Véronique Plesch’s Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue provides a detailed iconographic study of the Passion cycle painted by Giovanni Canavesio in the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines at La Brigue, an Alpine village in what is now France. Plesch provides ample context for the La Brigue cycle in terms of Savoyard Passion cycles in general, and she discusses in detail in both the text and an extensive appendix Canavesio’s various Passion cycles (although not his painted cycles on other subjects).

The book’s organizing principle is less the cycle itself than Canavesio’s status as “presbiter,” or priest. As Plesch points out, Canavesio always signed his works with his priestly profession as well as his name. Accordingly, she organizes the book into chapters according to the rhetoric of preaching. This means that the cycle is surveyed from beginning to end more than once, which may at first feel redundant. But this repetition is unavoidable, since the author’s primary concern is to give as comprehensive a reading as possible of each panel as well as of the cycle as a whole. Certainly any scholar who has recourse to this volume in the future will welcome Plesch’s thorough treatment of the cycle through multiple analytical lenses, along with the complete documentation of the cycle in high-quality color photographs.

Plesch states at the outset that she “place[s] the ensemble in the wider context of late medieval religious devotion” (xxiii), addressing the cycle’s rapports with contemporaneous religious theater, an ephemeral counterpart to the painted narrative. Plesch considers mural cycles, preaching, and religious drama to be mutual responses to a common devotional culture. Thus she views Canavesio’s concern with consistency of costume among the numerous characters, as well as his interest in subsidiary characters and background activity in many scenes, as fulfilling functions on multiple narrative and doctrinal levels. Further consideration of such painted cycles’ relationship to other multi-panel narrative media in a devotional setting, such as stained glass or tapestry, might have been helpful, since in nearby Provence there was a longstanding and flourishing tradition of “peintre-verriers,” some of whom were priests.

Canavesio’s consistent self-identification as “presbiter” serves as Plesch’s starting point for discussion of the potential impact of this vocation on the artist’s iconographic decisions. Plesch demonstrates how Canavesio continually made choices at every juncture of the project. The lack of a surviving contract for this work, however, renders the reasons for the choices obscure, although Plesch attributes many of them to Canavesio’s role as priest and his assumed concern with orthodoxy. For example, she argues persuasively that the anti-Waldensian stance of the Church probably informed Canavesio’s choice to emphasize the heretical actions of Jews throughout the cycle in the person of Judas, culminating in the grisly depiction of the Suicide of Judas as a negative counterpoint to Christ’s Crucifixion. But was it Canavesio only who made these decisions, or was it his patrons who encouraged a certain approach, choosing him because they knew he could work in their desired mode?

Plesch’s detailed treatment of the La Brigue Passion cycle proves especially useful in its discussion of Canavesio’s style. Her study of how the artist plumbed varying sources for inspiration and derivation counters the traditional scholarly judgment of these works as produced without innovation (176) and therefore unworthy of sustained study. As Plesch points out, the use of visual quotations from prints and other sources is both a Medieval and a Renaissance trope (150–151); certainly in other contemporary regions and media (such as the paintings of Rosso at Fontainebleau or the poetry of Du Bellay) scholars have not implied that the borrower lacked imagination. Again, Plesch stresses the artist’s process of making choices, as in her detailed discussion of Canavesio’s use of prints. She observes that Canavesio’s stylistic limitations or his difficulties with perspective (131) do not mean that his use of print sources was unsophisticated; thus she offers a direct rebuttal to the many scholars who have criticized provincial artists like Canavesio for their “poor use of perspective.” As Plesch states, “In no case did Canavesio slavishly copy the elements he chose from his models. The modifications he made to his borrowings can be ascribed to several factors: medium, breadth of the cycles, and format” (123).

Plesch explores Canavesio’s use of specific Northern sources in the form of prints, and discusses Joost Amman von Ravensburg and other known German painters in Savoy and Nice/Liguria. These important, documented links with specific Northern artists and works build on Marguerite Roques’s Les apports néerlandais dans la peinture du Sud-Est de la France, XIVe, XVe et XVIe siècles (Bordeaux: Union française d’impression, 1963). This analysis could have been further enriched by a consideration of the longstanding emigration of Netherlandish artists to Provence, and specific rapports of Canavesio’s work with Provençal works that may be less known or even anonymous, since they are more geographically proximate and could be either a filter for Northern sources or evidence for more widespread stylistic or iconographic phenomena.

