JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 134.129.120.3 on Wed, 30 Dec 2015 11:03:24 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsReviews 755 subject of the following section. The last four essays (two written by Italians and one each by Dutch and Polish scholars) open a window on some important problems of the social history of art: the patronage of the Prince and hisfamilia, the influence of the court on the career and the representation of the artist, the link between artistic and political developments in such different places as Mantova, Vienna, Rimini, or Brzeg (in Poland ). This is a stimulating book. Like an unfinished puzzle it contains a variety of indicators of what is being more and more considered as a focal point of society during this period: the world of the court. The contributors aim to investigate links and divergences between its ideology and manifold local realities; thanks to these essays we may catch better glimpses of the internal composition of this microcosm, with its fluid divisions betweenfamiliari and servants, officials, and members of the Prince's entourage, and also compare its various roles, economic, social, and cultural. We remark as well how, during the centuries under consideration, the connexions between the aristocracy, which gravitates round the court and the power of the Prince, are not in the least static, but at the same time do not unequivocally progress towards a mere absolutism. Likewise, emphasis is laid on the differences between centres and peripheries, places socially strongly attractive and realities shut in on themselves, as was the case with Pavia. This relationship of setting to court may concern any aspect of society: for instance, the various developments of the portrait in courts such as Mantova or, by contrast, Rimini, in the second half of the fifteenth century.In short this is a libro aperto, thanks to which we can gauge the actual state of research on the subject. It is also a book full of ideas, some still to be discussed, of course (and a few are already debated in its essays), but at the end the reader will find himself irresistibly persuaded into giving new and deeper consideration to the complexity of the courtly world between the age of Humanism and the Ancien Regime.
UNIVERSITY OF TURINGUIDO CASTELNUOVO L'etai romantica e il romanzo storico in Italia. By LIA FAVA GUZZETTA, GIORGIO PETROCCHI, GRAZIELLA PAGLIANO, and MARGHERITA DE FAZIO. Roma: Bonacci. 1988. 129 pp. I5,ooo lire.
