Stephen Campbell's new book is required reading for anyone who studies, and especially for anyone who teaches, sixteenth-century Italian art. Endless Periphery began as a series of lectures given at the University of Chicago in 2012 and retains the quality of investigating interconnected themes. Grosso modo, the project is meant to bring to the fore a series of artists and works of art from what has typically been construed as the hinterland of Italian Renaissance art history: artists like Girolamo Alibrandi, Cesare da Sesto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Girolamo Romanino, Moretto, and, perhaps most exemplarily, Lorenzo Lotto, who earns pride of place in the subtitle; and places like Messina, Naples, Recanati, Jesi, Varallo, Bergamo, and Brescia. Campbell makes an impassioned, convincing argument that the legacy of Vasari has overridden our ability to appreciate the broader scope—geographically and stylistically—of what comprises ambitious, innovative art in the first half of the sixteenth century. In essence, the book asks: What would our view of this art be if Vasari had not come along to shape the notion of the maniera moderna around the Florence-Rome axis?

In chapter 1, Campbell pokes holes in the Florentinization narrative often told about fifteenth-century art; in the first half of the sixteenth century, it is not that Vasari's axis comes out of nowhere, but it is still in the process of formation. Artists become aware that centers are developing (i.e., Florence, Rome, Venice), but they are in dialogue with the process of canon formation. Campbell asserts that works by artists in what in post-Vasarian terms became the “periphery,” “themselves effectively constitute counter-Vasarian historiographies” (24). As becomes clearer in later chapters, Campbell sees many works that do not fit the later established post-Vasarian model as oppositional. Chapter 2 connects the study to broader theoretical and interdisciplinary concerns, drawing on concepts such as geopolitics, heterotopias, and place studies. Through geographically framed case studies, the rest of the book asks us to rethink the relationship between center and periphery and challenges the dominant narrative told about sixteenth-century art in Italy.

Chapter 3 deals with the questione meridionale, focusing in particular on Renaissance Messina (and to some degree Naples). The sustained discussion of Cesare da Sesto's altarpiece for San Domenico in Messina (1514–16), now in the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, provocatively termed “one of the most influential High Renaissance altarpieces” (72), provides a good example of Campbell's mode of interpretation. Although the work registers the impact of Raphael in Rome, it has “transregional ambitions,” proposing an “alternative formulation of Rome and the ‘modern manner’” that acknowledges recent altarpieces from Milan, Venice, and elsewhere (75, 78). This is not, Campbell makes clear, a matter of the “unexamined concept of ‘influence’” (78), but rather a self-conscious, syncretic proposal by the artist.

Chapter 4 is concerned with the work of two artists in two particular places: Gaudenzio Ferrari's multimedia works for Varallo and Lorenzo Lotto's altarpieces in the Marches, both seen as “landscapes of pilgrimage” (104)—places activated by works of art. Both the artists and the locations have quintessentially been seen as peripheral, but Campbell demonstrates that both artists “produced a highly distinctive and innovative religious art that is clearly aware of—while maintaining distance from—the increasingly dominant workshops of the major centers” (103). Rather than seeing Lotto as stylistically individualistic, even retardataire, Campbell depicts him as highly attuned to many and various styles across Italy and even across the Alps, which the painter willfully exploits in different combinations that he thinks will speak to his audience in the particular locale where he is working.

Attention shifts in chapter 5 mostly to painters active in Brescia, especially Romanino and Moretto. Here Campbell takes on the hoary notion of the Lombard school. He concedes naturalism in the artists’ works, but not as “an organic and autochthonous phenomenon” (181). Rather he sees it as a rhetorical strategy born out of local controversies regarding the Eucharist (Brescia being particularly close to Protestant lands) from the 1520s to 1540s. The final chapter examines the late works of Titian as a kind of epilogue. As the canon building progressed in the artistic literature of the mid-century, Titian was increasingly made to stand in for Venetian painting. In the works Titian executed for non-Italian patrons, he sought to position himself as a pan-Italian artist; in those made for Italian patrons, he resisted being co-opted into the debates of regional differences.

The book is beautifully produced and illustrated, and Campbell provides both overarching arguments and sustained interpretations of individual works of art, many of which are not often discussed in such a broad context. Not every reader will agree with all the details of the diverse chapters. Campbell likes the phrase can be seen (or taken / explained / made), which is another way of saying this is the way he sees or explains. The book will provide ample food for thought in the next years.