Venetian Art Research Articles

DEATH, HISTORY, AND THE MARVELLOUS LIVES OF TINTORETTO

This article will examine the discursive process of canon formation that occurred in Venice in the 1640s. In 1648 Carlo Ridolfi published Le maraviglie dell'arte; it represented one of the first regional histories of art and stood as a monument against Giorgio Vasari's grand and authoritative lives of the artists. The first half of Ridolfi's Le maraviglie began with the late medieval artist Il Guariento and culminated with the biographies of Titian and Veronese. The second volume opened with Tintoretto and went on to cover the lives of modern Venetian painters working in the early seventeenth century. The deaths of Tintoretto and then of his son Domenico, it will be argued, were the first and last steps that enabled the eventual birth of a luminous master narrative for Venetian art.

SECULAR CHARITY, SACRED POVERTY: PICTURING THE POOR IN RENAISSANCE VENICE

The poor were depicted with increasing frequency and prominence in Venetian art of the sixteenth century. This new level of visualization within the fictive space of representation indirectly reflects contemporary attempts to exclude poveri and other undesirables from the actual space of the city. Increased state involvement in poor relief stimulated a new iconography of secular charity featuring almsgiving by patrician officials, presented in an hierarchical manner that pointedly departs from the more communal depictions in paintings commissioned by the city's non‐noble scuole. But it was in religious painting for the city's churches and monasteries that the visual imagery of poverty was most dramatically improved, with reference both to sacred and devotional texts stressing poverty as a sacred value and to formal models from antique and High Renaissance art. The povero increasingly appeared as an idealized human archetype whose suffering and humility associated him directly with Christ. The article concludes by arguing that the symbolization of the poor as significant sacred actors in visual art was an aspect of their repression and exclusion in the social domain.

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting ed. by David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (review)

REVIEWS 185 lated into Venetian pictorial dialect” (44). Examples of the half-length Madonna, the Bellini brothers’ favored type, are discussed to further exemplify this Veneto-Byzantine style, while Cretan icons of the Madre della Consolazione type are briefly contrasted as representatives of what Byzantinists would call Creto-Venetian style. Campbell is right to notice that, even though Greek and Venetian painters had different reasons for merging each others’ distinctive styles—commercial concerns or the close association Europeans made between Byzantine art and sanctity—it is not clear if any devotional distinction existed in the actual use of the emerging images (59). Unfortunately, discussions of the examples included in the catalogue do not move far beyond an all-too-familiar discourse, limited to identifying whether a painting is “Latin-inspired” or “Byzantine-looking.” Like the exhibition, the catalogue aims to blur the east versus west dichotomy , where western art is often artificially elevated. Written (in most part) from a western perspective, however, this catalogue proves how difficult it is to escape the modern borders of scholarly fields, even while looking at artists and patrons who themselves, over 500 years ago, managed to synthesize brilliantly the quintessential values of their cosmopolitan Mediterranean reality. The Italian images of Mehmed II suggest that, despite religious concerns, he admired European art and actively constructed a European image for himself. He requested established artists from various Italian courts and commissioned medals and painted portraits glorifying him as a successor of Alexander the Great. At his court, Greek scholars and bureaucrats worked alongside their Muslim peers. However, J. M Rogers and Alan Chong show that, even though Mehmed’s library and art collection joined cultures, his successors did not share his tolerance towards the occident, and thus his patronage was less influential than perhaps he might have expected. Chong’s essay, “Gentile Bellini in Istanbul: Myths and Misunderstandings,” is one of the strengths of the catalogue, disentangling the intricacies of Gentile ’s eastern visit. A close analysis of the artist’s few works securely dated to his Istanbul period clarifies their chronology and attribution. Last but not least, the artist who preceded Bellini at the Sultan’s court in 1478–1479, Costanzo da Ferrara, is firmly identified as Costanzo di Moysis. Little is known about this Italian, originally from Venice but active in Ferrara and Naples, whose oeuvre cannot be reconstructed in the absence of stylistic evidence. The second half of the fifteenth century marks the height of Italian fascination with the east. It was a period of explosive cultural dialogue—one that continues to stir our scholarly fascination today. The exhibition curators and the authors of this catalogue were successful in presenting Gentile Bellini as a case study, offering a reconsideration of an artist who, during his lifetime, was considered Venice’s most important painter. CRISTINA STANCIOIU, Art History, UCLA Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, ed. David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art 2006) 336 pages, 31 halftone + 162 color ill. This substantial, abundantly illustrated catalogue, created to accompany exhibitions at the National Gallery in Washington and the Kunsthistoriches Mu- REVIEWS 186 seum in Vienna, brings together some of the foremost scholars of Venetian art to shed new light on a significant moment in the history of Venetian painting. The exhibitions highlighted a period of considerable stylistic change in the painting of the Venetian schools from 1500 to 1530. The exhibitions and the catalogue were meant to illustrate this transition by bringing together the paintings of not only the three masters listed in the title, but also other lesser-known painters of the beginning of the sixteenth century like Lorenzo Lotto, Cima da Conegliano, and Vincenzo Catena. The catalogue brings together these artists seamlessly, creating for the reader a vivid picture of the artistic world of early sixteenth-century Venice. By not concentrating on a single artist, as many exhibitions do, the catalog presents a more complete idea of artistic development in all genres of paintings. Few scholars of Venetian art would doubt the significance of the three decades chosen by the exhibition organizers in the history of the city’s painting. During these thirty...

