The timing is perfect: Tullio Lombardo’s hugely impressive, over-life-size nude of Adam, badly broken in an unfortunate accident, has just emerged from a remarkable ten-year restoration, on view again at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In celebration of this event, Anne Markham Schulz has brought together her numerous articles on Tullio in a full-scale monograph of the artist, complete with superb photographic documentation and an online supplement of images.

The Tullio chronology has never been an easy one, with scholars differing widely in their judgments. Complicating the situation is the assessment of Tullio’s role in the Lombardo shop after 1506, when he turned his personal attention increasingly to architecture. Venice never had its Vasari. While Francesco Sansovino’s invaluable guide of 1581 offers precious attributions, the basic critical study remains Pietro Paoletti’s late nineteenth-century folio volumes (L’architettura e la scultura del rinascimento in Venezia [1893–97]), astonishing in sweep, maddening in organization. Schulz has remedied the situation, highlighting Venice’s most important sculptor of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, allowing us to savor the work of this key figure in the development of a distinctive Venetian Renaissance style, a style destined to have an aftermath long after the artist’s death in 1532.

A major concern of the author has been to separate the hands of the three principals of the story: the father Pietro, founder of the shop, and his two sons, Tullio and the younger Antonio, all three working together in projects of the late 1470s and 1480s. Pietro’s overwrought classicism, rife with highly decorated surfaces and jagged drapery, would give way to the austerity of the sons, each of whom developed a distinctive brand of Renaissance classicism. It is almost certain that both visited Rome, where Antonio became entranced with the motifs of classicism — later to be put on display in his work for Alfonso I d’Este in Ferrara — and Tullio acquired a stately, highly controlled classical vocabulary that was to proliferate in various forms throughout the long life of the shop. Schulz distinguishes the style of the two sons largely on the basis of drapery arrangement — “rigidly geometric” in the case of Tullio, “abundant and diverse” for Antonio, a distinction already to be seen in their very early works of the 1470s in S. Giobbe. Tullio’s style emerges fully developed in his masterpiece, largely of the 1490s, the tomb of Doge Andrea Vendramin, now in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, setting forth a new grandeur in Renaissance tomb monuments. Schulz’s chapter on the tomb, drawing usefully on the unpublished dissertation by Wendy Stedman Sheard (Yale, 1971), is the centerpiece of the book, putting Tullio front and center, separating his work from that of the large crew of assistants.

It is in the effort to establish a post-Vendramin style for Tullio that the stylistic judgments become more questionable. Antonio’s departure for Ferrara in 1506 and Tullio’s turn to architecture at about the same time mark a change in the shop in which autograph Tullio becomes increasingly hard to locate. Schulz’s ingenious solution has been to carve out a career for Tullio’s son Sante — for whom no documents or signed works exist — thereby creating a new category of Tullioesque, but not Tullio, works. Setting aside the Sante solution, numerous attribution questions remain. Does one really want to saddle Tullio with the thoroughly inept, half-carved, and partial copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper now in the Ca’ d’Oro? Could that painful grimace of the Guidarello Guidarelli visage ever be considered to come from the hand of Tullio? Can the head of a youth on display in the sacristy museum of the Church of S. Stefano, with his ill-fitting wig of hair flapping open at the sides, be anything but the earnest effort of an untalented Tullio imitator?

The book’s emphasis on the separation of hands will certainly mark one phase of Lombardo scholarship. Still to come is an appreciation of Tullio as an ideator — a brilliant inventor of motifs. This is probably in the long run where the hand of Tullio is to be found, whatever his autograph involvement may have been. No one can equal Tullio, for example, in his deployment of hair as a carrier of narrative: the wonderful streaming hair of the repentant son in the Santo relief, a perfect Christ-Pietà motif; the decorous princess locks of the Virgin in the S. Giovanni Crisostomo Coronation, a queen for the ages; the carefully disheveled hair of the Magdalen in the Seminario sacrament tabernacle, broadcasting her emotional abandonment; the uncanny adaptation of the classical Antonine mop of hair to beautifully convey the freshness of the newborn Adam. Schulz’s yeoman’s service together with her photographs provides the material that will allow this next phase of Tullio research to go forward.