In New Apelles and New Apollos, Diletta Gamberini builds upon an art historical tradition that embraces literary and poetic material as source for visual, cultural, and historical investigation. Her exploration stems from the consideration of verse-writing activity of poets and artists in the Italian courts during the Renaissance as being part and expression of the complex order of social phenomena brought to the fore by Italian art historian Arduino Colasanti in 1904. Gamberini narrows the field of investigation to Florence during the fifty years covering Cosimo I de’ Medici's ascent to power in 1537 as duke of the city, until the death of his son Grand Duke Francesco I in 1587. The author opens poetry to a compelling investigation of artistic production in its many features, such as patronage questions, workshop cultures, issues of professional identity, and personal networks with a fresh perspective that goes beyond the scholarly discourse about the intellectual ambitions of Italian Renaissance artists.
In the title, Gamberini skillfully puts forward the focus of her monographic work, which is the poetic production of art practitioners specifically engaged in drawing. In pluralizing Francesco Berni's 1534 epithet of Michelangelo that canonized him as the “divine artist,” and applying it to coeval artists practicing verse writing, the author benchmarks the proliferation of poetic production against prose writings on art. Historical details sprinkled throughout the chapters put the reader at ease while enabling them to follow the volume's trajectory, which sustains close textual analyses of the writers’ verse compositions. The many acute observations pertaining strictly to the literary field will inform the novice reader while enhancing an understanding of these sources, since they clarify “how the practice of art shaped the poetic voices of painters, sculptors, architects and goldsmiths [and] distinguished them from within the proliferation of verse-writing that occurred” (28).
These aspects unfold in the second chapter, which focuses on Benedetto Varchi's poetic corpus in the vernacular rather than on his Lezzioni. Specifically, the exchange between Varchi and Francesco da Sangallo offers relevant information regarding Varchi's role as broker of artistic commissions in Medici Florence. In the third and fourth chapters, Gamberini borrows tools from marketing analysis to show how artist-writers used the poetic medium to “[take] advantage of the poetic medium in order to tackle issues that were central to [their] chief activities” (29). They cut through the social fabric of the art market both vertically, reaching the rulers, and horizontally, creating partnerships. Through the scrutiny of two case studies (the writings by Benvenuto Cellini and Anton Francesco Doni's I Marmi 1552–53), Gamberini aims to “point out that their textual corpus offers a privileged cross-section of the alliances and rivalries that oriented the ‘horizontal’ relations within the Florentine arts community,” and “focalizes on a selection of poems that . . . addressed ‘vertically’ to the ruler and supreme arts patron of the city” (30). As a result, an interesting fresco of one of the most vibrant and competitive arts scenes of sixteenth-century Italy emerges.
New Apelles and New Apollos is not a book to read from beginning to end, and it was probably not intended as such. The erudition of the prose may occasionally emerge as an academic exercise, a trait compensated by the accurate exegesis of the sources, which are carefully selected and provided in edition in the appendix; the extensive bibliography; and the rich footnotes. All of these combine to make this book a reference volume for scholars. Ultimately, the merit of the work rests in its analysis of a plethora of primary sources in their original language—a fundamental step for any kind of serious historical investigation of the early modern period and its legacies.