Willem Drost (1633-1659): a Rembrandt pupil in Amsterdam and Venice

Willem Drost (1633--1659) was one of Rembrandt's most gifted pupils, and he is also considered one of the most mysterious. This book, the first ever devoted to this exceptional artist, unravels many of the mysteries of Drost's life and career. Curator and art historian Jonathan Bikker offers not only new archival evidence of the artist's date and place of death, but also a new assessment of Drost's place in the Rembrandt workshop and in the Venetian art world of the mid-seventeenth century. Drost emerges as one of Rembrandt's most talented imitators and, despite his short career, an artist with a variety of faces. The book features a meticulously researched and fully illustrated catalogue raisonne with 38 paintings now attributed to Drost (several formerly attributed to Rembrandt) and 35 other paintings today known only from old sale catalogues or reproductions. The author also discusses 32 paintings he rejects as Drost's work.

The new palaces of Medieval Venice

The palaces of Venice have long excited the wonder of visitors. These grand, ornate buildings seem to float on the water of the city's canals like the sea castles in a mariner's dream. But Juergen Schulz demonstrates that the origins of these residences lay on terra firma, in a widely disseminated building type that, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was adapted to the special circumstances of an Adriatic lagoon and the needs of the merchants who were turning this environment into a center of trade. An internationally recognized expert on Venetian art, architecture, and cartography, Schulz examines the city's medieval palaces with scholarship of unprecedented breadth and insight. His book, based in both archival research and first-hand knowledge of Venice, reconstructs the original appearance of the city's oldest surviving residences, such as that of the Corner and Pesaro families, and traces the many later modifications made to these buildings. Further, Schulz's book breaks new ground by presenting a systematic discussion of the use of sculpture in Venice's early palaces, famed for their exhibitionistic ornament and scale. Illustrated with numerous photographs and pla

Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History Sally Parkin Datta, Satya , Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. vii, 272; 1 b&w illustration; RRP £45; ISBN 0754633470. This careful and meticulous book is written in a personalised style, giving it an accessibility which the considerable methodological analysis would otherwise have made very weighty. Nevertheless, the continuous side-tracking down avenues of complex methodology can render the reader somewhat confused, losing sight of the women and men in early modern Venice who are the subject of the book. The long introductory chapter is a reflection on the nature of historical discourse with theoretical considerations which encompass epistemological considerations, descriptive gender studies, the Scott-Tilly-Varikas controversy on gender/experience/discursive reality, and the determination of meaning and experience through intellectual history after 'the linguistic turn'. By this is meant that intellectual history's major concern should be the semiological orientation [End Page 217] of the history of meaning, which is then viewed from the perspective of a realist epistemological position. Essentially, the remit of the work is to make the common people of Venice, the popolani, major historical subjects. Each of the five sections begins with a detailed analysis of historical discourse and, true to the sub-title 'Reassessing History', each is a presentation of the subject matter within the constructs of the historical discourse. However, the discourse itself is sometimes limited by the cut-off point of research, pre 1998. Each chapter highlights one crucial aspect of the human experience: the social experiences of commoners who were male and female artisans; the cultural experience of art-related artisans; the feminist experience of three Venetian intellectual women; and the invisibility of women explored through a gender perspective on the working experiences of ordinary women, lacemakers. Chapter 2 examines the social experiences of artisans and is contextualised within the ruler-ruled relationship, citing the conceptualisation of the early modern state in the case of Venice, the dialectics of the patrician and popolani relations, patrician hegemony as expressed through the state, popular consent in civil society and anti-hegemonic tendencies. Datta concludes that the social life of men and women was constrained by the ruler-ruled dynamics but, through guilds and confraternities, they experienced an autonomous social life. However, they failed to capitalise on this by not undertaking the cultivation of any political vision and working towards their own betterment. In part, this was because of the enlightened pragmatists who ruled them, and the artisans' inability to harness their own experience to develop a socio-political consciousness. Chapter 3, the cultural experience of Venetian artisans in the Renaissance, begins with an analysis of culture, popular culture and historical studies. In setting the historical parameters, most of the discussion is limited to texts published prior to the 1990s. Renaissance artisans were as essential to the Venetian art community as they had been in pre-Renaissance times but the artisan community contributed far more to art patronage and the promotion of new art works in the early modern period. The chapter ends with a brief evaluation of the living costs and valuation of Venetian monies in this era. Chapter 4 examines three Venetian writers and their feminist experiences. Datta relates the emergence of early feminism in sixteenth century Venice to two main circumstances: Venice was an epicentre for the growth of women's writing in the sixteenth century, and the Counter-Reformation's negative portrayal of women provoked a backlash from Venetian women, specifically Moderata Fonte, [End Page 218] Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti. All three women were successful in articulating their personal experiences but only at the personal-intellectual level. Their work and feminist experiences did not connect with society as a whole. Chapter 5 is perhaps the most informative of all the chapters as it considers 'invisible women', the working experiences of Venetian lacemakers. Lacemakers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not officially recognised as a highly skilled artisan trade despite the fact that their endeavours contributed significant economic wealth to Venice. The Venetian state refused to allow them to form guilds or confraternities, which makes them historically invisible because...

