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Drogin reviews Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio's Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue by Veronique Plesch.

This dissertation examines monuments of painting and sculpture in the Bentivoglio Chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna. It demonstrates how generations of artists and patrons positioned Bentivoglio patriarchs as legitimate rulers of Bologna by creating works that draw from different models of social and political authority and their related artistic traditions. The contexts surrounding fifteenth-century Bentivoglio rulers and their monuments mandated changing forms of commemoration specific to those protagonists and their historical moments. The first two chapters establish the roots of Bentivoglio hegemony and examine the professor's tomb of Antongaleazzo Bentivoglio, a professor, condottiere, and, briefly, ruler of Bologna. Chapter One discusses the contexts surrounding Antongaleazzo's ascendancy and his son Annibale's procurement of the tomb. It argues that the tomb was carved mostly by Jacopo della Quercia in the 1430s. Chapter Two explores the motivations behind, and development of, medieval Bolognese professors' unique funerary iconography. I argue that the iconography's élite status and the tradition of burying Bologna's de facto rulers in professor tombs made Quercia's monument useful to the Bentivoglio in the 1440s. Chapter Three addresses the equestrian monument of Annibale I Bentivoglio, dated 1458. It queries the relief's accepted attribution to Pagno di Lapo Portigiani and places it within the contemporary tradition of equestrian monuments. It explains why commemorating Annibale I as a military hero was a useful strategy for the mid-century Bentivoglio, in an emphatic shift from intellectual ideologies. This conclusion emerges from a discussion of the titles and authority the Bentivoglio gathered from foreign rulers at mid century. Chapter Four considers paintings by Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Francia, commissioned by Giovanni II Bentivoglio in the 1480s and 1490s. I argue that Giovanni emulated his princely peers to shape his family's dynasty and to control his own representation as devote patriarch, erudite prince, and successful condottiere, partly through the reinstallation of Annibale's relief. This chapter traces an iconographic shift toward Petrarchan literature and allegories of Fame and Fortune. It explains how these changes remain within the framework of selecting effective legitimating identities from the contemporary social and artistic lexicon.

Drogin reviews I Volpini, una famiglia di scultori tra Lombardia e Baviera (secoli XVII-XVIII) by Pietro Delpero.

IN THE WAKE OF ARTISTS SUCH AS CINDY Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, and John Currin, playing \"I spy the Old Master citation!\" has become a popular sport, offering opportunities to reexamine (and occasionally give facile nods to) figurative art's early-modern roots. Critically reworking canonical images, the postmodern bait and switch foregrounds thorny concepts of authorship and identity, encouraging a reconsideration of source material, as well as querying crucial factors behind the surfaces of these masterpieces and even their status as such.