More than mastery of the nude: David Ekserdjian reviews the first comprehensive account of the art of Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, which bravely tackles the challenging problems of attribution in the careers of two artists who worked with great skill in many media

The Pollaiuilo Brothers: the Arts of Florence and Rome

ALISON WRIGHT

Yale University Press 45 [pounds sterling]/$75

ISBN 0 300 10625 4

In The Nude, Kenneth Clark writes of Antonio Pollaiuolo's Hercules compositions that 'These alone are enough to distinguish Pollajuolo as one of the two or three chief masters of the nude in action and as one of the originating forces in the history of European art, whose importance has been underrated partly owing to the accidents of time, and partly, perhaps, owing to a name which looks difficult to pronounce.' The other reason why Antonio--and indeed the less talented Piero--Pollaiuolo have not received the recognition they deserve is that there has never been a truly comprehensive monograph devoted to them. We may regret the fact that The Nude is absent from the otherwise intimidatingly all-encompassing bibliography of this enormous and remarkable book, but it should be stated at the outset that Clark would have been delighted to see his hero honoured in such impressive and at the same time judicious style.

There are two principal problems associated with writing about Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo. The first is that the attribution of paintings to one or the other of them is fraught with difficulty, and that some pieces are universally agreed to be collaborations between them. This means that a discerning eye and a sense of quality are essential: Alison Wright has both, although she tends to eschew overtly evaluative commentary; moreover, she is wise enough not simply to apportion all the inferior works or disappointing passages of individual paintings to Piero. The second is that Antonio in particular worked in so many different media: above all as a painter and sculptor in metal, but also as a draughtsman, an engraver and a designer for embroidery. Wrights doctoral thesis of 1992 was entitled 'Studies in the Paintings of the Pollaiuolo', but the intervening years have not been wasted, and the scope of this Gesamtkunstwerk is incomparably more ambitious.

The introduction and fourteen chapters are followed by a compact but extremely useful catalogue section, with the text being artfully constructed to combine chronological thrust with thematic unity. The consequence is that chapters can be devoted to 'The Development of Secular Subjects' or 'Small-scale Bronzes', and become virtual mini-monographs, while at the same time there is a real sense of forward momentum and artistic evolution. Arguably the greatest triumph is the chapter on 'Portraiture'. In his so-called 'Complete Edition' of 1978, which contained thirty-nine catalogue numbers of extant works as against Wright's seventy, Leopold D. Ettlinger included one solitary portrait, Piero's half-length of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (it is given to Piero in the 1492 Palazzo Medici inventory), and rejected all the other candidates with a spineless escape clause: 'None of these attributions is convincing, and all portraits have been ascribed to various artists. Their re-examination seems necessary.'

Wright, in contrast, fearlessly grasps every nettle on offer, and makes a good case for the finest of the portraits--those in the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin and the Museo Poldi-Pezzoli in Milan--being by Antonio, and also makes a compelling association between a frontal Portrait of a Youth in a private collection and two female profile portraits, respectively in the Uffizi and the Metropolitan, These three pictures must all be by the same hand, and Wright has no qualms about owning up to the major stumbling-block to their being by Piero, which is that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's Portrait of a Woman is profoundly different from them, and more obviously Piero-esque. Putting a good deal of chronological distance between them may be the answer. Typically, Wright--who is very interested in social history as well as art--peppers her prose with fascinating apercus, such as that Galeazzo Maria Sforza's gloves are a mark of rank, since they were not worn by Florentine citizens.

Another high point of the book is the meticulous and sure-footed consideration of the tombs of Sixtus re and Innocent VIII, which Antonio Pollaiuolo executed in Rome towards the end of his life. The former, memorably described by the author as 'a floor tomb which has overreached itself', is squirrelled away in the Sacristy Museum of St Peter's, and is visited only by specialists, I suspect, but will surely prove a future must-see for all readers of this book, in which it is lavishly and beautifully illustrated. The latter, by contrast, is readily accessible--albeit in slightly modified form--in the left aisle of the basilica itself, where it punches its weight against Bernini and Algardi at their best. In discussing both tombs, Wright is characteristically illuminating and balanced about their related but not identical iconographies.

Having just completed a book of my own, I am more mindful than usual of the adage about casting the first stone, and in fact aficionados of error will find pretty slim pickings here: on p. 29, Donatello's Zuccone is associated with the facade of the Duomo instead of its campanile; on p. 292, Herrick is Thomas, when he should be Robert; on p. 311, Lucca is said to be five kilometres from Pistoia, presumably courtesy of a typo.