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Chinese works of art in the Este Wunderkammer in Modena

Two marriages: Artemisia Gentileschi; Bernardo Cavallino

The Spanish Royal Academy in Rome | William Dyce’s ‘Lamentation’: its commission and provenance

Rubens tapestries | Spanish drawings | Late Turner | Mannequins | Horst | Kiefer | Tuttle

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Those unfamiliar with conchology – the scientificstudy or collection of mollusc shells – will find it, uponperusing this book, a beguiling subject. Tobin’s narra-tive guides us through the culture of contemporarynatural history collecting, outlining how and whereshells were collected, and how in the process of theircollection and exchange they were reinvested withnew meaning and values to become complex culturalcommodities. The author also examines the methodsby which the duchess amassed, organised and displayedher shell collection, and explores what this tells usabout the popularity of natural history in the upperechelons of English and European society. Tobin’sbook is, as she explains, an ethnographic description ofthe culture of shell collecting, taking as its focus theDuchess of Portland’s collecting practices.

Although the duchess kept her shell collection at hertownhouse in Whitehall, she spent much of her time atBulstrode in Buckinghamshire – her natural history laboratory complete with grotto, aviary and botanicalgarden, where the curious and the informed congregatedto observe, discuss and study the latest wonders of thenatural world. Here natural objects from far-flung corners of the South Pacific, North-west America andBritain were not only drawn, painted and examined forserious scientific reasons; they also generated aestheticresponses and were assembled to form a variety of arti-ficial productions such as shellworks and needlework.

Among the author’s explicit aims are to resurrect thereputation of the duchess, to situate her within theculture of collecting, and to revivify interest in her col-lections. Tobin is especially keen to distance the duchessfrom contemporary natural history collectors who were,in her view, censured in popular culture as ‘dull-witted,dry-as-dust, and methodical accumulators of nature’sdetritus’, or virtuosos driven by curiosity rather than moti-vated by rational principles, taste or erudition. She positsthat the duchess’s interests went well beyond the aristo-cratic culture of collecting, and that her mastery of theLinnaean system of classification elevated her natural history collecting to the level of serious scientific endeav-our. This may be true, but this reviewer suspects that theauthor’s efforts to deny the duchess some of the moreendearing foibles of her contemporaries has the effect ofdiminishing her personal charm and idiosyncrasy.

That the duchess’s collections of shells, insects, birds,petrifactions, minerals, gems and corals were dispersedin a thirty-eight-day sale after her death is lamentable.So, too, is the fact that she died before completing thecatalogue of her collections. Nonetheless, numerousannotated copies of the sale catalogue of the PortlandMuseum survive and provide us with a reasonablycomprehensive picture of her immense repository.Indeed, in a curious twist of fate, more catalogues survive than shells that can be identified with any cer-tainty as having once belonged to the duchess’s collec-tion: of the thousands of molluscs she once owned amere three can be identified – a Voluta aulica now in theNatural History Museum in London, and two Polymitapicta now in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.

TODD LONGSTAFFE-GOWAN

Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Move-ment. By William Tronzo. 238 pp. incl. 78 col. + b.& w. ills. (Italica Press, New York, 2014), $50. ISBN978–1–59910–271–9.This book contains four essays that centre loosely on

medieval and Renaissance gardens: the viridarium Genoard,with its Zisa and Cuba palaces in Norman Sicily; a sketchof the River Sorgue at Vaucluse that appears on the margin of Petrarch’s copy of Pliny’s Natural History; aroom in the Burgundian castle at Hesdin; and the Cortiledelle Statue in the Vatican Palace at the time of Julius II.

It becomes clear that, despite its title, the book is notabout Petrarch’s two gardens at Vaucluse. Nor does itmake any substantial contribution to the history of gardens or to Petrarchan scholarship. The ‘oscillation’defined in the essay on Petrarch (p.79) as both the physical movement of the poet’s wanderings at Vaucluseand the metaphysical movement of his mind, always

conflicted between the spiritual love of God and thematerial love of the world, is, as is well known, a characteristic trait of humanism, which Petrarch exem-plifies with the complexity and contradictions that areinherent in his works.

A brief mention of the gardens at Vaucluse, whichPetrarch addresses in a famous letter, occurs only in theprologue. The letter may have suggested to the authorthe commonplace that movement is intrinsic to gardens,but nowhere in the book is the meaning of ‘movement’clearly articulated. And if in the case of Petrarch the termmay imply the mental wanderings of a conflicted poet,in other cases it is used to refer to the bodily movementsof individuals: workers tilling the fields in the Allegory ofGood Government in the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena, or inthe implied movement of the Laocoön, showing the Trojan priest struggling to free himself from the sea ser-pents; in other examples, ‘movement’ is used to describean idea of performance, or the movements of automata,as at Hesdin. All these occurrences of ‘movement’,however, are too tenuous and vague to link the fouressays and their contents together.

There is an ubiquitous lack of substantive explanationabout the many digressions, which do not seem partic-ularly useful to the author’s multiple arguments. Forexample, it is not at all clear why a discussion of theParthenon’s sculptural fragments housed at the BritishMuseum is needed to make a point on the Cortile delleStatue in Rome. Invariably, the narrative in each chapter relies too heavily on the author’s ‘selective andsuggestive’ conclusions (p.81), which are neither convincing nor illuminating. For example, Nero’sDomus Aurea, hailed by Tronzo as the Roman prece-dent for the room in Hesdin castle, which was fittedwith devices that created the effect of rain and thunder,only goes so far, for it is doubtful that imperial Romanguests would have had to change out of their drenchedwoollen robes, as they supposedly did at Hesdin. In thischapter Tronzo uses the words ‘wool’ and ‘cloth’ inter-changeably, and while it may very well be the case that‘cloth [. . .] is everywhere in [. . .] fifteenth-centuryBurgundy, where it appears abundantly, beautifully,exuberantly, for the first time’ (p.128), the image that heuses to illustrate his point shows a bright and shiny garment, with a range of hues from the palest salmon tothe darkest orange-red, that makes us think more oflight-reflecting silk or linen than light-absorbing wool.

