Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam and Genevieve Warwick, eds.,
(Ashgate [in association with
]: Aldershot, 2003), xvii +
225pp., 121 b/w illustrations, ISBN 0754600378.
The twelve essays gathered together in this handsomely-produced volume arise, in the main, from a 1997 conference organized by The Burlington
Magazine, sponsored by the Getty Provenance Index, and hosted by the
National Gallery in London. In the words of Genevieve Warwick’s lucid
Introduction, the collective aim of the pieces assembled here is two-fold: first, to bring together ‘two fields of scholarship that have hitherto remained somewhat separate: the study of the collection of prints, and that of drawings’; and secondly, ‘to use the sources to reconstruct the social and intellectual contexts through which collected prints and drawings were viewed’. To that end, the contributors examine extant prints and drawings, as well as written sources such as inventories, correspondence and treatises on pictures. In its emphasis upon the presentation of documentation and new discoveries, this volume is very much the methodological child of The
Burlington Magazine (and indeed the black-bordered dust jacket pays homage to the cover of the Burlington).
Essays likely to be of particular interest to readers of Renaissance
Journal include four dealing with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. David Landau and Mark P. McDonald both have contributed fascinating pieces on the extraordinary collection of 3204 prints (engravings, woodcuts, and maps) assembled by Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539), natural son of Christopher. An inventory of this collection - compiled by scribes, but edited and annotated by Ferdinand himself - is extant in Seville and the subject of a research project directed by McDonald. The Seville manuscript is, in Landau’s words, ‘the most important inventory of prints to survive from the Renaissance period’, as well as a list of ‘practically everything that was available at the time in Europe’. The ongoing work of the Columbus Print Collection Project promises to shed considerable light not only on the history of collecting prints, but also on ‘crucial dates for prints and states’ and ‘the relative strength of, for example, religious and allegorical prints’ in Renaissance Europe.
Matteo Lafranconi also discusses a hitherto little-known inventory: a post-mortem listing of some 350 drawings amassed by the Roman collector
Antonio Tronsarelli (?1528-1601) in the final decades of the Cinquecento.
Comparing this document with contemporary post-mortem inventories which also list drawings, Lafranconi notes that the Tronsarelli inventory is unusual in its attention to medium, subject matter, size and, in some cases, the colour of the paper in question. In addition, the Tronsarelli inventory provides attributions for roughly three-quarters of its entries. More than fifty-five artists - most of them sixteenth-century Romans - are named in the

document. Lafranconi persuasively argues that the presence of these attributions ‘is the major achievement of the inventory, giving a clear indication of Tronsarelli’s taste and passions’.
The value of inventories as sources is also apparent in Michael Bury’s essay on Giulio Mancini (1558-1630), the Sienese doctor and, from 1623 onwards, personal physician to Urban VIII. Mancini was also the author of the Considerazioni sulla Pittura, a treatise aimed at amateur painters which circulated in manuscript from circa 1617. Although Bury is primarily concerned here with an explication of Mancini’s comments on the ways in which prints and drawings should be classified, stored, and displayed, he turns to a 1627 inventory of the goods of Cardinal Francesco Maria del
Monte as evidence of a contemporary print collection that accords with the principles set forth in Mancini’s treatise. In common with several other contributors to this volume, Bury also considers ‘the rituals of using prints and drawings as objects of discussion’, a topic about which, as he admits,
‘we know very little’ in the early modern period.
Unlike many works arising from conferences, the pieces in this volume cohere almost like chapters in a work by a single author. For example, the first essay in the volume - an analysis by Antony Griffiths of what can be learned from glue marks, mounts, inscriptions and other accretions to paper - informs and paves the way for the analyses of individual prints and drawings found in the essays that follow. By the same token, the work’s final essay - Nicholas Turner’s discussion of the ways in which both written and visual sources may be used to reconstruct a collection (in this case, the Italian drawings collection of Cavaliere
Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburi [1676-1742]) - provides a fitting summary of the range of methodologies employed in the volume.
In between, the contributions of Jeremy Wood and Diana Dethloff on the collections of Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666) and Sir Peter Lely (1618-
1680), respectively, are of interest in their own right, as well as in dialogue with Carol Gibson-Wood’s piece on Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-
1745), many of whose drawings had a Lanier/Lely provenance. Similarly,
Gibson-Wood’s discussion of the extent to which Richardson’s collection was influenced by the example of Padre Sebastiano Resta is all the more interesting for its placement immediately following a piece on Resta by
Genevieve Warwick - just as Gibson-Wood’s discussion of the contrasts between Richardson’s collection and that of his near-contemporary Pierre
Crozat (1665-1740) is enhanced by the fact that an essay on Crozat by
Cordélia Hattori follows immediately thereafter.
It is a credit to the contributors and their three editors that the essays in this volume enlighten not only on their own terms, but also as part of a larger narrative of the evolution of the collecting of prints and drawings in early modern Europe.

Elizabeth Goldring University of Warwick