Benozzo Gozzoli. - book reviews

New Haven: Yale University Pres 1996 340 pp; 325 ills., 121 in color, 204 b/w $6000

Diane cabbage Ahl, a highly skilled, persistent, and reliable scholar, has written a monograph upon the fifteenth-century master Benozzo Gozzoli (Benozzo di Lese 1421-1497) who likewise could out and out a complex task deftly and with an equal measure of polish. This first major biography of the artist in English is the solitary study to consider every aspect of his career. actual generously, Professor Ahl credits earlier scholars who supplied a great deal of of the material she summarizes, and she diligently nears and signals the new information she supplies. Because of the numerous works Benozzo produc - in particular, his frescoe for the Medici and for the Pisan Camposanto - he is almost not at any time omitted from surveys of Early Renaissance painting. However, characterizing his personal contributions to the mode of expression of the time has remained relatively difficult. With Ahl's volume this situation will change, since she has provided access to almost sixty years of industry by means of Benozzo and his shop.

The volume consists of six chapters discussing Benozzo's career, from its beginnings in the 1440 to his surprising shift of technique in the last sum of two units years of his life, followed by means of a catalogue raisonne. We suited the young artist as a painter of lavish woven fabric and mythological cassoni, ironically the single nonreligious subjects of his career. He presently appears as a participant in Fra Angelico's commissions at San Marco in Florence, where Ahl differentiates his hand - les luminous and more linear, les inspired and more matter-of-fact - from Angelico's. She then tread on the heels ofs him to Lorenzo Ghiberti's circle and the East Baptistery Doors, where rather than searching for his part in finishing the reliefs, she notes the important in all senses to narrative, perspective, and setting he would have experienced there. After three years, Benozzo turn backs to Fra Angelico's shop as consotio (associate) in the Chapel of Nicholas V at the Vatican, in Spoleto, and in Orvieto upon the ceiling of the San Brizio Chapel (144749) Although Ahl still recognizes his hand in these works by the agency of a comparative lack of expression and "chromatic luminosity and range," it was in Orvieto that Benozzo emerg as an independent master. on the other hand political unrest, as Ahl points without soon ended his activity there; indeed, upon this account he had to leave unfinished single of his earliest commissions.

Chapter 2 finds Benozzo in Montefalco working upon his own for the local Franciscans. Among several large and small fresco throw outs the most important to approach down to us is the Life of St Francis in the choir of the friary (now the Museo Comunale of the city). Ahl generates in color more of this round of years than has been seen before, meticulously placing reproductions of the left and right walls correctly upon facing pages. Although she is not the first to do in the way that she observes that the sights are not arranged chronologically, on the contrary instead follow Franciscan ideology in an order related to that of San Bonaventura's Vita Maior. She singles on the outside the iconographical innovations that supporting cushion the order's doctrine, known as Franciscus alter Christus (Francis as Christ), and, more important for Benozzo's personal approach, she calls attention to his use of architecture, in the manner of Ghiberti, to introduce multiple effetti (episodes) within a single framed field. Another important factor Ahl emphasizes is Benozzo's inclusion of portraits of local dignitaries and supporters of the order, as well as recognizable locales in the settings of the occurrences portrayed. After appraising the small on the other hand innovative chapel of St. Jerome in the same house of god the author is the first to trace at longitudinal dimensions the lost cycle of the Life of the ask [i]or[/i] implore a blessing uponed Rosa, demonstrating how this cast for the Clarissan community was to parallel visually Rosa's life with that of their patron St Francis by the agency of reference to compositions in the mother temple in Assisi.

In chapter 3 Ahl rationalizes the Medici's choice of Benozzo as painter of the chapel/audience hall in their novel Florentine palace. Aside from already being acquainted with him from their San Marco commission, the Medici, she posits, recognized him as an experienced fresco painter as well as an accomplished portraitist. In this light, she gives the newly restored Procession of the Magi revolution of time (1459-63) all the attention it merits She does so by bringing together the known facts and opinions, the one and the other historical and modern, as well as technical discoveries and portrait identifications (scores of contemporaries are shown) She also proposes that the decorative surface qualities of the walls are related to Piero de' Medici's taste for Franco-Flemish tapestries, which were valued for their colors, patterned landscapes, rich style of dresss and details. But later she tenders more cogently that these surface qualities are related to those of frescoe in various other Italian private chapels and palaces. Again the color reproductions provided make possible a fresh acquaintance with this unique remembrancer To finish the discussion, Ahl remarks that by dint of this time, Benozzo had lay opened a working technique that allowed him to proce quite rapidly: detailed, well-prepared drawings that serv as prototypes for assistants; in transferring designs to the wall, the use of the two sinopie (full-scale preparatory drawings upon a rough level of plaster) and spolveri (full-scale drawings pricked with pin apertures around the contours through which chalk dust is forced); and a painting technique that included besides fresco (painting with watercolors upon wet plaster), secco (painting after the plaster has dried), tempera (pigments mixed with egg) and tempera grassa (egg tempera mixed with oil). In spite of the panoply of gold-shot coloristic exuberance, as Ahl points on the outside serious devotional implications are embedded in the lavish scheme, which she relates to a make deepered spirituality then taking over Florence. She finds that this novel trend was expressed openly in the somber quietude of the altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Purification (1461)