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 Avcıoǧlu 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 Avcıoǧlu 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 formation, representation and promotion of the self” (2), “despite the inherent difficulties of doing so in a society which enforced self-discipline and frowned upon the overt promotion and glorification of the individual” (10). They also intriguingly note the special applicability of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “producing space” for the city of Venice, although the connection is not explored in any of the contributions (2).

The issue of identity nicely frames the volume in its first and last essays, by Allison Sherman and Brown, respectively. Through two case studies (Angelo and Alvise Amadi and Tommaso Rangone), Sherman examines how non-noble citizens (cittadini) used their positions as lay procurators of Venetian churches to become important patrons of art and architecture. Her analysis adds further evidence to the argument that both cittadini originari and immigrants to the city could be unusual, unexpected, even extravagant patrons of the arts, at times unconcerned with the tastes and methods of the indigenous nobles. Rangone in particular “collected lay procuratorships in an astonishingly systematic fashion” (22), allowing him to plaster his portrait throughout various ecclesiastical monuments.

Brown’s essay, an expanded English version of her contribution to Pietro Bembo e le arti (Venice: Marsilio, 2013), by contrast shows a Venetian nobleman’s pursuit of gain and reputation through official appointments in the stato da mar and the terraferma. The case study is Gian Matteo Bembo, Pietro Bembo’s nephew-in-law and protégé, with whom the great writer exchanged 350 surviving letters. The correspondence relates how Gian Matteo, as Rettore and Provveditore of Cattaro (Kotor in Montenegro), successfully protected the city from Ottoman attacks, and then later moved on to various other government posts in the Venetian “empire.” Most interesting is how the letters reveal the special administrative skills and social comportment needed to govern republics. As the elder Bembo counsels his younger male relation (denoted by the term “nipote” in Italian; Pietro even refers to him at times as his son), “the more modesty you display in your letters to the Republic, the more you will be praised and the more you will acquire” (240)—advice Gian Matteo was not always able to follow.

The comparison of Sherman and Brown’s essays is enlightening, showing how in some ways the avenues and strategies of self-promotion for male cittadini and nobles resembled one another, but also how the importance of “modesty, and prudence, and sweetness” (240) and “knowing how to dissimulate” (243) and hide one’s pride did not apply in the same way to cittadini as to patricians; the former were after all not actually part of the Republic. It would be interesting to explore further how the particular social, political, and diplomatic comportment of men of government in the sixteenth-century Venetian Republic differed from Baldassare Castiglione’s famous recommendation to enact “sprezzatura” in court society.

As already noted, the geographical and historical range of the essays is striking. For example, Andrew Hopkins examines a church in Gostyń, Poland, based on the design of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice; Johanna D. Heinrichs argues that Venetians came to see the entire island of Crete (one of their colonies)—its natural landscape as well as its monuments—as an antiquity in itself; Laura Moretti proposes that Palladio designed spaces in his mainland villas specifically for the performance of music. An especially good example of the peripheral and less-studied corners covered in this book is Blake de Maria’s examination of a fascinating late sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript, whose imagery by the Greek painter Giorgios Klontzas reinterprets the ninth-century Oracles of Leo the Wise, which prophesized the Fall of Constantinople, in light of Veneto-Turkish relations after the Battle of Lepanto (1571).

The chronological spread reaches the eighteenth century in Esther Gabel’s study of the art patronage of three noblewomen of the Sagredo family, the sisters Marina and Caterina and their mother Cecilia Grimani. Using private family archives, Gabel is able to uncover much new material to tell the story of women’s roles in this period of Venetian history. One looks forward in Gabel’s future publications to more analysis of the works of art themselves, as well as to a further contextualization of these examples in relation to other female patronage and artistic activity in eighteenth-century Venice (particularly literature), as well as the position of women in eighteenth-century Italy in general.

The importance of studying a broad span of Venetian history and culture is brought home in Tracy E. Cooper’s examination of Paolo Gualdo’s early biography of Palladio: a seventeenth-century text about a sixteenth-century architect, which was only published in the eighteenth century. Cooper asks what difference it would have made to an understanding of Palladio had the text been published at the time it was written, that is, how it would have effected later historiography. What the essay shows so clearly is how scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and the nineteenth century for that matter) so fundamentally shaped the way the earlier centuries have been handed down to the present, in the textual sources, the formation of the canon, and indeed in the very ways Venetian identities are understood.

As is the case in many publications of this nature, the sense of audience for the book as a whole is somewhat unclear. While some essays would be easily intelligible to a reader who is not a specialist in Venetian art, others assume great familiarity with Venetian geography, monuments, and scholarly debates. A number of the essays end with a helpful “conclusion” section; in some of the cases where this was lacking, its addition would have improved the article. One might also note that while the word “art” is included in the title, the volume’s emphasis is on architecture and/or patronage: actual works of art, such as paintings or sculptures, while mentioned (and only sparingly illustrated), are not analyzed in detail. Overall the collection is a fine testament to Howard’s impact in the field, and is not the only one. Another set of essays in her honor, Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, was recently published by Ashgate (2015). Howard, a towering figure in the field, deserves all this recognition and more.