In the middle of the last century, Nicola Ottokar (“Criteri d’ordine, di regolarità e d’organizzazione nell’urbanistica ed in genere nella vita fiorentina dei secoli xiii-xiv,” Archivio storico italiano 98.1, 1940: 101–106) and Wolfgang Braunfels (Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana, Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1953) demonstrated the fruitfulness of consulting the statutes of medieval Italian cities for insights into their urban form. Although art historians have continued to mine these sources in the intervening years, the last decade has brought an explosion of new research not only on medieval and Renaissance urbanism in Italy but also in the history of Italian jurisprudence. An international panel of legal, political, and art historians assembled in September 2001 at the Italo-German study center of Villa Vigoni on Lake Como to explore the intersection of these issues. A product of that conference, La Bellezza della Città includes an introduction by the conference’s organizers, legal historian Michael Stolleis and art historian Ruth Wolff, and essays by each of the twelve speakers. As a result of the conference’s interdisciplinary focus, the essays in the book are highly diverse. The first four address broad questions about the statutes and the role of beauty in urban design (Hagen Keller, Gerhard Dilcher, Bernd Roeck, Enrico Guidoni). Another group consists of case studies exploring the legislation of particular cities, sometimes in conjunction with other written sources (Vito Piergiovanni, Antje Middeldorf Kosegarten, Guido Tigler, Mario Ascheri, Ingrid Baumgärtner). A third examines specific aspects of the medieval city, using the statutes as one source (Peter Seiler, Wolff). Finally, an essay by Julian Gardner treats the painted representations of cities in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Of the four synthetic essays in the volume, historian Keller’s discussion of the statutes as art-historical sources is perhaps the best point of departure for scholars new to legal texts. As Keller warns, medieval and Renaissance statute books are useful but problematic sources. They are compilations that often juxtapose laws of widely varying dates. Individual laws may no longer reflect current practices. Keller urges scholars to balance their reading of the statutes by continually comparing them to other sources, both legal and literary. Dilcher’s essay also strives to contextualize the statutes, but he takes a radically different approach. Invoking Jürgen Habermas’s theories about communicative action and using the Lorenzetti frescoes of Good and Bad Government in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico as examples, Dilcher concludes that the statutes are only one part of the larger mechanism driving medieval urban design in its pursuit of beauty.

Roeck’s contribution compares the aesthetic goals implicit in the civic statutes, the built environment of Italian cities at the end of the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century architectural treatises of Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio, and Filarete. Alberti’s interest in varietas and his preference for curved streets conflict with the desire for uniformity and orthogonality repeatedly expressed in civic statutes, while Filarete’s ideas seem consonant with it. To Roeck’s mind, the planned cities of the modern period have their roots in medieval statute books. His essay suggests several interesting avenues for future research and introduces examples from less-studied cities, such as Treviso and Ascoli Piceno. Unlike most of the other authors, Guidoni makes limited reference to statute books in his brief contribution. Instead, he uses literature in praise of cities (laudes civitatum) together with chronicles to demonstrate that the idea of physical beauty in a city evolved from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the early period, beauty was a by-product of the pursuit of order and strength, only becoming an end in itself in the early fifteenth century.

The chapters by Piergiovanni, Middeldorf Kosegartern, Tigler, Ascheri, and Baumgärtner examine the statutes of individual cities. All of them demonstrate, though to varying degrees, how the desire to order and regularize the city fabric became an increasingly prominent feature of the urban legislation of Italian medieval cities. A brief essay by legal historian Piergiovanni reveals that the officials in charge of the port of Genoa, known as the Padri del Comune, also oversaw the city’s urban fabric as a whole, although he does not explore the aesthetic implications of this practice.

Another port city, Venice, is the subject of art historian Middeldorf Kosegarten’s contribution. She examines Venetian legal sources to determine how the term “beauty” (pulchritudo) was used to characterize the city and uncover examples of urbanistic legislation affecting its political center (San Marco) and commercial center (the Rialto), among other areas. Notably, the extensive and well-preserved Deliberazioni of the Venetian Maggior Consiglio are richer sources for this material than the civic statutes, especially since Venice’s unique conditions as a lagoon city made standardized responses to architectural and urbanistic questions difficult.

