July 16, 2015 Nebahat Avcı oǧlu and Emma Jones, eds. Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and its Territories, 1450–1750: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 326 pp.; 16 color ills.; 72 b/w ills. Cloth £ 70.00 (9781472410825) Monika Schmitter The retirement of the eminent architectural historian Deborah Howard from her position at the University of Cambridge, especially following that of Patricia Fortini Brown from Princeton University, marks a major turning point in the teaching of Venetian art and architecture in the academy. To honor Howard, recognized and admired for her rigorous, clear scholarship, as well as her kind, generous nature, some of her many students and friends have edited and contributed to this Festschrift. The volume covers a broad range of topics, both geographically and historically, but the essays are nonetheless tightly focused on particular subjects; many are devoted to monuments, places, and/or patrons that have largely been overlooked. A focus on documentary sources and evidence is notable throughout. To encompass the broad range of subjects, the volume is divided into sections: “Identity, Space and the City,” “Drawing, Mapping and Translating Venice,” “Palladio’s Creations and Creating Palladio,” “The Production of Sacred Space,” and “Time and Place in the Stato da Mar.” Due to the number and diversity of contributions, I will focus on themes that emerge from the ensemble rather than provide an account of all the articles (such a summary is included in the introduction by the book’s editors, Nebahat Avcı oǧlu and Emma Jones). Of the three words in the title “Architecture, Art and Identity,” predominance is given to the first, as is appropriate given Howard’s own scholarship; as a result, the volume will be primarily of interest to architectural historians. The figure of Andrea Palladio looms large, especially his contributions to ecclesiastical architecture; not only is a section devoted to him, but additional essays concern his influence and legacy, adding fodder to Howard’s own remark, quoted in the introduction, that “it would be scarcely an exaggeration to claim that more has been written about Palladio than about any other great architect” (6–7). Two key essays expand upon theories Howard herself has proposed. Paul Davies gives important, if, as he admits (58), circumstantial evidence that Jacopo Sansovino began with an initial “master plan” (67) for the design of the Piazza and Piazzetta at San Marco, supporting Howard’s position against the influential arguments made by Manfredo Tafuri for a more piecemeal process in which the spatial solution resulted from the complex design process of the individual buildings (the Zecca, the Libreria, and the Loggetta). The essay not only makes a significant contribution to the debate on this monument of Venetian civic identity, but also brings to the fore issues concerning the relation between design and building process, and architect and patron, in sixteenth-century Venetian architecture. The essay by Joanne Allen takes the reader from the center of Venice to its periphery, to the Church of San Giobbe at one of the farthest reaches of the city, and examines the vexing issue of its retrochoir. Scholarship has vacillated between seeing the San Giobbe retrochoir as a typical example of the shift of the choir from the nave to the space behind the high altar in the Counter Reformation (hence dating it to the early seventeenth century) or instead as a pioneering example built in the fifteenth century of a type of space that later became more common. Howard argued for the latter, and Allen presents compelling documentary and structural evidence to support the earlier date (making San Giobbe an example of what one might call a proto-retrochoir). Allen ties the innovation to the interest in lay mausolea in high altar chapels (in this case the funerary chapel of Doge Cristoforo Moro). The theme of identity is addressed most explicitly by Avcı oǧlu and Jones in their introduction: “By mining the Republic’s codes of conduct and unspoken rules for social, political and economic advancement, individuals were able to think creatively about the critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies published by the College Art Association Donate to caa.reviews Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and its Territories, 1450–1750: E... http://admin.caareviews.org/reviews/2438/preview 1 of 3 7/10/2015 2:51 PM