Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence. George R. Bent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xviii + 334 pp. $120.
that do survive restores a sense of their original splendor. Avery addresses the infrequency with which bronze is used for ducal monuments, a somewhat surprising absence considering the prestige that the material enjoyed, its widespread use for princely commemoration in other European centers, and its extensive employment in other contexts in Venice itself. Avery hypothesizes that the combination of bronze’s time-consuming execution, pagan and imperial associations, and conspicuous splendor and cost, along with the Venetian sense of mediocritas, may explain the reluctance to feature it more prominently in ducal memorials. This volume will be of great interest to specialists in Venetian sculpture and architecture, and to anyone studying self-fashioning in the Venetian Republic or funerary commemoration more broadly.