Royal-Paper Copies of Aldine Editions, 1494–1550

Royal-Paper Copies of Aldine Editions, 1494–1550 Conor Fahy* (bio) The question of royal-paper copies of Aldine editions, of which the bulk of the surviving copies are printed on smaller paper, first impinged on my consciousness a few years ago, in the course of a collaborative research project on the first edition of Baldassar Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano, a folio printed by the Aldine press between the end of November 1527 and the beginning of April 1528. In a letter sent from Spain in April 1527 to his factor, Cristoforo Tirabosco, Castiglione expressed the wish to have an edition of 1000 copies, for which he did not specify a paper size, plus thirty copies to be printed on the best quality royal paper available in Venice at the time. In a further letter to Tirabosco, written in April 1528, after the publication of the edition, Castiglione again referred to the thirty copies on royal paper, indicating that some at least were intended as presentation copies to important figures, such as the marquis of Mantua, Isabella d’Este and Elisabetta Gonzaga, “quelli più principali”, as he explained.1 Our census of surviving copies of this edition brought to light 147 copies,2 none of which was distinguished by its leaf height, but which were printed on two different paper stocks, 136 on stocks (predominantly anchor paper) which [End Page 85] we know from the evidence of an uncut copy in the library of the Diocesan Seminary, Padua, to be super-chancery, and eleven, all bound and trimmed, on another sort of anchor paper, easily distinguishable from the stocks used in the majority of copies by having no countermark.3 It was tempting to assume that these eleven copies were the survivors of the thirty copies on royal paper ordered by Castiglione, but to have been reduced to their present size all eleven must have undergone a savage trimming over the centuries, reducing the leaf size of an untrimmed royal folio (c.445 × 307 mm) to that of a trimmed super-chancery folio (c.315 × 220 mm). Since the royal-paper copies, or some of them, were destined originally for illustrious personages, it seemed odd that not one of our eleven should have leaf dimensions which indicated that it might have been printed on royal paper. But because of the pressure of other work I put the problem to one side. My interest in the question was rekindled recently by the chance encounter, in the pages of the catalogue of the Aldine collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, of an entry relating to the 1536 folio edition of the commentary by the Byzantine philosopher and theologian Eustratius of Nicea on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Alongside a first copy of the edition, for which, in accordance with the general practice of the catalogue, no leaf size was given, the collection also contained a second copy, on “very large paper”, measuring 425 × 270 mm.4 The discovery of a folio edition published by the Aldine press less than ten years after the Cortegiano, containing a copy printed on what seemed like royal paper, led me to reopen the question of the eleven copies of the Cortegiano printed on paper different from that used in the main run. And the first step was clearly that of finding out whether, in the production of the Aldine press, there were other known examples of this usage. In the last fifty years many important studies have been published on the press, particularly for the period from 1494 to 1515, when it was directed by the great Aldus. These studies have given us a much deeper knowledge of the cultural importance of Aldus’s publication programme, of his relations with the international world of scholarship, of the commercial organization of the press, of the various series of types created by and for him, and of the links between [End Page 86] the press and the Venetian art world. But in all this activity there has been a notable absentee—a serious interest in the descriptive bibliography of the Aldine press. One of the obstacles is...

Art conservation: Glass materials let venetian art shine

Art conservation: Glass materials let venetian art shine

The architectural history of Venice

This book is the indispensable guide to the history of architecture in Venice, encompassing the city's fascinating variety of buildings from ancient times to the present day. Completely updated, this edition of Deborah Howard's classic volume (first published in 1980) is filled with splendid illustrations, most of them new and reproduced in full colour. Howard writes in a highly accessible style, inviting those who visit Venice in person, armchair travellers, and all students of Venetian art and architecture to look more closely at the unique architecture of one of the world's most beautiful cities.

The Art and Archaeology of Venetian Ships and Boats by Lillian Ray Martin (review)

