Benozzo Gozzoli. - book reviews

It is in this vein that Benozzo's last days were spent preparing a monumental Maesta for the town hall of Pistoia, where another of his sons was magistrate. All that remains is the sinopia, discovered in 1955. The grand composition shows a combination of stalwart monumentality, religious humility, iconographic pertinence to the locale, and pictorial fluency, which, as Ahl describes, was on the cusp of the High Renaissance.

Following 203 pages of text, the catalogue raisonne is presented in three parts: 1) All works that show any trace of the artist's hand, whether in collaboration with older masters, independent works, or works conceived and partially executed by Benozzo and completed by members of his shop. The 87 entries, including many more objects than are discussed in the text, are arranged by geographic location; 2) The 7 misattributions to Benozzo and/or his shop; and 3) 31 works known only through documentation, the largest such roster to date. There follows a selection of original documents, some of which are published for the first time. The last section is a 21-page bibliography.

While the author herself makes no pretense about breaking new interpretive ground, her book will surely set its readers thinking. By laying forth what is clearly the result of years of careful, dedicated work, she has made possible a new assessment of Benozzo Gozzoli. No longer can we accept the traditional but unspoken agreement about Benozzo's mediocrity. No longer can we define his style almost exclusively by saying he was not as good at color, light, and form as Fra Angelico, and then that his own assistants were not as good as he at the same things.

But more important, with this amount of information, it becomes possible to study, if not solve, some intriguing mysteries, such as the question of the quantity and quality of Benozzo's portraits. How did he come by such proficiency? Who before him imbued faces with such penetrating psychological content? What do these tense and thoughtful faces mean? His own self-portraits in the Medici Chapel, for example, express extreme social discomfort, not to say anxiety. What are we to make of those feelings? And not only are the major characters in the cavalcade highly individuated personalities, many ancillary figures seem closely studied and seem to palpitate with life and verve. This physiognomic sharpness was outstanding at the time and surely made an impact on contemporaries.

Another mystery is where Benozzo learned so much about foreshortening and perspective. His facility was enormous, far surpassing his presumed teachers. Look, for example, at the mule and horses seen head-on in the Medici Chapel; Leonardo must have had these in mind when he showed one of the magi's horses in the same view in his Adoration cartoon. Look again at the multiple levels of illusion - curtain, frame, shadows, and then the painting of the fictive altarpiece in the St. Jerome Chapel. If Benozzo was an autodidact, he would be more of an intellectual than is usually presumed. Is it possible, moreover, that the so-called "dull and dryly" finished scene of Solomon and Sheba on the East Doors of the Florentine Baptistery, so different in structure from the rest of Ghiberti's panels, was his design? (He was to repeat the single focus on the same subject in his own Camposanto cycle.) Could he have been not the dutiful follower of Fra Angelico, but the one responsible for the painted architecture in the Niccolina Chapel? Judging from the rest of his career, such architectural pockets for separate effetti were Benozzo's lifelong concern, and he achieved greatness precisely in this domain. In this light, one would have expected from Ahl more professional and historical analysis of Benozzo's representations of actual buildings and construction techniques (as in the Tower of Babel scene in the Camposanto, to name only one), than mere reliance on a letter from a colleague, which she cites in both the text and notes.