L’art au service du prince: Paradigme italien, expériences européennes (vers 1250–vers 1500). Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, eds. Italia comunale e signorile 8. Rome: Viella, 2015. 396 pp. + 48 b/w pls. + 8 color pls. €55.
proceeds from the fact that El Greco created for the Hospital a resurrected Christ in wood and the portrait of Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera after a death mask as the starting point for a meta-artistic discourse, characterizing the icon painter as different from Michelangelo and Alonso Berruguete. The article by Livia Stoenescu likewise concerns a comparison. The emphasis in her selection, however, lies on Baroque artists such as the Carracci, Barocci, and Poussin. Instead of their search for ideal beauty, she recognizes in El Greco a historical style focused on the resonances between medieval and modern art. Karin Hellwig’s contribution, like her study from 2006, focuses on El Greco’s drawing of Michelangelo’s Giorno, which was formerly owned by Vasari and is today preserved in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Together with El Greco’s commentaries mentioned above, Hellwig is able to demonstrate in this example his conscious distance fromMichelangelo’s conception of art and corroborate his preferred adhesion instead to the Venetians. El Greco’s early works, which we should not forget were not accepted by Harold E. Wethey in his catalogue of works in 1962, are the topic of the article by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzo. His stated goal is to more precisely identify El Greco’s master in Creta and his context. The text not only provides abundant information on the strong presence of Western art on the island, but also the continuing Byzantine influence on El Greco in Venice, parallel to the well-known models of Titan, Tintoretto, and Bassano. El Greco’s individualistic position between Renaissance and Baroque, as well as his role as an artistic link between the Western and Eastern Mediterranean, have been finally recognized as unique values. Even Germany has self-critically remembered with the exhibition El Greco and Modernism (2012) that the expressionists acclaimed him in 1912, yet most museum curators did not want any of his works. Nevertheless, despite the surviving edited 20,000 words, he still has not made it on the list of Bernd Roeck’s Gelehrte Künstler (Scholarly artists, 2013). And the Italian exhibition in 2015 on his anniversary was held in Treviso, not in Rome or Venice. More such conferences, like the one that produced these proceedings, will be necessary before El Greco has occupied the position he deserves in the art historical canon.