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Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.3 (2002) 525-527



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Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet. By DEBORAH PARKER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 233; 29 black-and-white illustrations. $60.00 (cloth).

The Florentine artist Agnolo di Cosimo, or Bronzino (1503-72), was also a prolific writer, known in his own day as much for his burlesque and lyric poetry as for his portraits and fresco cycles. Bronzino's dual facility with texts and images puts him in the company of other Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, and Giorgio Vasari. Although the literary production of his peers has attracted much scholarly attention, Deborah Parker presents the first wide-ranging, interdisciplinary interpretation of Bronzino's poetry and its relation to his artistic oeuvre. Readers of the Journal of the History of Sexuality will likely find most relevant Parker's discussion of erotic and homoerotic material, particularly evident in the burlesque poetry, or capitoli. But one of Parker's main points is that the capitoli account for only fifty-one out of more than three hundred poems; an exclusive focus on the burlesque poetry, she argues, produces a distorted view of Bronzino's overall production.

The book consists of an introduction to Bronzino's place in history and art history, four chapters on the poetry, a brief conclusion, and two appendixes. In the first chapter, "A Poetry of Transgression: Bronzino's Rime in Burla," Parker discusses burlesque poetry and its characteristic subject matter. In keeping with the genre, Bronzino chooses mundane, innocuous topics that allow for the maximum display of authorial wit, ingenuity, and innuendo. Titles include "Against Bells," "On the Onion," "On the Paintbrush," and "On the Frying Pan." Ever since the publication in 1981 of Jean Toscan's Le Carnaval du langage, a study of double entendre in Italian literature, readers have been able to decode the often surprising and unpredictable erotic connotations of everyday objects. According to Toscan, for example, boiled meat stands for heterosexual intercourse, while roasted meat connotes anal intercourse or sodomy, paintbrush is euphemistic for penis, and frying pans (round and hot!) represent buttocks. Parker presents an important critique of Toscan, countering his focus on what each word means with an emphasis on how the words create meaning in relation to one another. While Toscan's study concentrates on the signifier and the signified, Parker's poststructuralist approach shifts our attention to syntax. "[O]bscenity is less a matter of certain words summoning specific sexual meanings than of language considered as a system that is working toward an erotic effect . . . the identification of a word's possible obscene meaning should be seen as a point of departure rather than as an end in itself" (24). Together with her insistence on open versus closed readings, Parker also reminds the reader of the polymorphous and varied possibilities of eroticism in Bronzino's burlesque poetry. Michael Rocke's work provides a foundation for her discussion, yet Parker does not directly engage in the debates about Renaissance homosexuality [End Page 525] articulated by Michel Foucault, Jonathan Goldberg, James Saslow, Alan Bray, and others. She avoids ascribing any single sexual identity to Bronzino; indeed, she somewhat coyly characterizes him as having had "an unusually divided mind" (124, 169).

In chapter 2, "The Comfort of Friends in Bronzino's Canzoniere," Parker develops the contrast between burlesque and lyric genres; the crisp, definitive dichotomy she presents resembles the lapidary, unyielding surfaces of Bronzino's paintings. The burlesque poems are equivocal, subversive, and obscene, while the sonnets are rhetorical and Petrarchan, often consisting of exchange poems between friends with laudatory or commemorative content. The burlesque poems take the reader into the streets, hospitals, prison galleys, and artisans' shops, while the sonnets evoke the Medici court and the Florentine Academy. The sonnets, previously dismissed as superficial and mannered, find a sympathetic reader in Parker, who explores the role of sociability and coterie patronage on Bronzino's writing and painting. Parker also notes that the burlesque and lyric genres differ in their publication histories; five of Bronzino's capitoli were...

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