The credibility of the author is also marred by his manytentative statements, as in ‘the argument is lacking proofand must remain an intriguing hypothesis’ (p.103); or ‘myincipient train of thought becomes too tenuous to hold’(p.116). Instead of certainties the author offers a series ofhunches that seem inspired by emotion rather than logic.Tronzo’s many arguments are difficult to follow becausethe writing is convoluted, and the reader is left feelingdecidedly dissatisfied. One has the sense that the bookmight have been more aptly titled ‘UnconnectedThoughts Around Gardens’.

RAFFAELLA FABIANI GIANNETTO

Ave Eva: Ein wiederentdecktes Hauptwerk des Renaissance-meisters Guillaume de Marcillat. Edited by Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel and Roberto Contini. 128 pp. incl. 97col. + 20 b. & w. ills. (Michael Imhof Verlag, Peters-burg, 2013), !19.95. ISBN 978–3–7319– 0026–9.This book commemorates a recent exhibition at the

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (closed 11th May 2014), focusedon a single painting, a rare easel work by the French-born artist Guillaume de Marcillat. This large paintingAve Eva, or the Dispute of Church scholars over the Immac-ulate Conception, kept in the Gallery’s depot since thebeginning of the First World War, is a behemoth of anobject with over-life-size figures and unique subject-matter that produced no progeny. The show celebratedits restoration, revealing how a wide horizontal sectionat the top was later added to fit the painting into its spectacular frame. The work was recorded in 1806 in

the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi with an attribution toPietro Candido; it also carried attributions to the Florentine school and Girolamo Genga until in 1987Nicole Dacos astutely ascribed it to Marcillat.

Marcillat was summoned to Rome before 1509,where he came into contact with the studio of Raphaeland the work of Michelangelo. By 1519 he was estab-lished in Arezzo (taking Vasari as a pupil) and attempted ambitious paintings there – an enthusiasmseeded in Raphael’s workshop as well as a desire totackle novel subjects on a monumental scale with anintellectual courage that produced, in this case, anunusual if rather turgid image. The picture reflects theartist’s experience of the Vatican: the figure of Eve, forexample, is based on the Muse Calliope in Raphael’sParnassus which derived in turn from the voluptuousDying Cleopatra sculpture in the Belvedere; thus providing a wanton pagan as the source for Eve.

The panel is documented in the church of S.Francesco in Arezzo as the altarpiece of the ImmaculateConception. Payments started in 1528–29, and thework probably dates from 1529, but for some reasonthe date on St Augustine’s costume was partly obliter-ated (only ‘MDXX’ remains visible). Because thepainting lacks an image of the Virgin, the authors suggest it acted as a predella to an altarpiece or possiblywas to be installed beneath a statue of the Virgin. Itseems clear, however, that only one painting wasintended and perhaps Marcillat adopted a horizontalformat in emulation of medieval Aretine altarpieces inorder to give a venerable quality to the work.

The Immaculate Conception was a relatively newtheme, still without an established image, as recountedby Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel in a well-researched andthoughtful essay. Marcillat’s painting is unique for theinclusion of eight saints, not in dispute but as a groupof like-minded Church fathers and doctors. Kroegelexplains this as an attempt to illustrate the scholars’ the-ological quandary that, in order to be consideredImmaculate, the Virgin Mary could not be touched byOriginal Sin even for an instant. The long inscriptionson the painting refute the possibility of any such stain.

Vasari’s woodcut portrait of his master included in theLives is based on the figure of Origen in the Berlin paint-ing, indicating that it was a self-portrait. Marcillat was anAugustinian friar, but was probably assisted with the Latininscriptions at the base of the painting by Giovanni Lappoli, called il Pollastrino, or Pollastra, Vasari’sgrammar-school teacher and a canon of the cathedral. He was seventy-five years old at the time and onewonders if his portrait is also included, perhaps as StCyprian at the right. Pollastra assisted Rosso in his verydifferent-looking drawing of the Immaculate Conception(Uffizi, Florence) at precisely the same date.

DAVID FRANKLIN

Constructivism. By Aleksei Gan, translation and intro-duction by Christina Lodder. 178 pp. incl. 12 col. +28 b. & w. ills. (Editorial Tenov, Barcelona, 2014),£23. ISBN 978–84–939231–2–9.First published in Russian between October and

December 1922, Aleksei Gan’s Constructivist manifestohas been given a new translation by Christina Lodder.Gan’s talent for agit-prop and distinctive yet seminalunderstanding of the post-revolutionary conception ofthe ‘artist-as-engineer’ is well expounded in Lodder’sintroduction. This proves to be an indispensible com-plement to Gan’s prose, the style and power of whichmay have otherwise been difficult for anyone but thespecialist to distinguish from contemporary literature(Mayakovsky’s more aesthetically focused journal Lef,for example). In addition, the typography has beendirectly transferred from the first publication and showsitself to be wholly bound up with Gan’s rhetoricalstrategies. Combined with useful notes to the translationand a variety of secondary sources (Varvara Stepanova’sdrawings of Charlie Chaplin as they appeared in Gan’sjournal Kino-Fut are particularly striking), such featuresforcibly designate this publication as the definitive edition of Gan’s text.

J.V

B O O K S

828 december 2014 • clvi • the burlington magazine

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