The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance is an ambitious book, a prolonged meditation on the reflexive nature of portraiture. It constitutes a novel contribution to the history of Renaissance portraiture in that Jodi Cranston seeks to bring modern literary criticism and concepts to bear in her discussion of sixteenth-century Venetian and northern Italian likenesses. Stating that “thinking of pictures in terms of analogous structures characterized the general approach” (7) of Renaissance artists and patrons, she suggests parallels between the structural relationship of sitter and viewer and the rhetorical structures—as distinct from the content—of certain Renaissance literary forms. The book’s five chapters are devoted to the sitter’s dialogue with the beholder, memory and presence, self-portraiture by Titian, mirrors and specularity, and Michelangelo’s epitaphs in memory of Cecchino Bracci.

The author focuses primarily on portraits that depend on the viewer to complete the composition, following Ernst Gombrich’s conception of the “viewer’s share” (Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [New York: Pantheon Books, 1960]) and, more recently, John Shearman’s notion of a “transitive relationship” between art and the beholder (Only Connect…: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992]). The Renaissance literary dialogue, said to offer a “discursive paradigm for thinking of portraits as analogous to language” (2), seems pertinent as a parallel to the intimacy of the “tu” mode of address of the frontally posed sitter, although one wishes the discussion had included an illuminating parallel in art: the holy image that speaks to the devout worshipper. A poetic form called the tornata, “where the canzone turns and speaks about itself” (80), offers another analogy, especially revealing in the instances provided of Dante’s use of the form.

Given Renaissance interest in Cicero’s De Amicitia and his concept of the friend as an alter ego, the literary form of the letter to an intimate presents a further model for reading portraits. Cranston points out that Cicero’s notion of friendship, which involved reciprocity and identification, supplied Leon Battista Alberti with paradigms for the emotional effect that the surrogate portrait could have on its viewer, not to mention its sitter. Such an association between friendship and portraiture may have encouraged a type of image that, appropriating the conventions used for married couples, could express the mutual affection of two (invariably male) friends; Pontormo’s double male portrait of ca. 1522 (Venice, Cini Collection) even includes an open copy of De Amicitia itself.

In emulation of Francesco Petrarch’s sonnets on his (probably) fictive likeness of Laura, the theme of “silence and speech” was often the focus of early-sixteenth-century poems on portraits. Alberti’s invention of the painted interlocutor—and by extension the portrait sitter—who addresses the viewer and draws attention to the painting’s content is plausibly linked by Cranston to both the literary topos of the speaking figure and the orator’s delivery of his address to his listeners. The conceit of a given author’s direct address to his readers, deriving from the oral tradition of medieval troubadours, is used as yet another analogy. Cranston’s sensitivity to the translation of these literary forms to the visual arena produces some suggestive readings of well-known portraits.

Alberti characterized painting as preserving the past in such a way as to affect the present, and another theme pursued by Cranston is that of time and temporality, of then and now. The liminal parapet, for instance, which is usually discussed as a spatial feature that separates the world of the painting from that of the viewer, is instead interpreted for its temporal significance. As a metaphor for time, the parapet is characterized as framing the dialogue, and mediating the exchange, between the past (the sitter) and the present (the viewer).

Cranston’s choice of Giorgione’s La Vecchia (ca. 1500–10, Venice, Accademia) as the focus for her discussion of the sitter’s dialogue with the beholder is unexpected, given the work’s status as a portrait cover rather than a portrait. Embodying the mortality of the human condition, this allegorical figure makes an original and highly appropriate image with which to cover a portrait, in that the concept of vanitas can be said to gloss the motivation underlying all commissioned likenesses. The discussion would have benefited from consideration of the figure’s class, age, and gender, and the low esteem in which women in general—and ugly, old, plebian women in particular—were held in this patriarchal society. Indeed, portraits of aged women were extremely rare in this culture of ideal forms, and no independent images of lower-class crones come to mind. For this very reason La Vecchia seems unlikely as a figure with which the wealthy patrician who owned it would have chosen to hold an intimate dialogue.

It is perhaps significant that throughout the book Cranston returns to this non-portrait to reinforce her points about interaction and dialogue in visual form. No portrait of an actual sitter communicates as explicitly by gesture and facial expression with his or her audience as this allegorical figure, no doubt because the portrait cover was not bound by the conventions of decorum that normally governed the genre of portraiture itself.

Chapter 3, “Designing the Self,” makes intriguing suggestions about self-portraiture focusing on Titian’s self-likenesses. Looking into the mirror in order to depict one’s own features normally produces a self-image in a frontal pose in which the viewer may be equated with the mirror. Uniquely, Titian’s two surviving autonomous painted self-portraits show him, in the one case, looking away from the viewer and, in the other, (almost) in profile. The author asserts that, instead of an “I,” the artist presented the self as a “he” in a conceit similar to an autobiography written in the third person, which distances and objectifies the subject. Depicting himself in the “Lei” mode of address—described as the language of fame, as distinct from the language of familiarity in which the sitter addresses the viewer—Titian, Cranston claims, made his likenesses not from observation in the mirror but from memory. In addition she argues that these self-portraits, which she terms “nonautographic,” (102) were intended to give the impression of having been painted by another hand. Her citation of Michel de Montaigne’s dictum seems apt in this context: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me” (98).

While Cranston suggests that Titian’s self-likenesses are portraits of the mind, she discusses them in terms of the artist’s manual, rather than conceptual, self. In his self-portrait in Berlin, the table in the foreground and the painter’s pose are said to evoke pictures of inspired scholars, except that in this case the table bears not a blank sheet of paper but the right hand with which Titian executed the work, which Cranston reads as “offered for itself” (112). Adding to earlier observations about the use of the numismatic imperial profile in Titian’s Prado self-portrait, the author interprets the pose as declaiming the authority and nobility of his art. Titian, who holds his brush toward his body, is plausibly described as activating this “attribute of his craft into a gesture of literal and figural self-designation” (102). Readers may decide for themselves whether the point of Titian’s brush, which does not coincide with the contour of his body, should be further characterized as tracing this body’s outline, and whether such a tracing should be understood as a reference to the myth of the first artist tracing the shadow cast on the wall in the classic story about the foundation of painting (105–9).

While it asks intellectually engaged questions, this book is not an easy read; the text, longer than it needs to be and sometimes unclear, could have benefited from editing. The language borrowed from critical theorists at times obscures the author’s meaning. The impression is given throughout, for instance, that some of the most self-conscious and idiosyncratic portraits by Lorenzo Lotto, Titian, Parmigianino, and Savoldo painted and “positioned” themselves without the artist’s help. Indeed, Cranston’s construction of the visual artist’s marginalized conceptual role contrasts with the agency given to the literary author—as represented by Dante and Petrarch—who is not made to suffer a Foucauldian or Barthesian death.

Finally, the problems that Cambridge University Press has with the reversal of cover images, most egregiously in Rona Goffen’s anthology from 1998 on Masaccio’s Trinity, where that well-known painting is reversed on both the front and back covers, have yet to be resolved: the self-portrait with a companion, attributed to Giovanni Battisti Paggi, is reversed on the back cover.