Giovio in Parnasso: Tra collezione di forme e storia universale (review)

Among Italian humanistic historians of the Cinquecento Paolo Giovio stands at the head of the line, perhaps beside only Guicciardini. Famed for his Histories, Eulogies, and Commentaries on the Turks, he was also an avid collector of portraits of famous people, which he displayed for the edification of all in his Museo at his villa near Como. Bolognese researcher Lara Michelacci presents an intriguing study of Giovio the Collector in this study that draws together the main threads of his thought, activity, and writings. She adds great depth and texture, however, by developing Giovio's physical and intellectual contexts, which creates a multivalent picture of the Renaissance enterprise in the sixteenth century. Giovio becomes a centerpoint around which swirl the era's leaders, collectors, travelers, historians, geographers, and humanists. Her observations and conclusions are well documented, perhaps a little too well documented, so that teasing out her own distinct contributions to Giovian studies is at times difficult. Nonetheless, the theoretical frameworks she provides for each section are nicely rooted in contemporary scholarship, including much Anglophone work that often begs to be integrated into a study like this one. Unfortunately, most of the English transcriptions are flawed, though not fatally.

Michelacci divides her work into four major sections. The first explores palazzi and villas as venues of display and commemoration. She outlines the glorification of the Medici dynasty embodied in the villa of Poggio a Caiano and its decoration and Giovio's role as creator of the iconographic scheme that transformed the sylvan villa into "a paradigm of [dynastic] continuity" (55) — from Arcadia to Parnassus — that paralleled Poliziano's encomiastic poetry. She then develops the linkage of the Tuscan villa with the Roman splendor and flavor of antiquity provided by the figure of Leo X. Though Poggio a Caiano provided a type or model for Giovio's own museum, its program remained underdeveloped, lacking both organizational focus and written cues to the iconography. The Farnese contributions to the Cancelleria in Rome, however, combine word and image in a way that Giovio would use in his galleries. For Giovio the image — especially one meant to praise its subject — needed the written word to complete its rhetorical task in the creation of a "theatre of meaning" (82). In this light, Michelacci then considers the Palazzo Cambi in Naples with its family stemme, busts, and inscriptions, and the general inspiration provided by Hadrian's Tivoli.

In chapter 2 Michelacci focuses on Giovio's own villa, collection, and museum. His collection and its display, which blur distinctions between public and private spaces in the villa, fuses the older role of study and the emerging concept of a museum. She analyzes this "reproducible microcosm" (105) in light of Paula Findlen's scholarship. Michelacci distinguishes Giovio's creation from other collections of the era along several lines, including his insistence that the portraits be true-to-life and not merely representational. She terms this an "apparatus of reality" (131) founded on research and evidence, laid out in Como for public consumption. Here the parallels to his written historical works begin to emerge, as do parallels to the Renaissance-era interest in the world as it is, even if mediated through imitation.

Chapter 3 shifts to geographic and ethnographic considerations of Giovio's scholarship. Michelacci reviews the mix of medieval myth and eyewitness testimony that constituted Europe's understanding of Africa, and the negative propaganda that passed for the truth about the Turks and their world. Usefully, she ponders why Giovio bought into so many African myths, but insisted on a fair and balanced view of the Turks, especially in his Commentario de le cose de' Turchi. His museum, too, contained verisimilitudinous images of Turkish leaders. She contextualizes these approaches to the ethnographic "other" by positing the rise of empiricism over classical authorities and the evolution of travel literature as major factors.

Lastly, Michelacci steps...