Georges de La Tour and His World. by Philip ConisbeeReview by: Deborah H. CibelliThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 1079-1081Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543130 .

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Book Reviews 1079

that Prior Camillo Contreras died in Rome in 1601 and presumably did not take his paint- ings out of that city. In fact, although Caravaggio's naturalism is superficially akin to Velhzquez's paintings, more likely sources can be found in the Spanish tradition.The artist Pedro de Orrente, whose work was praised by Pacheco, is a case in point. The eating scenes also find a prototype in Jan Vermeyen's Spanish Supper. Additionally, the relationship of the bodegones to the Spanish tradition of popular art, the Pliegos del Cordel, should have been explored.

Nor is it particularly convincing to compare a religious painting, like Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, with genre pictures. Caravaggio's painting is tied to post-Tridentine beliefs con- cerning the literal interpretation of the Gospels.The disciples were poor and should be rep- resented that way.Vela'zquez does not paint apostles. He does paint merrymaking musicians and tippling peasants in such paintings as Three Men at a Table and Musical Trio, which I believe do not demonstrate a "profound sympathy" for the poor as Davies suggests. In fact, these tavern scenes seem to be in the genre of 'iguras ridiculas," comic figures which Pacheco said "provoke laughter." Surprisingly, this interpretation, advanced in my book on Velaizquez's bodegones and also by Jonathan Brown in Velazquez (1986) and William Jordan in Spanish Still Life (1985), is not cited. To be sure, Vela'zquez is not as overtly comic as his Italian contem- poraries who painted similar subjects. But restraint is part ofVela'zquez's stylistic pattern and manifests itself throughout his career. This restraint should not be confused with sympathy. For a more balanced and thorough view of the problem of interpreting these pictures, the reader is referred to Jordan and Cherry's Spanish Still Life (1996).

This is a handsome book with over fifty color plates and interesting nuggets of informa- tion, particularly pertaining to technique and training. It remains, however, a book that pre- sents an incomplete vision of Vela'zquez in Seville. Barry Wind .......... University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Georges de La Tour and His World. Ed. Philip Conisbee. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996. 319 pp. $50.00.

Attempts to provide a detailed account of the life and oeuvre of Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) are among some of the most recent of historical studies of French baroque art. The early effort by Alexandre Joly in 1863 is only followed by that of Herman Voss in 1915 during the next century. Over the next several decades, approximately twenty paintings were established in the literature, and in subsequent years, numerous scholars added discoveries of their own, nearly doubling the number of attributions and the number of paintings believed to be after lost originals. Such connoisseurship has often inspired summative art exhibitions including the Paris 1934 exhibit, Les peintres de la realite, which also featured the Le Nain brothers; the 1972 monographic retrospective at the Orangerie in the Tuileries; the 1993 quadricentennial celebration of the artist's birth in Vic-sur-Seille; and the 1996-1997 exhibit, Georges de La Tour and His World, organized by the National Gallery of Art, Wash- ington, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

The catalog to accompany the most recent exhibit, Georges de La Tour and His World, features a number of paintings that have been discovered since the 1972 exhibit and is a far- reaching study of the artist's paintings and the significance of Caravaggio and his followers, the role of Netherlandish art, the history of the duchy of Lorraine, and the impact of the Thirty Years' War. The book offers a number of methodological approaches, examining paintings in terms of various social and economic factors of seventeenth-century France.

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1080 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII / 3 (1997)

Technical data on individual art objects and iconographic studies contribute to the findings that synthesize material on La Tour and artists working throughout Europe.The catalog con- sists of seven essays: a review of documentary archival evidence for the artist, a chronology of his paintings, a study of patronage and symbolism, entries of the forty-five exhibited works (thirty paintings by La Tour, two paintings and three engravings after La Tour, and ten paintings by contemporaries), observations on the physical condition of paintings and the artist's painting process, and an appendix of the autoradiographic examination of three can- vases. Contributors include Philip Consibee, curator of French paintings at the National Gallery; Gail Feigenbaum, curator of the museum's academic programs; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, head of paintings at the Louvre; Leonard Slatkes, professor of art history; Patricia Behre Mishkimin, professor of history; Edmund Pillsbury, director of the Kimbell; and Claire Barry, Barbara Berrie, Melanie Gifford, and Michael Palmer, all museum conservators. The bibliography is selected and yet remains comprehensive. All of the color plates and mono- chromatic illustrations in the catalog are of excellent quality and include many comparative images for a total of 178 black-and-white, 59 color illustrations, and 39 color details. Lastly, the formal analysis of the art is excellent, and the comparisons are often compelling.

Nearly all of the authors trace La Tour's paintings to various sources including the late Mannerists, Caravaggio and his followers, and artists of Bologna, Rome, and Flanders. His paintings are contrasted with contemporary prints byJacques Callot, Hendrick Goltzius, and Ludolf BUsinck, and paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Man- fredi, Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen, the Candlelight Master, Jean Le Clerc, Jacques-Charles Bellange, Georges Lallemant,Valentin de Boulogne, and SimonVouet.This broad survey is in keeping with the recognition that La Tour's primary residence at Luneville in Lorraine stood at the crossroads between France, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Spanish Netherlands.

