Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
When in Rome…
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture
by Bette Talvacchia
Princeton University Press, 302 pp., $35.00
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream
by Francesco Colonna, Translated from the Italian by Joscelyn Godwin
Thames and Hudson, 474 pp., $70.00
The sixteen erotic engravings at the heart of Bette Talvacchia's Taking Positions have inspired outrage, delight, a recent popular novel (Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures), a salacious translation of the Italian sonnets (by Lynne Lawner) that accompanied the prints, and now, Talvacchia's fine essay, subtitled On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. I modi, 'The Ways,' first surfaced in 1524 as a series of drawings by Giulio Romano, the artist who was the prize pupil of Raphael and, after the master's sudden death at thirty-seven in April of 1520, his chief artistic heir. Shortly thereafter, another of Raphael's associates, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, put I modi into a form that Raphael had made an indispensable feature of the sixteenth-century art market: the published print.
Review, 4451 words
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