Volume 45, Number 13 · August 13, 1998
A Room of One's Own
By James Fenton
The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy
by Dora Thornton
Yale University Press, 214 pp., $50.00
In 1546, Fra Sabba di Castiglione (not to be confused with Baldesar Castiglione, the author of The Book of the Courtier) published the first edition of I Ricordi, a collection of essays designed for the edification of his great nephew. Among the topics discussed was 'the Suitable Decoration of Grand Interiors.' Fra Sabba himself was not grand. He was a knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and had spent three years on Rhodes, during which time he had to collect antiquities on behalf of Isabella d'Este, but had fallen out with his fellow knights from north of the Alps, who thought that a devotion to classical sculpture amounted to idolatry. In fact Fra Sabba was deeply devout, and his next posting in Rome shocked him:he believed Rome to be utterly corrupt, he thought the Church was riddled with heresy, he believed Luther to be the Antichrist, and he lived in earnest expectation of the end of the world.
Review, 3013 words
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