The essays are also rich in assessments of the social history of La Tour's genre paintings, religious images, and nocturnes. Conisbee, for example, brings recent scholarship of Paulette Chone's studies of the emblems and symbolism of Lorraine during the Counter-Reforma- tion to bear as a source for interpreting the tenebrism and lighting that contributes to the meditative quality of La Tour's nocturne paintings. Feigenbaum discusses the moralizing messages of the gamblers and fortune-tellers, which she regards as Caravaggesque, linking the figure of the gypsy to comic theater and the literature of Miguel de Cervantes.

Further sources are suggested by these studies.While LaTour's genre paintings and images of old couples and blind musicians are also compared with prints of burlesque subjects by Callot and Bellange in several of the essays, it would be worthwhile to further examine farce in French literature of c. 1630-1645, including writers such as Antoine Girard de Saint- Amant and Paul Scarron as proposed by Alain Merot in French Painting in the Seventeenth Cen- tury and in French theater as suggested by Francois-Georges Pariset, Anthony Blunt, and others.

The steady fidelity to established scholarship for the artist is consistent throughout the catalog and is particularly evident in the development of a canonical body of work. The cat- alog presents thirty paintings as original autograph and autograph copies by La Tour. Even the controversy that long surrounded the Metropolitan Museum ofArt's 1960 acquisition of The Fortune- Teller is minimized in the presentation of an uncontested oeuvre.

Although the authors have read widely in the literature and have incorporated references to many of the debates, they might have further illuminated the questions of authenticity, however problematic, of how these paintings became the works we accept. What happens when copies are presented as consequential and revealing as those of the master La Tour?

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Book Reviews 1081

Does the idea of copy versus signed autograph work add to our understanding of workshop practices? Are the contradictions inherent to the numerous versions of certain images and themes and issues of originality and questions of quality reconciled by presenting copies as evidence of the artist's popularity and the appeal of his subject matter and style? These con- cerns that are implicit to LaTour connoisseurship underscore the importance of the conclud- ing essays, which carefully analyze the physical condition of some of the work accepted as autograph paintings and autograph copies. The technical studies using infrared reflectogra- phy, x-radiography, neutron autoradiography, and paint samples to determine the materials and artist's painting process, offer the most promise for future discussion of problems in attri- bution and chronology.

Given the developments in La Tour scholarship, this collection is essential reading. It pro- vides a current review of the new attributions and recent findings. The many comparisons with late Mannerist and baroque art also broaden the view of La Tour's style and subject mat- ter.The studies are further enriched by the discussion of the religious and secular context of the duchy of Lorraine and early modern France. Deborah H. Cibelli .. ............................. Nicholls State University

The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics. Blair Worden. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996. 406 pp. $50.00.

In this important study BlairWorden departs from his earlier work on the Stuarts to draw attention to the political character and implications of Sidney'sArcadia. Detailed yet readable, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Elizabethan history, politics, and lit- erature, especially those who concentrate on Sidney and the Elizabethan regime of the 1570s and 1580s. It combines the virtues of historical and literary approaches, even if it may well prompt some debate about the methods and conclusions one draws from such links.

Worden begins with the admirable point that connections between Sidney's beliefs about poetry and writing intersect with his ideas about politics and virtue, linking his fiction to his life. He develops his argument in five parts divided into eighteen chapters. Part 1 investigates the connections between his views of poetry and those related to his life; part 2 examines in some detail biographical and political contexts of the years 1579 to 1581, when Sidney is believed to have written the Old Arcadia. Part 3 develops a series of analogies between Sid- ney's characters and historical personages; part 4 looks beyond the historical particulars to examine Sidney's general political beliefs and his critique of Elizabethan institutions. Part 5 probes the connections between Sidney's concept of virtue within the individual and in the polity.The work concludes that Sidney's life and chief work share a tension between dutiful obedience and a desire to flee the court as well as Elizabeth's disapproval. Results of this ten- sion include the Arcadia itself, the fruit of unwanted idleness, and Sidney's wish to fulfill the promise of his position, education, and experience by correcting the errors of Elizabeth's regime. According to Worden, Sidney hoped to realize the political and religious principles of limited monarchy advocated by "forward Protestants."

This group included Fulke Greville, Leicester, Francis Walsingham, and others commit- ted to the diagnosis and correction of ills in an Elizabethan regime thought to be drifting to a less-strident and weakened English Protestantism, a movement symbolized by Elizabeth's proposed match to the duke of Anjou. Worden identifies the central interest of this circle as vigilance against national and spiritual evils and active response to real and potential encroachments upon English sovereignty from the French and Spanish, from the papacy, and from England's internal divisions.Worden emphasizes the international concerns and support

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