In almost every sense, the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and the accompanying catalogue are retrospective. First, they include many objects that were acquired by collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century, during an earlier period of interest in the history of private life. Second, they draw upon and summarize four recent decades of historical and art-historical scholarship focused on the family life of Renaissance Italians and the material objects that accompanied them through its various stages. Finally, they look back at those Renaissance Italians themselves and try to explain how they understood love (both sacred and profane) and used objects to embody, foster, express, and communicate its many different forms. Following in the footsteps of important recent publications on the private life of Renaissance Italians, major research projects on the material Renaissance, and such exhibitions as At Home in Renaissance Italy, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum from October 2006 to January 2007, the exhibition and catalogue have the feel of a valedictory. Indeed it could be argued that after several decades of such productive scholarship, it is now time for this particular field of inquiry to lie fallow, so that new questions and approaches will have time to germinate. Nevertheless, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy goes a long way toward conveying some (but not all) of the complex ways in which Renaissance Italians understood love. Moreover, the exhibition in particular raises the more general question of how to present a subject in which historical and art-historical scholarship are so closely intertwined.

The exhibition is divided into eight sections: Arts of Love and Marriage; Celebrating Betrothal and Marriage: Gifts and Dowry Objects; Portraits: Betrothal and Marriage (with one wall labeled Widows); Textiles; Arts of Childbirth and Family; Decorating the Camera: Cassoni and Spalliere; Profane Love and Erotic Art of the Renaissance; and From Cassone to Poesie: Paintings of Love and Marriage (with walls labeled Belle Donne and Illustrious Women). Many of the objects are stunningly beautiful and are (with few exceptions) extremely well displayed and accompanied by informative labels. But as the sectional divisions indicate, the logic behind the organization of the exhibition is at best unclear, at worst schizophrenic, since at times the organizing principle seems to be the life cycle; at other times the theme appears to be love in its various manifestations, and still other times according to the objects themselves. So, for instance, after following Renaissance Italians through betrothal and marriage, one suddenly finds oneself in a room with the theme of textiles. Obviously textiles played a crucial role in marriages since they usually formed a large portion of the dowry, but the objects seem somehow out of place since the next section (Arts of Childbirth and Family) resumes the itinerary through the life cycle, only to have it suddenly abandoned for the balance of the exhibition.

If the exhibition was following the life cycle, then shouldn’t the portraits of widows have come at the end and been included in a section on memorializing love? The problem, I believe, is that the organizers found themselves caught at the intersection of historical and art-historical scholarship, with the former favoring an analysis of the life cycle, and the latter privileging an analysis of the objects. One solution would have been to make the demarcation clearer. Alternatively, the organizers could have brought the two fields together by displaying in tandem some of the written documents (marriage contracts, household inventories, family diaries) in which the objects are described with the objects themselves, as was done at least in part in the Victoria and Albert exhibition. The extraordinary maiolica inkstand (cat. no. 16) with the busts of a couple and the fede motif, which Dora Thornton plausibly hypothesizes was commissioned for the signing of a marriage contract or the exchange of marriage vows before a notary, could, for example, profitably have been paired with a marriage contract (and an accompanying transcription and translation of the contract). The public would then come away with a greater appreciation of both the inkstand and the legal mechanics of a Renaissance marriage.

What the exhibition and catalogue do better is raise the issue of how Renaissance Italians understood love in its various manifestations. As one who has read hundreds if not thousands of dowry receipts and wills, I was struck by the disjuncture between marriage as it appears in those documents with their emphasis on property and how it appears in portraits of couples on such objects as maiolica plates and jugs, and through repetition of the fede motif. These objects simultaneously symbolize the property exchange and seek to erase it. Most Renaissance marriages had nothing to do with love; but the objects created to celebrate marriage willfully attempted to deny that that was the case. It would be interesting to explore whether this was almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon or if the lower-classes also layered their marital alliances with a veneer of sentiment. Profane love and sex (both hetero- and homosexual—if one can use those anachronistic terms) get rather full treatment in the exhibition.

The truly outstanding essays in the catalogue on the topic of profane love by Linda Wolk-Simon and James Grantham Turner make clear that, in the words of Wolk-Simon, “the erotic was an indelible part of Renaissance culture, as much a defining characteristic of the age as the erudite humanist paradigm instauratio Romae” (55). Turner observes how two of the “stars” of the exhibit, the maiolica Phallic-head plate (1536; cat. no. 110) and the engraving The Triumph of the Phallus (French, seventeenth century [?]; cat. no. 102), based on a lost drawing by the sixteenth-century Florentine painter Francesco Salviati, both imitate and subvert plates with profiles of beautiful women and cassoni panels (181). As he also points out, works such as Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi’s I Modi (before 1531) and Perino del Vaga and Rosso Fiorentino’s Loves of the Gods, engraved by Gian Giacomo Caraglio (1527), were simultaneously “dirty pictures” (to quote one visitor I overheard at the exhibition) and vehicles for promoting artistic variety and creativity. Sacred love, except in its Platonic form, especially as embodied in images of Belle Donne, gets much less treatment. Certainly a fuller consideration of the themes of love and marriage in Renaissance Italy ought to include some consideration of mystical marriage, both as it was depicted by artists and practiced by female mystics of the time, as well as some analysis of the marriage celebrations of nuns.

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy is certainly a feast for the eyes and a prompt to thought. But some of those thoughts are about how one might better convey such complex topics to the general public.