Review

Author(s): Martha A. McCrory

Review by: Martha A. McCrory
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 1208-1211
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of
America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262015
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 1208 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

The unusual format of the book may have dictated the inclusion of a "checklist"
rather than full-scale exegetic catalogue entries, and for some objects these brief
entries must be balanced with the copious information presented in the essay sec-
tions where the objects are first introduced. The dating of several of the objects
could be refined or modified in light of published comparanda, and specialists may
lament that, in certain instances, intracacies of controversial or uncertain attribu-
tions are treated rather cursorily. For example, Watson attributes, unqualifiedly, the
imposing Destruction o Troy dish (cat. 4) to Francesco di Piero - a workshop
owner, but not necessarily a painter - presumably from a suggestion made by Tim-
othy Wilson nearly fifteen years ago.
With an eye to future studies there is surely room for aggiornamenti and sug-
gestions and notes on points of detail for individual objects. The intriguing dish
dated 1 5 5 5 (cat. 5 5), for example - an allegorical painting related to Vespasiano
Gonzaga and his transformation of the small town of Sabbioneta into an ideal
Renaissance city - will benefit from further research, and it pleases to learn this
object will be the focus of a forthcoming article by Watson. As the design of the dish
immediately recalls the work of Battista Franco (employed by Guidobaldo 11 of
Urbino intermittently ca. 1545-51), its provisional attribution to Mantua surprises
since Renaissance pottery production at that center appears to be nearly wholly lim-
ited to incised slipware and rather undistinguished tin-glazed wares. Nothing would
seem to exclude primafacie the (more probable) consideration of mid-century work-
shops established in Urbino, Venice, or Faenza.
These observations and nigglings in no way detract from Watson's achieve-
ment: a scholarly, detailed, and beautifully illustrated volume that is required
reading for anyone interested in the applied arts and material culture of Renaissance
Italy. In particular, neophytes to the study of maiolica will benefit from the synthesis
of the diverse topics covered in the chapter essays, including discussion of the con-
ditions in which these vessels were designed, manufactured, and purchased, and
how contemporaries valued and used them.
MICHAEL J. BRODY
Harvard University

Rosamond E. Mack. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art,

1300-1600.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. x + 258 pp. illus. bibl. index.
gloss. $65. ISBN: 0-520-22131-1.
Rosamond E. Mack is an art historian who has traveled widely in Islamic coun-
tries, focusing her attention on their art and ornament, the subject of the book
under review. In addition, Bazaar to Piazza is concerned with the exchange and
influence of the decorative arts between Italy, above all Venice, and the Near East.
Its ten chapters are preceded by an introduction in which the premise of this study
is set out: the importance of travel in the eastern Mediterranean; the influence of
eastern prototypes and the way this influence varied according to what the West

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 REVIEWS 1209

admired at a particular historical moment; the elite status held by oriental works of
art; the importance of East-West trade, travel, and industrial competition among the
Mediterranean countries. This book is furnished with a full scholarly apparatus of
notes, glossary, bibliography, and an index, although the glossary lacks certain essen-
tial terms. As well as the ease of use thus provided, the reader has the pleasure of
handling a volume which is well-designed, with many beautiful, captioned color
plates, in addition to those in black and white, all of them placed near the relevant
text.

Travel, and the trade and diplomacy which often accompany it, merits a single
chapter. Again Venice captures the reader's attention, as the Loredan embassy of
1338 to the East is discussed followed by a consideration of the variousJondachi (an
institution whose purpose was to afford accommodation to foreign merchants,
often in a special palace, while controlling their mercantile activities). In this chapter
the author introduces the subject of the diplomatic gift arriving from the East citing
a celadon dish presented to Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92) by the ruler of
Egypt. Another even more spectacular object arrived in Italy from the East during
the fifteenth century - the large Ptolemaic cameo known as the Tazza Farnese. It
was in the collection of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Pope Paul 11 (1417-71), and
before Paul 11 it was drawn, as noted by Mack, by a Timruid court artist of the Per-
sian court. However, the author does not seem to know that it was also owned by
King Alfonso 11 of Naples O 385-1458), a newly discovered fact that places Alfonso
in the succession of Renaissance collectors and connoisseurs who took great pride in
owning one of the most coveted of ancient glyptic art objects.
With the following chapter Mack introduces the subject of eastern textiles and
their crucial influence on those of Italy. A recent study, La seta in Italia dalMedioevo
al Seicento, dal bacco al drappo, ed. L. Mola, R. C. Mueller, and C. Zanier (Venice,
2000) is an important addition to the bibliography. Lucca was the foremost center
in Europe for luxury figurative silk textiles and much of the silk and many of the
designs arrived in Lucca from the East. Then, starting in the mid-fourteenth cen-
tury, Italian textiles traveled to the East. The preservation of many of the eastern
textiles in Italy is due to the fact that church vestments were made from them, and
the vestments were subsequently used as grave wrappings. Knowledge of the eastern
designs is also documented by religious paintings (for example, Gentile da Fabriano,
Adoration of the Magi) and portraits (Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo) -
Pseudo-Arabic script (not pseudo-Kufic, a common misnomer) links the chap-
ter on patterned silk and chapter 4 ("Carpets") by way of the discussion of eastern
ornament. Pseudo-Arabic script was employed as ornament - in the case of the
West, often as the decoration of the borders of the garments of the elite (the
Madonna, saints, and others), following a pattern established through the use of
authentic script by eastern artists. Likewise, the author recognized the script deco-
rating eastern metalwork as yet another prototype of western pseudo-Arabic script.
In the important chapter on carpets Mack states that the early carpets, from the
fifteenth century, were produced in various locations in western Anatolia. It seems
that the Italians initially preferred figurative carpets often representing animals.