The lack of documents on Canavesio himself and on this cycle perhaps kept Plesch from fully considering the application of documentary evidence to the rest of the study. Plesch’s conclusions on the choices made by Canavesio could have been considerably buttressed by the judicious use of this evidence. It is somewhat surprising that the bibliography includes no archival sources. While it is true that only a handful of surviving documents mention Canavesio, and that the majority of his career is recorded through the signature panels on his works, there is still evidence to be gleaned from other materials from the region and neighboring areas. Further exploration could reveal a tradition in Savoy of painters working in multiple forms, such as altarpieces, murals, and glass- or banner-painting, just as there was in Provence at the time (this research would further buttress claims of other scholars that Canavesio worked on illuminations and sculpture [3, notes 12, 13]). Similarly, although there is no surviving contract for the La Brigue cycle, the use of a textual/iconographic “consultant” may be postulated, based on its previous use in Provence (Josse Lieferinxe, altarpiece for the Church of the Friars Minor, Aix-en-Provence, 1498–1500).

Painter and Priest opens a new direction in the art-historical scholarship of the regions of Savoy, Nice, and Provence, alongside several other book-length studies of the painting of these regions, whether surveys (L.-H. Labande, Les Primitifs Français: Peintres et peintres-verriers de la Provence occidentale, Marseille: Librairie Tacussel, 1932; Michel Laclotte and Dominique Thiébaut, L’Ecole d’Avignon, Paris: Flammarion, 1983; and Joëlle Guidini-Raybaud, “Pictor et veyrerius”: Le vitrail en Provence occidentale, XIIe–XVIIe siècles, Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003) or monographs (Charles Sterling, Enguerrand Quarton: Le peintre de la Pièta d’Avignon, Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1983; Marcelle Baby-Pabion, Ludovic Brea [actif de 1475 à 1522] & la peinture primitive niçoise, Nice: Editions SeRRe, 1991; and Claire-Lise Schwok, Louis Bréa ca. 1450–ca. 1523, Paris: ARTHENA, 2005). Plesch acknowledges the lack of systematic and comprehensive study of Savoyard or Niçois painting, and her book would be better appreciated if such a survey existed. Her study complements Germaine and Pierre Leclerc’s Chapelles peintes du pays niçois (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 2003), adding many levels of scholarly inquiry to that study of chapel mural cycles, while the Leclerc book provides valuable context to Plesch’s detailed study of Canavesio’s work.

The study of the history of art in Europe during the late medieval and early modern period continues to be structured around the two poles of the Northern and Southern (i.e., Italian) Renaissances. Although Plesch does not confront this dichotomy directly, her book in itself offers a rebuke to a system that concentrates scholars’ efforts on a few, albeit rich, centers and leaves large swathes of the continent in a peripheral zone. Plesch does not investigate the enormous impact of modern nation-state boundaries and allegiances on the study of art in these liminal regions between modern France, Italy, and Switzerland; and her discussion of how to spell Canavesio’s name, for instance, reveals the practical implications of the current paradigm. Artists like Canavesio clearly occupy neither Italy nor France, and thus fall between the cracks of modern nationalist art-historical discourses. The art of Savoy, Piedmont, Liguria, Nice, and Provence is rarely studied by scholars who are not native to those countries—Italy, France, and Switzerland—to which those regions now belong. Plesch herself is Swiss, but her study of these paintings in a U.S. institution (this book reworks her Princeton dissertation) remains unusual. A region already difficult to classify due to its chronology (late medieval or Renaissance?) and geography (neither France nor Italy) thus becomes even more liminal and local. Plesch’s book transforms the local into a subject of serious scholarship, as it also opens new avenues for scholars to integrate this material into art history by including Canavesio in wider discussions of priest-artists, such as Lippi, or other studies of devotional mural cycles.