A long-neglected fresco cycle by Battista Zelotti, decorating six rooms in the Obizzi Castle of Cataio, is stunningly revealed in Irma B. Jaffe’s richly illustrated new book. The cycle’s rediscovery becomes one element of a three-part narrative. First, in the acknowledgment, Jaffe relays the sense of adventure and excitement that followed a phone call from her colleague, Gernando Colombardo, who first visited the frescoes, newly open to the public in 2002, and urged her to grab the next flight to Venice in order to see them. Then in the first half of the book, two chapters contextualize the frescoes by looking at the patron, the humanist scholar who provided the program, and the artist’s influences and sources. The book’s second half comprises the third and final phase, which presents the frescoes themselves in brilliant color reproductions. Full-page illustrations are accompanied by explanatory text that has as its source the detailed program written by the humanist Giuseppe Betussi in self-conscious anticipation of future tourists and scholars.

Chapter 1 deals with the history of the Castle of Cataio and outlines a brief introduction to the genealogy of the Obizzi family. The proximity of Cataio to both Venice and Padua puts it in the center of an area with long traditions of fresco painting and epic pictorial cycles. The patron, Pio Eneo Obizzi (1525–1588), served the city of Venice and the Veneto as a condottiere, but his fortune was already well established due to the martial activities of his ancestors, who made their first appearance fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II in the early eleventh century. Pio Eneo’s wealth, enhanced by the tremendous dowry of his wife, Eleonora Martinengo, allowed him to expand a small villa owned by his mother into an impressive country villa. The Castle of Cataio resembled a medieval fortification, but its function as a symbol of Obizzi power and wealth is based on the more classicizing precedents set by such examples as the Villa Madama or the many Medici villas, e.g., Caprarola or Fiesole. When Betussi convinced Pio Eneo to immortalize the deeds of his ancestors in text and image, the political self-fashioning that a landed estate promoted was further enhanced by the fresco cycle, which recounted the deeds of his ancestors in grand epic mode.

A rising star in humanist circles, Betussi (born 1520) received the endorsement of Pietro Aretino, who recommended him to several potential patrons. According to Jaffe, Betussi’s peripatetic career was the result of a succession of romantic relationships and an inexplicable restlessness that drove him to leave several promising positions. Nevertheless, Betussi was already well regarded and experienced in writing in the uomini famosi genre when he proposed the fresco cycle to Pio Eneo. The Ragionamento Sopra Cathaio, published in 1573, provides a tour of the castle and explicates the forty frescoes in a series of dialogues between the author and a fictive German visitor. Although Jaffe states that her book “is not the place to analyze all of Betussi’s literary oeuvre” (31), her subsequent discussion nevertheless could make better use of a text that is so closely aligned to the imagery. For example, she promises to examine how Mannerist aspects of Betussi’s writing parallel the Mannerist characteristics of Zelotti’s frescoes (31), but, aside from subject matter, she never provides a satisfying connection between the two on a more formal level.

As the artist who completed the extensive fresco cycle, Zelotti (ca. 1526–1578) is perhaps the most neglected of the three participants. A Veronese artist, Zelotti received numerous commissions for fresco cycles in villas throughout the Veneto. Yet little of his work survives, and he has received scant attention from art historians, even though he was accomplished enough to receive a commission for a painting in the Chamber of the Council of Ten in the Venetian Palazzo Ducale circa 1556. Because he collaborated with Veronese early in his career, his work was often misattributed, already at an early date. By the seventeenth century, Veronese was credited with the Cataio frescoes, despite the fact that Betussi specifically names Zelotti in the Ragionamento. A 1996 catalogue raisonné by Katia Brugnolo Meloncelli, Battista Zelotti (Milan: Berenice), goes a long way in documenting his many commissions, although it provides little critical analysis of his work. More recently, Sabina Glaser’s 2003 Il Cataio (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag), along with Jaffe’s book, should bring about greater interest in Zelotti, who can hold his own in the company of the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century.

A short second chapter places the frescoes into the context of other historical cycles. Betussi himself had an acute awareness of how the Cataio frescoes would be compared with works created to glorify prestigious families such as could be found in the Palazzo Vecchio, the Castle of San Secondo, or the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola. Jaffe traces the tradition of pictorial histories in Italy all the way back to Augustus’s Ara Pacis and the second-century Column of Trajan. She lays out historical precedents for the sort of grand-scale political art that allowed many powerful sixteenth-century patrons to manipulate perceptions about their histories and to justify their increasingly autocratic rulership. Doubtless, Betussi was able to convey to his patron how both the content and the scope of Zelotti’s cycle would allow Pio Eneo to elevate the Obizzi name and participate in a sort of cultural competition with other well-known families.

As short as this second chapter is, it provides the most telling insight into Betussi’s motivations and justifications, as Jaffe shows him taking pains to assure his readers that his sources are sound and his scholarship thorough. Yet Betussi’s insertion of Obizzi protagonists into known historical events should be viewed as a literary genre that is unique to sixteenth-century humanism, in which history writing was not so much concerned with accuracy as it was with intentions. Jaffe rightly asserts that the classical notion of ut pictura poesis, revived by humanists, closely aligns Betussi’s text to Zelotti’s frescoes. Betussi’s factual inaccuracies are not necessarily deliberate lies or sloppy scholarship; rather, as purposeful inventions they conform to notions of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio as laid out by Roman writers such as Cicero and revived by humanist writers and artists alike.

In the third chapter, Jaffe takes the reader on a systematic tour of the six rooms, beginning with the Genealogy Room. Much as intended in the Ragionamento, Jaffe uses Betussi’s text to explain both the narratives playing out on the walls and the allegories gracing the ceilings. The Room of Prudence and Peace, the Room of the Popes, the Rooms of Ferrara, San Marco and Florence, respectively, all reinforce the centrality of the Obizzi clan in the formation of important political power on the Italian peninsula. Throughout, Jaffe corrects many of Betussi’s inaccuracies and provides the iconographical and genealogical background necessary for a complete understanding of the frescoes’ content. The frescoes mix illusionism and self-conscious ornament, a stylistic hallmark of maniera in this amazingly well-preserved cycle.

One minor difficulty with this book lies in determining the intended audience. For example, the author posits that Mannerism arises “in response to a number of circumstances pivotal among which must be counted the atmosphere of crisis created by the constant struggle on Italian soil between Frances I of France and Charles V . . . the rise of Protestantism, and . . . by the felt but unrecognized threat posed by the loosening of the class structure as a book-reading middle class developed” (28). Debatable or not, Jaffe does not prepare for or follow up this rather sweeping assertion. Tying the development of an artistic style to broad political and social events can be tricky and deserves more than this one sentence. In the descriptive sections of chapter 3, the author frequently points out compositional or spatial characteristics as Mannerist, but the transition to formal analysis seems abrupt and overly simplistic. As an abbreviated reminder of Mannerist characteristics, it falls short to a more knowledgeable audience, yet may not adequately explain them to students less familiar with the period or the intellectual issues of a Mannerist style.

One could wish, perhaps, for a more critical look at the causes and intentions of this bravura act of patronage and execution. Not enough credit is given to Glaser’s 2003 book, which already laid out much of the material covered here. In addition, Betussi’s conversational description begs to be analyzed in conjunction with the frescoes as an example of how text and narrative, intended by Betussi to go hand in hand, informed artist, writer, and viewer. Zelotti’s Epic Frescoes is a delightful introduction to a little-known fresco cycle, and it should provide a visually rich stimulus to further study of this overlooked artist. However, much remains to be done in terms of critically analyzing the place of both Zelotti and Cataio in the larger context of late Renaissance art.