REVIEWS 213 that in some way deal with the culture of Islamic Iberia will find The Literature of Al-Andalus to be very helpful as a reference work for understanding a subject that is significant, albeit little-known outside the circle of the cognoscenti. DAMIAN BACICH, Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA Lillian Ray Martin, The Art and Archaeology of Venetian Ships and Boats (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press 2001) xii + 236 pp., 153 b/w ills. In this wonderfully illustrated volume, the fifth in a series of Studies in Nautical Archaeology, Lillian Ray Martin presents the most extensive catalogue to date of all known medieval and Renaissance representations of ships and boats in and around the Veneto. Over the course of three chapters composed of an introductory essay, the catalogue, and an analysis of the collected works, the author answers a range of archaeological questions regarding the function and design of Venetian watercraft. This is a particularly welcome study from this reviewer’s point of view, because although it is by no means the first technical study of early modern Venetian ships, as the author makes clear by citing the fundamental work of Giovanni Casoni (1847), Frederic Lane (1934, 1963, 1973), Marco Bonino (1978), and Alvise Chiggiato (1987, 1989), it is the first archaeological work that utilizes a wealth of visual evidence to bring their rigging , steering mechanisms, and superstructure into focus. Martin devotes the first chapter to an introduction of Venetian history and art. This opening chapter is divided into subheadings that include a chronological summary of significant political events and nautical developments, as well as an overview of Venetian art and a discussion of its prevailing iconographic themes. Of particular interest is the discussion of the navigational instruments that were invented between 1250 and 1300, such as the magnetic compass and the pulley, which increased Venetian trade activity in the Mediterranean by allowing for faster and safer shipping. It should be noted, however, that while some of these sections are clearly meant to acquaint the reader with various aspects of Venetian history, others have a more uncertain purpose. One section devoted to artistic techniques, for example, does not appear to be relevant. It is only when one nearly finishes the book that one realizes it was intended to describe the artistic techniques employed to produce the works illustrated in the catalogue. It is never explicitly stated. As a result, this first chapter reads as a somewhat disjointed assemblage of topics unrelated to each other and to what comes later. The primary contribution of this book lies in the catalogue of the second chapter, where Martin has pulled together 129 artistic representations of Venetian ships and boats drawn from the early fourth to the early sixteenth centuries . Compiled from mosaics, enamels, wood inlays, manuscript illuminations, frescoes, paintings, sculpture, prints and engravings, and metalwork, the catalogue demonstrates the author’s meticulous method and is exhaustive in scope. Indeed, a testament to its expansive nature is the inclusion of the graffiti of ships etched into the columns on the west facade of San Marco and in the prison cells of the Palazzo Ducale (134–137). The information given in the catalogue is clear, despite the technical nomenclature used throughout (there is a helpful glossary at the end), and each work is illustrated and accompanied by REVIEWS 214 complete tombstone information. For all entries, the author concentrates on describing the rigging, hull construction, steering apparatuses, anchors, and armaments of the ships represented, and where appropriate, she offers a summary of the iconography. The only possible shortcomings of the catalogue do not originate from what is included, but rather from the absence of what the author stated she would include. In the introduction, Martin asks “Did the artist trouble himself to be accurate in detail? To what extent did the stylistic or formal conventions or limitations of the medium dictate the final product of the work? What was the purpose of the ship and boat illustration? What areas of the picture have been subjected to deterioration or restoration, and how has that effected the maritime image?” (5). Immediately after posing these questions, Martin states that they “will be addressed ... specifically, as necessary, with...

The Glory of Venice: art in the eighteenth century

Venice, home of Tiepolo, Canaletto, Piranesi, Piazzetta, and Guardi, was the most artistic city of eighteenth-century Italy. This beautiful book examines the whole range of the arts in Venice during this period, including paintings, pastels and gouaches, drawings and watercolours, prints and illustrated books and sculpture. The book begins with an introduction by Andrew Robison, and a general introduction to Venetian art by Michael Levey. Essays by other eminent authorities then discuss the international taste for Venetian art and major aspects of the art of the period. The essays are followed by a catalogue that discusses and reproduces many of the finest works of the time along with biographies and critical discussions of the artists. The selection of works emphasises the beauty, quality, distinctiveness, variety, balance, and unity of Venetian art. It includes altarpieces by Tiepolo, Piazzetta, and others that demonstrate the importance of profoundly serious and grand religious art; it presents the finest examples of history painting and allegory, views and landscapes, architectural fantasies, decorative paintings, and portraits; and it offers a large selection of particularly fine graphic art, for many of the greatest painters - Marco Ricci, Piazzetta, Canaletto, and Tiepolo - also devoted themselves to printmaking, book illustration, and designs for stage sets and the decorative arts, and often found greater freedom for their fantasy in such works.

