The fifteen collected essays in the second volume of Peter Humfrey’s Festschrift, drawn from papers delivered at a 2012 conference in his honor, explore only a handful of the subjects in which Humfrey has become a leading expert. He wrote monographs on Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, Dosso Dossi, Lorenzo Lotto, Titian, and the Renaissance Venetian altarpiece, and published on dozens of other artists in numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and entries in Grove Art Online. His Painting in Renaissance Venice (1997) remains the finest single-volume survey on the subject. For decades, Humfrey has been an irreplaceable presence in Renaissance art history and a doyen of Venetian Renaissance painting.
The essays are of a high quality and most concern major artists dear to Humfrey. Paul Hills explores Lorenzo Lotto’s characteristic animation of colored and diaphanous fabrics — specifically shrouds, veils, and altar cloths — to intensify emotional expressiveness and educe sacramental resonances that invite meditation. Bernard Aikema identifies a previously unpublished painting of Ecce Homo in a private collection as a mid-1520s work by Lotto, relating it to the reception in certain Venetian circles of The Imitation of Christ, a text Lotto owned. Aidan Weston-Lewis argues that a painting of the Annunciation in the Church of Our Lady and St. Andrew, Galashiels, was executed by Titian’s workshop to record his now-lost Annunciation of ca. 1535 that was dispatched to the Spanish court. Matthias Wivel sees Titian’s hand in the doodles on the verso of Titian’s Portrait of Girolamo Cornaro and speculates that one of them is a caricature of Michelangelo. Andrea Bayer, Michael Gallagher, and Silvia Centeno consider whether Jacopo Bassano’s late and probably undelivered altarpiece, The Baptism of Christ, recently conserved and technically examined at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was indeed “non finita,” as Ridolfi described. Philip Cottrell identifies two paintings in Weimar as part of Bonifacio de’ Pitati’s original set of six Triumphs of Petrarch, a cycle discussed by Ridolfi but often misattributed and iconographically misinterpreted. Joseph Hammond argues that certain motifs in The Presentation of Christ in the church of Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice, support its identification by some scholars as an early work of Jacopo Tintoretto. Joanna Kilian Michieletti considers how new interests in musical improvisation might be depicted in, and affect the meaning of, certain sixteenth-century paintings, such as the Louvre’s Concert Champêtre (now usually given to Titian, but more probably, as Jaynie Anderson argues, by Giorgione).
Other essays explore the work of lesser-known artists. Nina Kudiš adds four paintings located in a Franciscan church near Orebić in Croatia to the oeuvre of Pace Pace, and also argues that The Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony and Francis and Donors in Venice’s church of San Francesco della Vigna is by Gabriele Caliari. Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo analyzes Domenico Bottazzo’s often-overlooked monochrome ornamental decorations, painted on the ceiling and lesenes dividing the wall frescoes in Padua’s Scuola del Santo. Mauro Lucco adds several paintings to the oeuvre of Stefano Cernotto, an artist whom he identifies with the “Stefano, discepolo de Tiziano,” mentioned by Marcantonio Michiel in 1532.
Three essays relate more generally to Humfrey’s interests. Marzia Faietti traces the model for Antiope, in Renaissance depictions of Jupiter and Antiope, to various works by Parmigianino and to Michelangelo’s Eve in Original Sin on the Sistine ceiling. Linda Borean uses several case studies to identify a portrait type of the art collector, different from Flemish examples and unique to Venice. Irving Lavin brings his wealth of knowledge to reexamine possible meanings of Michelangelo’s signature on the St. Peter’s Pietà, the only public work signed by the artist. Especially noteworthy is Allison Sherman’s essay, which employs archival and other primary sources to reconstruct the rich and highly suspenseful microhistory surrounding the commission of Titian’s Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, now in Venice’s Chiesa dei Gesuiti. Sherman’s thorough research uncovers not only a fascinating episode of intrigue among the Venetian elite, but also startlingly illuminates one of Titian’s darkest masterpieces, which was initially an altarpiece in Santa Maria Assunta dei Crociferi before the church was razed after the suppression of the Crociferi in 1656.
These essays represent a rich trove of research for the specialist. Both volumes, handsomely produced with beautiful color reproductions by Artibus et Historiae, offer a fine tribute to Humfrey, one of the most genial and generous historians of Italian Renaissance art, as well as one of the most distinguished.
