Anne Dunlop’s fascinating volume on domestic wall painting in Italy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries contributes to the study of early Renaissance art in several overlapping ways. Most immediately, it introduces the reader to a group of little-known decorative complexes in private residences throughout the Italian peninsula, although concentrated in its northern areas. Dunlop gathers surviving cycles of wall paintings that are neither religious nor civic, using the term “secular” as a kind of synonym for domestic. None of these works has yet entered the standard canon used to understand the period. In assembling and examining this corpus, Dunlop seeks to do no less than rewrite the history of secular painting in the Renaissance. Indeed, a glance through the illustrations begins to revise the current paradigm almost immediately. Students of Trecento art are not accustomed to underwear-clad nudes grappling in fountains (fig. 1) or fictive observers who expose their backsides (fig. 49), certainly not in large-scale cycles and not from so early in the Renaissance.

Dunlop’s volume goes much further, however, than simply illustrating these remarkable complexes. She provides generous information on their patronage, condition, and content. The subject matter of each example is analyzed in detail, making the often-damaged works much easier to read. Some of the scenes are variants of familiar cycles, such as the feats of Hercules or the Virtues and Vices. Many, however, are unique presentations of the feats of individual patrons or strange tales of love that form a welcome addition to our knowledge of large-scale painting of the period.

At a still deeper level, Dunlop discusses the material in its broader context, claiming that the process of secularizing art, usually assigned to the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had a much earlier starting point. As she notes, general ignorance of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century domestic decoration has distorted an understanding of the secularizing process that is usually seen as the birth of the modern artwork. She moves the inception of this trend back by a century or more. Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta (1465–74), often understood as a starting point for secular schemes, is here the subject of an epilogue positing it as a work that builds upon the tradition explored in the volume.

Several other interpretive themes weave through the book. Most prominently, Dunlop draws frequent parallels between secular palace decoration and the evolution of vernacular poetry. She also considers many of the images to be reflections of patrons’ ideas about their roles in society. At several points, she emphasizes a pervasive “tension” between the convincing illusions created on the walls and the viewer’s simultaneous awareness of them as works of art, a tension that, of course, is visible in the wider realm of art at the time.

Painted Palaces is divided into seven sections. An introduction sets forth its main goals, as described above, with lavish and surprising illustrations of the Sala Baronale in the castle of La Manta in Piemonte. The first chapter follows the history of the paintings commissioned in 1391 in Prato for Francesco di Marco Datini, the “Merchant of Prato.” These constitute the only fully documented palace paintings of the period. The comings and goings of Agnolo Gaddi, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini, and other artists are tracked through changing assignments, multiple delays, and payment records. Dunlop introduces the kinds of materials used, common decorative schemes, and, most interestingly, discusses the distribution of subject matter in public and private spaces. Overall the decoration in Prato was meant to praise the building’s owner and to recommend knowledge and virtue. These objectives reappear in private palaces throughout the volume.

“Art, Artifice, and the Rise of the Vernacular,” the second chapter, investigates the role of imitation in art and its relation to contemporary vernacular poetry. The Camera di Ercole in the Palazzo Paradiso in Ferrara, founded by the Este family, draws upon Boccaccio, and creates fictive balconies complete with spectators who seem to inhabit the room and examine the frescoes. Dunlop finds similar mimetic goals in other works of the time, such as automata. In a key sentence, Dunlop proposes that, “the relations of art and artifice explored in . . . debates about vernacular literature offer the closest and most important models for their play in Trecento secular painting” (71). The Room of the Arts and Planets in the Palazzo Trinci in Foligno also serves to illustrate the relationship between secular painting and vernacular poetry.

Three chapters follow on major themes from vernacular poetry that Dunlop finds central to palace decoration. A chapter on allegory considers how the mimetic style discussed in the preceding chapter is used to represent deeper meanings, in a manner similar to that found in literary allegory and discussed by early humanists. The fourth chapter, on the theme of love, centers on the chamber at the top of the tower of the Castle of Sabbionara d’Avio and the Castle of La Manta at Saluzzo. It presents various links between love and painting, as well as Petrarch’s more ambivalent ideas about love. The last chapter treats domestic murals that are centered on family history, portraits of owners, and related allegorical material. Classical sources receive special attention in this chapter.

Beyond the virtues of introducing and analyzing new material, Painted Palaces deserves special praise for the incentives it provides for further research. As one reads, one constantly wants to know more. For example, a clearer notion of the extent of secular fresco cycles from that period would be very helpful. Dunlop has presumably presented the core of the surviving material but refers to “significant numbers” (6) of others. One wonders how large a segment of the art of the period domestic cycles constituted. Such information seems crucial in evaluating Dunlop’s assertion of their importance in the secularizing of Renaissance art. If they were rare and not well known, their role in the secularization of art might be less influential than if they were part of common experience.

The reader’s curiosity is further aroused about other media from this early period that also had secular contexts and domestic roles, such as books, furnishings, or personal objects. Dunlop explains that she does not intend to deal with them, but perhaps her volume will inspire such a study. Other recent books on domestic art, some of which must have been in progress at the same time as Painted Palaces, including Jackie Musacchio’s Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) or the exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy, which took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006–7, deal mostly with a later portion of the Renaissance, when secularization was well under way. It would be fascinating to see how the subjects and meanings of the fourteenth-century paintings in Painted Palaces compare to domestic objects from the same period.

Painted Palaces offers much new information and creates a foundation for future research. Some features of its writing style, unfortunately, require extra effort on the part of the reader. Certain themes and terms could use additional clarification; an example is the concept of “permeability,” which is used repeatedly in referring to the relation between viewer and object but never completely defined. While Dunlop begins each chapter with a careful statement of what she will be doing, concluding or even intermediate statements corresponding to these introductory ones would have been helpful. Each section ends somewhat abruptly, and the reader has to scavenge a bit to find where the promised tasks have been accomplished. Mantegna’s Camera Picta, for example, is described in the introduction as a room that “embraces and expands the experiments in painting and palace decoration of the previous two hundred years” (13). This leads one to expect a review of those experiments in the epilogue on the Camera Picta itself. But while some themes found within earlier sections are cited there, such as “the tension of seeing and being seen” (216) and the framing of the past through recent events, there is no full restatement of the complicated analysis the book has just completed. A few recapitulations would have strengthened her arguments considerably.

Most of the photographs are of excellent quality, despite what must have been myriad difficulties of access since many of the spaces are in current use. The occasional blurry or partial views, often photographs taken by the author herself, were undoubtedly the best efforts possible under modern constraints.

The contributions of this volume far outweigh any difficulties. It should be required reading for any serious student of the Renaissance, not least because it challenges the long-held narrative about the rise of secular art.