The potted tree: essays in Venetian art

The potted tree: essays in Venetian art

Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics, and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seven-Teenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy

This book traces the changing attitudes towards painterly brushwork from Mannerist norms to the Arcadian classicism of eighteenth-century critics. At the centre of this history of artistic taste stands the Venetian art dealer, critic and painter Marco Boschini, who wrote a rambling, metaphoric defence of Venetian painting in 1660: La carta del navegar pitoresco (The map of painterly navigation). Pittoresco, 'painterly', serves as the title of this book because the shifting opinions on painterly brushwork are contained in its semantic history, migrating in meaning from a neutral designation of all painting ('pictorial') to a specific type of painting ('painterly' or 'picturesque'). It could be interpreted as a sign of inspired creativity and manual facility, or as a sign of showy dexterity unrestrained by learning. By means of linguistic analysis, pittoresco and related terms open up a world of cultural reference where literate art critics bring their taste in poetry and rhetoric to the least literary aspect of painting: the descriptive, ornamental or inspired form of brushwork.

The art of Renaissance Venice: architecture, sculpture, and painting, 1460-1590

In the first contemporary single-volume survey of the three arts of Venice--painting, sculpture, and architecture--Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters offer an important counterbalance to the traditional orientation toward painting as the city's preeminent art by focusing on architecture as the essential Venetian art. They begin their study in 1460, when Venice was one of the key powers of Italy, and end with the death of Tintoretto in 1594, a period of waning international power. In the process, they define the distinctly Venetian terms by which the city and its culture should be understood. With over three hundred illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography, this volume makes an impressive contribution to art historical scholarship. The historical aspect of this book is splendid, but where it excels is in its fearless and thought-provoking critical judgements...it will lead both beginners and experts to new joys.--David Ekserdjian, Times Literary Supplement

Venice and Islam in the Middle Ages: Some Observations on the Question of Architectural Influence

Once described by the great Venetian art historian Giuseppe Fiocco as a colossal suq, the city of Venice has always conveyed a distinctly oriental atmosphere to the western european visitor. Mystified by its labyrinth of dark, narrow, often dead-end streets, twisting at right-angles through densely built-up, separately demarcated parishes, glimpsing fragrant gardens hidden behind high, crenellated walls, sniffing the pungent odours of exotic oriental spices in the bustling, crowded markets, the traveller might well have imagined himself transported, as if on a magic carpet, to one of the great mercantile centres of the Middle East — to Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus — to the world of Marco Polo’s travels or the Arabian Nights.

Ferdinanda Ongania and the Golden Basilica: A documentation programme in 19th-Century Venice

Abstract The remarkable Ferdinanda Ongania, publisher, bookseller, cultore appassionato, and purveyor of the beauties of Venetian art, was born in Venice, 18th July, 1842 and died in St Moritz on 21st August 1911. When still very young he began working in a bookshop established in Venice in the spring of 1846 by the elder of the Munster brothers. He soon became its director and, in 1871, though not yet thirty, he succeeded the brothers as proprietor. In Venice, which up until the previous decade had belonged to Austria, the bookshop (located under the Procuratie of the Royal Palace toward the Ascensione, no. 72-73, in front of the Basilica of San Marco) had become a traditional landmark for foreign scholars. It held a special importance for young Venetian intellectuals, who met there to read clandestinely Berchet's and Aleardi's patriotic lyrics. In the euphoric, chaotic and rather uncertain climate of the liberation (1866), there was a new rise of interest in Venice. Beginning in the 1870s, Ongania's ent...

The Genius of Venice

The Genius of Venice, 1500–1600, an exhibition held at the Royal Academy, London, from November 2, 1983 to March 11, 1984, organized by John Hale of University College. London, and a group of British art historians (which also included Francesco Valcanover, Soprintendente alle Gallerie, Venice), fulfilled the claim of its sponsor. The Sea Containers Group, to be the most important display of Venetian art outside Italy in fifty years. The sheer number of paintings, more than 140, and their overall high artistic quality and marked diversity of style, subject, and mood, would alone have ensured success. Added to this, the inclusion of more than 40 bronze, marble, and terracotta sculptures, along with about 150 drawings and prints and several manuscripts and maps, made possible a basic comprehension of Venetian artistic and general culture during the cinquecento as a whole.

