Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice First Edition Edition by Frederick Ilchman (Author), David Rosand (Author), Linda Borean (Author), Patricia Brown (Author), John Garton (Author) (MFA Publications)

This is the catalogue published to accompany the exhibition of the same name mounted by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2009 and which then traveled to the Museum of the Louvre in Paris. I was fortunate to be able to see the exhibition a couple of times in Boston, but I have just now acquired the catalogue, in order to be able to read it along with the one from the current "Masters of Venice" show in San Francisco (see my review on this website). I am very glad I did, and I would urge anyone interested in Italian Renaissance art to acquire it now, while it is still in print and available at the original price, because it is a real gem. The exhibition itself was spectacular, and the catalogue does it full justice. All fifty-six of the exhibited paintings are reproduced full-page and in excellent color, and they are accompanied by 112 quarter-page or half-page comparison illustrations, almost all also in color and extremely well arranged to complement the catalogue entries. I agree with the reviewer Ivor Zetler that the full-page detail reproductions he refers to should have been identified, but I did not find that quite so irksome, as most of them are only a few pages away from their sources.

The written contributions are largely by the most eminent scholars in their fields and equally excellent. There are interesting essays on patronage, on collecting, and on the materials and techniques available to sixteenth-century artists. The introductory essay, by Frederick Ilchman, who mounted the exhibition in Boston and is now the MFA's Curator of Paintings, is an excellent discussion of the relatively new artistic phenomenon of easel painting with oils on canvas and the attendant "invention" of brushstrokes, as well as the rivalry (the word is well chosen--he makes clear that this was more than mere "competition") the new possibilities occasioned. The most engaging aspect of the catalogue is its organization. Rather than taking the three artists one by one, or following a straight chronology, the arrangement is by theme and topic. There are eight major themes (e.g., "Sacred Themes, " "Tactile Vision: The Female Nude," "Portraiture"), and within each theme are several narrower topics (e.g., for the nude theme "Objects of Desire," "The Nude and the Mirror," and "Allegories of Love and Fertility"). Each of these topics, then, amounts to a succinct, several-page essay on its subject, comparing paintings of at least two--and in some cases all three--of the artists, with references to and illustrations of yet other painters. Most of these mini-essays are by Ilchman himself or in collaboration with Robert Echols; the nude-theme essays are contributed by Columbia University professor David Rosand, whose works on Venice and Venetian painting are well known, and much of the portrait material was done by John Garton, a Clark University art historian who has recently written the definitive study of Veronese's portraiture. I found this to be a very successful way of marshaling a quite diverse body of information. Although the exhibition and catalogue focussed on only three painters, their centrality and the expansive nature of the discussion make this book something like a general introduction to Venetian Renaissance painting. It is made additionally valuable by the conscientious annotation of the texts, the inclusion of a checklist providing complete provenance and selected references to the catalogue paintings, notes on the figure illustrations, a chronology, a selected bibliography, and a detailed index. This is a volume equally useful to the general reader and to the specialist.