Tigler surveys the history of Lucca’s urban form during its first communal period, from 1081 to 1316, drawing on a wide variety of sources, including unpublished fragments from the city’s incomplete 1308 statutes (the communal archive was lost to fire in the mid-fourteenth century). In this wide-ranging and well-illustrated essay, Tigler pays particular attention to the city walls, to new town foundations such as Castelfranco and Pietrasanta, and to the commune’s characteristic towers. He notes that the city’s rulers became increasingly sensitive to the representational qualities of the built environment towards the end of the communal period. In contrast, the essay by historian Ascheri only summarizes and slightly amends views already presented in his Siena nella storia (Cisinello Balsamo: Silvana, 2000) and Lo spazio storico di Siena (Cisinello Balsamo: Silvana, 2001).

Legal historian Baumgärtner investigates urbanism in Rome during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. As Italy’s largest city in late antiquity, Rome both had ample room to accommodate an expanding medieval population and readily available construction materials in the form of spoils. Consequently, little regulation on private construction existed until the fourteenth century except that concerned with water rights and other urban infrastructure. Baumgärtner shows that, instead, the emerging civic government attended to the creation and maintenance of public spaces as ceremonial sites for citizens and to accommodate pilgrims. Also unique to Rome was a body of legislation concerned with the preservation of ancient monuments, which were inextricably linked to the image and prestige of the city.

Seiler and Wolff’s essays address individual aspects of the cityscape. Wolff examines the role communal legislation played in the gradual removal of tombs from cathedral squares and their reappearance in the piazzas of mendicant churches, arguing that it reveals a desire to ensure that the cathedral square reflects the identity of the city as a whole rather than that of particular families or individuals. This is an intriguing hypothesis that would have been considerably strengthened by addressing the well-documented conflict between the regular clergy and the mendicant orders over the right of burial in this period. Seiler’s study shows how the installation of heraldic devices on public, semi-public, and private structures within the commune of Florence makes the city’s political order visible. However, he relies primarily on the chronicle of Giovanni Villani, rather than on the Florentine statutes. Seiler and Wolff’s interesting contributions would have been enriched by more nuanced reading of the medieval concept of public versus private space.

In the compendium’s final essay, Gardner compares painted representations of Italian cities from the early thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries. He concludes that the generalized representations of the earlier period are later replaced with more detailed and individualized depictions, which in turn ultimately give way to what he calls the painter’s “interpretative impression” (371). Readers interested in these questions may also want to refer to Felicity Rattè’s work on architectural representation in this period (“Significant Structures: Architectural Imagery in Tuscan Painting of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” PhD diss., New York University, 1995) and “Re-presenting the Common Place: Architectural Portraits in Trecento Painting,” Studies in Iconography 22, 2001: 87–110).

La Bellezza della Città’s flaws are those inherent to conference proceedings. Not all essays are equally substantive (individual contributions range from ten pages to sixty-eight). The volume is plagued by the formal problems typical of such compilations: uneven copyediting (e.g., the running head that truncates “Lucca” into “Lucc” [137–203]), exacerbated by the project’s polyglot nature (e.g., “Vanice” for Venice, 352, “Pallazzo” for Palazzo, 355, etc.), mediocre image reproduction, no index, and no bibliography.

As Stolleis and Wolff anticipated, the essays in this book contextualize the production, function, and reception of statute books and related legal sources, as well as demonstrate the relationship between legal texts and the built environment. The soundest contributions are the case studies of individual cities which, together with Keller’s essay, provide art historians with a solid foundation for future research in this area. The most stimulating essays, however, are those that examine the textual record and the urban fabric together to illuminate some aspect of the urbanistic practice of individual cities. Yet while six cities are studied in some detail (Genoa, Venice, Lucca, Florence, Siena, and Rome), Florence as usual attracts the most attention, and the pioneering urban programs of the medieval communes of the Po plain are mentioned only in passing. This is a pity, for despite recent forays into the study of Parma (Areli Marina, “The Urbanistic Transformation of Parma in the Age of the Commune, 1196–1347,” PhD diss., New York University, 2004), Bologna (M. Pritchard, “The Urban Development of Bologna, 1300–1500,” PhD diss., London University, 1993, and Francesca Bocchi and Enrico Guidoni, eds., Bologna, Bologna: Grafis, 1995), and Modena (Enrico Guidoni and Catia Mazzeri, eds. L’urbanistica di Modena medievale X–XV secolo, Rome: Kappa, 2001), the precocious urban form of most of the plain’s medieval cities remains unstudied, notwithstanding the wealth of extant documentary and physical evidence.

La Bellezza della Città invites readers to explore how local interpretations of the desire for order and, eventually, beauty affected the physical form of specific cities and landscapes, above and beyond the mere desire for straight streets and dry squares. Perhaps it will inspire its audience to investigate these phenomena in the peninsula’s less-studied cities, enhancing understanding of this vital but still misunderstood period in Italian urban design.