Seicento Painting in Friuli

The fine tradition that the organizers of the fourth Biennale d'Arte Antica (which opened on September 8, 1968, in the church of San Francesco in Udine) hoped to continue has been somewhat jeopardized by the Mostra della Pittura Veneta del Seicento in Friuli shown on that occasion. At least, this was the first time that the high standard set by Bruno Molajoli in his Mostra del Pordenone e della Pittura Friulana del Rinascimento of 1939 and maintained by subsequent similar shows in Udine was not in evidence. It is sufficient to recall the exhibitions devoted to Nicola Grassi (1961), Bison (1962-63), and Carlevarijs (1963-64), or to Bombelli and Carneo (1964), not to mention the spectacular Mostra della Pittura del Settecento in Friuli of 1966 with its impressive array of masterpieces, among them a number of significant new discoveries. That the yield in the most recent exhibition, dedicated to the seventeenth century, was so conspicuously inferior in comparison can be attributed primarily to the fact that this time the influence upon Friuli of one of the less fertile epochs of Venetian art was represented. In addition, we should not underestimate the difficulties that must have arisen because of the obvious lack of material suitable for mounting such an exhibition. Nevertheless, we must still ask why in many cases readily available resources in nearby public collections, in Trieste for instance, were not put to use. At any rate, the frequently mediocre, or even poor, examples from private collections which comprised a good half of the pictures exhibited were unsatisfactory substitutes, especially since their state of preservation often left much to be desired. Besides, most of them had only recently been acquired on the art market by their present owners and so could in no way give a true picture of the art scene in Friuli during the seventeenth century. All in all, the exhibition directors seemed mainly interested, on the basis of the present selection, in offering a survey of the significant trends in Venetian Seicento painting and in demonstrating the corresponding approach of some of the artists then working in Friuli. The extent to which new research completed since the 1959 Seicento exhibition in Venice was drawn upon for this purpose is evident from the well-documented catalogue introduction by Rodolfo Pallucchini. This not only proved to be an indispensable guide for understanding the Udine exhibition but by its almost flawless argument went further to supplement the visual material whenever the latter was insufficient to make a convincing case. In accord with Pallucchini's outline, the exhibition began with three representatives of the so-called tardo manierismo accademico at the close of the late Venetian Renaissance: namely, Palma il Giovane, Andrea Vicentino, and Sante Peranda. Of these, Palma, whose art was based at first primarily upon Titian and later more upon a formularistic derivation from Tintoretto's manner, was represented by five paintings. Three of these (Nos. 51-53), from the last two decades of the sixteenth century, betray the still predominantly warm, rich colors of that time, which only began to soften about the turn of the century with the increasing use of cooler colors and correspondingly pale flesh tones. The attitudes of the figures, which at the same time became progressively stiffer, are emphasized in silhouette against light landscape backgrounds, as in the altarpiece from Cividale (No. 54). In the case of the picture from Morsano al Tagliamento (No. 55), the indifferent virtuosity that increasingly stamps Palma's late works is pleasantly mitigated by the impressively characterized heads of the two saints. Two pictures attributed in the exhibition to Sante Peranda (Nos. 61, 62) testify above all to that artist's at times very close upon Palma. In t e case of the Ecce Homo (No. 61), derived from the late Titian, this dependence is actually so close that one is inclined, rather, to think with Pallucchini that it is by Palma. Finally, Andrea Vicentino, whose extensive oeuvre still awaits definitive clarification, was represented by a densely crowded altarpiece from the Cathedral of Sacile (No. 84), clearly indebted to Veronese. Careful restoration of this work unexpectedly brought to light an uncommon richness of color.