seem to confront a study of …