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 1210 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

These carpets disappear from paintings in the 1470s to be replaced by those with
geometric designs. The term, "Lotto carpet" (well-defined in The Eastern Carpet in
the Western World by Donald King and David Sylvester [London, 19381) named
after the sixteenth-century Italian artist, Lorenzo Lotto, who used them extensively
in his paintings, is briefly considered. A great many of the carpets painted by Sebas-
tiano del Piombo, who made use of the "Lotto carpet , and Lotto show
pseudo-Arabic script, and they all serve a decorative purpose. One of the largest ori-
ental carpets extant (1088 cm. x 409 cm.) is that in the reserves of the Palazzo Pitti
in Florence. On the evidence of sixteenth-century inventories (those of 1557 and
1 5 7 1) this Mamluk carpet entered the collection of the Medici grand dukes between
those two dates and is perfectly preserved due to the fact that it was reserved for state
occasions. The decorative purpose of many of these carpets is also made evident by
their lavish use on the exterior of public buildings such as the Doge's Palace in Ven-
ice. Carpets along with ceramics were frequently sent to Italy as gifts on state
occasions and thus acquired a particular status as an elite court object.
The discussion on ceramics which follows makes evident the importance of
Italian pharmacies as a locus for the influence of eastern ceramics on those of the
West. Documentary evidence dating to the beginning of the fifteenth century from
Sta. Maria Nuova in Florence specifies that its over 500 pharmacy jars were to be in
the damascene style. Collectors such as Lorenzo the Magnificent preferred eastern
ceramics - especially porcelains. This evolved in the later sixteenth century under
Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici in an attempt, unsuccessful but demonstrating
great beauty, to establish the famed, but short-lived, Medici porcelain factory. In
Ferrara, in 1514 Duke Alfonso I dEste engaged a Venetian potter to imitate oriental
porcelain without any evidence that this project came to fruition. In this same year
Duke Alfonso paid for The Feast of the Gods now in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, which includes representations of several large blue-and-white oriental
bowls, demonstrating the use of eastern porcelain as an elite object, part of the grow-
ing demand for elite objects by the discerning Italian consumer.
Bookbinding and lacquer were two Islamic arts much admired in Italy, as was
"inlaid brass." Giorgio Vasari attributed late-Renaissance im rovements in Italian
metalwork to the products of Islamic craftsmen. Enthusiastically admired by the
Medici, the grand dukes displayed in the octagonal Tribuna of the Uffizi examples
of "inlaid brass" such as the beautiful covered box, incised and inlaid with silver and
today in the Bargello in Florence. It is mentioned in the first inventory of the
Tribuna 0 589). In the penultimate chapter Rosamond Mack draws on her knowl-
edge of trips made to Damascus and other eastern cities by Venetian artists who
were commissioned to document the peoples, architecture, and ornament of the
East.

Much of the exchange emphasized here has been from the East in the direction
of the West. On the other hand, Islamic connoisseurs made use of consortia of
Venetian craftsmen. Western ceremony, such as that employed by the Holy Roman
Emperor Charles V, was likewise copied. Textiles continued to be Italy's chief
export to the East, where Islamic designs were woven in Italian silks. This being

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 REVIEWS 1211

true, it is strange that there is only one Islamic ceremonial garment made to order in
Italy still extant (the voided velvet kaftan of Suleyman I in the Topkapi Museum in
Istanbul). Islamic and Italian art objects can often resemble each other so closely
that the only way to distinguish them is through a careful examination of their
respective techniques.
Rosamond Mack should be congratulated on her study of the arts of the eastern
and western Mediterranean and the way they influenced each other. She adds new
information and insights to our understanding of this subject, concentrating on the
decorative arts in a novel way. Bazaar to Piazza is a book which beautifully presents
the carpets, silks, and ceramics of the East. 'VAile the individual decorative arts are
well set out, the author might have attempted a better synthesis and more complete
integration of these arts into the cultural context of the age. This, however, is a
minor criticism of an important addition to the literature on the cross-fertilization
of Islamic and Italian art during the period of the Renaissance.
MARTHA A. MCCRORY
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, Emeritus

Jonathan Thacker. Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002. xvi + 202 pp. index. bibl. $52-95 (cl), $19-95
(Pbk). ISBN: 0-85323-548-1 (cl), 0-85323-558-9 (Pbk).
This publication on siglo de oro comedia by Jonathan Thacker is based on his
1999 doctoral thesis and contains a page each of acknowledgments, list of abbrevi-
ations, and foreword. Thacker begins his critical study with an introduction, divides
the main part into four chapters, finishes with conclusions, and appends a fourteen-
page bibliography and a five-page index.
The foreword explains that "[a] Ithough this study of Spanish Golden Age
drama is underpinned by the traditional scholarly values of close reading of play-
texts and knowledge of the world into which they were brought, it is buttressed by
modern critical theory" (xi). This statement is supported not only by the extensive
bibliography but also by the numerous footnotes and the continuous dialogue with
comedia criticism. Thacker's analysis is bolstered by multiple approaches, particu-
larly a sociological one; however, the author engages with psychological, feminist,
and anthropological theories as well, thereby demonstrating broad knowledge of
critical theories and allowing him to reach his own conclusions. Thacker explores
the meaning of metatheater, such as the interrelationship between life and theater
and the social implications of the reliance on - but also the deceptiveness of
role-play.
The first chapter deals with issues of social power and the debate about nature
versus nurture through an analysis of Guille'n de Castro's Lafuerza de la costumbre
and its two main characters Hipo'lita and Fe'lix. Through the play's symbolic use of
language and the actions of its protagonists Thacker shows that " [r] ole-play is con-
spicuous as both a mainstay of patriarchal life and a method of quick-witted

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