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  • Véronique Plesch. Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio's Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue
  • David J. Drogin
Véronique Plesch . Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio's Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. xxx + 458 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. map. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-268-03888-0.

Véronique Plesch's book is a thorough investigation of a late fifteenth-century Passion cycle by the painter and priest Giovanni Canavesio, frescoed in Notre-Dame des Fontaines at La Brigue, at the intersection of Savoyard, Provençal, and Genoese territories. With exhaustive descriptions and analyses, the author considers this little-studied region and artist, his sermonic rhetoric, and interwoven pictorial sources. According to the author, Canavesio drew upon his experience as a priest to manipulate form and content, rhetorically emphasizing confession, repentance, and the Good Death. These themes develop in eight clearly [End Page 537] circumscribed chapters, divided into numerous subsections, and supplemented with three appendices on additional Passion cycles by Canavesio and by other Piedmontese artists. Helpful diagrams guide the reader through the detailed pictorial analyses.

The author suggests that Canavesio introduced nuances to a traditional fresco subject, and that stylistic manipulation has been mistaken for poor artistic skills. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce Canavesio and Notre-Dame des Fontaines, whose nave he frescoed in 1492. Canavesio's twenty-five frescoed Passion scenes are presented with the author's photographs of each and with a paragraph stating each scene's title and pictorial contents. Through discussions of region and biography, the author introduces Canavesio as a transitional painter who, through his activity in and near the Duchy of Savoy, intensified Piedmontese influence in Liguria at the end of the Quattrocento. The author argues that, because of the politics and geography of the region — summarized effectively in chapter 2 — Canavesio absorbed traditions from the Savoyard region, the Pays Niçois, Provence, Burgundy, and Liguria, as well as Germanic, Flemish, Lombard, and central Italian influences. Although the author's net of influence may be cast wide, these chapters help the reader negotiate the subsequent detailed visual analyses, where such influences are picked out; they also effectively introduce a region that may be unfamiliar to many in the fields of Italian and French Renaissance art.

The fundamental arguments are laid out in chapters 3 through 7, where the author employs a rhetorical lexicon to explain Canavesio's artistic merit and the significance of his priestly training: tellingly, these chapters are titled "Elocutio," "Imitatio," "Inventio and Dispositio," "Amplificatio," and "Expolitio." In each chapter, the author explains the rhetorical motif, then walks the reader through each scene by tracing each motif in detail, sometimes with charts and diagrams — here the individual images are indispensable. In chapter 3, the author positively reassesses Canavesio's poorly esteemed artistic skills by explaining that he expressionistically manipulated gestures, postures, and space to emphasize psychological states and to encourage empathy. Chapter 4 effectively traces Canavesio's refashioning of Northern pictorial sources circulating in the region, particularly Israhel van Meckenhem's Grobe Passion engravings. Chapters 5 and 6 suggest that Canavesio's unusual narrative sequences emphasize repentance, salvation, and (im)proper death, through motifs provided by Canavesio's experience as a priest — repeating themes include tears symbolizing repentance, and scorpions and bats symbolizing falsehood, heresy, and the Jews. Chapter 7 describes how tituli, scrolls, and labels complement the images, again employing diagrams to clarify motifs' frequency and significance. Chapter 8, the conclusion, expands on the significance of the artist's preaching expertise, particularly in themes of repentance and of anti-Semitic, anti-Waldensian imagery.

Well-structured arguments are supported with minute analyses and are generally convincing; however, the reader occasionally questions whether some motifs and techniques are more ubiquitous than this study acknowledges. Through chapter 3, for instance, the author argues that Canavesio expressionistically contorted [End Page 538] faces and gestures to intensify the narrative. The same could be said of other, earlier Italian schools (such as Trecento Bologna), and without the acknowledgment of the technique's currency, the reader might wonder whether the author is suggesting it is an innovation in Canavesio's...

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