In the 1530s, word of a new palace in Mantua, begun in the middle of the previous decade, had already spread north to Bavaria and south to Rome, where it figured in the dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda. But by the eighteenth century, the Palazzo Te, created by Giulio Romano for Federico II Gonzaga, was abandoned, abused, and in disrepair. Miraculously, this suburban complex has survived relatively intact (even after several restorations, some more drastic than others), and its slipping triglyphs and Camera dei Giganti have become textbook images of “Mannerist” art and architecture. The Palazzo Te in Mantua, a hefty two-volume work with a lavish pictorial atlas, reveals Giulio’s most famous work in unprecedented visual and historical detail. Amedeo Belluzzi’s analysis and discussion of its construction and decoration is followed by a detailed catalogue of the exterior and each interior décor. The text clearly profits from the renovation, conferences, catalogue, and other publications associated with the Giulio Romano exhibition of 1989, including the publication in 1992 of known and new documents concerning the artist by Daniela Ferrari (with the assistance of Belluzzi and others). Belluzzi not only sums up the current state of research, skeptically reassessing some old theories and advocating some newer ones, but he also offers the most complete biography to date of this singular cinquecento gesamtkunstwerk.

Belluzzi’s history of the pleasure palace/showcase villa begins with a brief account of the site before Giulio’s arrival in 1524. Since the second half of the fifteenth century, the Gonzaga and their consorts frequented the island retreat at the southern border of the city, apparently furnished with a menagerie (where the Marquis Ludovico showed off his leopard in 1459), as well as stables for their famous horses. (Since the Middle Ages, the Te had also been the site of the city’s traditional horse race or palio.) Vasari wrote that Giulio incorporated these stables into the new palace, initially in a limited scheme, then in a grander proposal. Thus it was thought that a first campaign involved only one or two wings, which was later expanded into the more ambitious, square plan around a central courtyard. As he and Kurt Forster proposed in 1989, Belluzzi argues that the square plan, typical of utilitarian, rustic complexes in the region, was already set by the quattrocento Te stables and that, very early if not ab initio, Giulio’s project encompassed all four wings. On the other hand, Belluzzi tempers the usual attribution of Giulio’s irregular spacing between the architectural openings and memberings to his adaptations of older structures. Thus Belluzzi and, earlier, Manfredo Tafuri represent a pendulum swing in critical analysis—away from John Shearman, Kurt Forster, and Richard Tuttle’s earlier readings of Giulio’s arrhythmical cadences as ingenious but practical adaptations to preexisting conditions, and back to Ernst Gombrich’s celebration of the artist’s aesthetic will.

Considering the large lacunae in the payment records and the sporadic references to specific rooms or themes in the documents, Belluzzi does an admirable job of marshaling the available evidence toward a chronology of construction and decoration. The author also sketches the careers and roles of assistant painters and stuccoworkers, and offers one of the better overviews of the workshop’s organization (Chapters 1 and 8). Over time, Giulio himself participated less and less in the actual painting, which increasingly was left to this mostly second-rate and changing stable of regional talent. (It should be noted that, by contrast, Giulio insisted on closely supervising the execution of his metalwork designs right up until the year of his death.)

Giulio and his team speedily completed more than twenty-five rooms in ten years, the length of time it took Mantegna to fresco one room—the Camera Picta—in the Gonzaga’s urban palace. A first campaign focused on the main salone (Sala dei Cavalli), the adjacent large camera (Camera di Psiche), and Federico’s private chambers (Camera dei Venti and Camera delle Aquile). These rooms, which constituted a seigneurial suite in the northeast corner overlooking city and garden, were ready to be furnished by the end of 1526 or the beginning of 1527, when Florentine textiles arrived and leather hangings were ordered. Although work then proceeded simultaneously inside all four wings, Belluzzi believes that the exterior revetment of classical ornament and faux rustication was not begun until rather late—after 1528. He identifies the wood rosettes commissioned that year as decoration for the eaves; they would have been hidden behind Giulio’s attic and therefore must predate this addition to the crown of the palace’s exterior.

Chapter 2 examines the spatial and functional aspects of the Palazzo Te. Except for a description of the entertainment of Emperor Charles V in 1530 and limited references in the inventory of 1542, we have little documentation of actual or intended use of specific areas; even Jacopo Strada’s plan in Düsseldorf, executed decades after the deaths of Giulio and Federico, has only generic annotations. Belluzzi does point out that the classical orders and the sumptuous real and fictive materials in the decoration of the large reception room (Sala dei Cavalli) and Federico’s bedroom (Camera delle Aquile) signal their hierarchical importance. Other visual clues might include the alignment of openings such as doorways—sometimes enfilade, sometimes framing the view of a fireplace in the next room—as well as their decorative surrounds, which might indicate directions of circulation and levels of privileged access. Belluzzi also draws attention to the materials and forms of the fireplaces, but analysis of these and other functional accoutrements and spatial markers of Italian Renaissance domestic interiors has not received the same attention as those of exteriors (see, for example, Belluzzi’s next chapter on façade entrances, windows, and loggias) or non-Renaissance interiors (for example, by John Clarke for ancient Rome and Patricia Waddy for Baroque Italy). Belluzzi’s discussion of the gardens, with their fish ponds, hydraulics, pavilions, and plantings (mostly fruit and nut trees) is a welcome contribution. The Palazzo Te served not as a literary/intellectual or agricultural center, but as a convenient and sumptuous site for repose, entertainment, and pleasure, whose distance from the negotium of the city was more psychological and illusionary than actual.

Among Giulio’s most important innovations were his exploitation of the expressiveness of rustication and the rich decorative possibilities of stucco. Belluzzi’s analyses of the exterior classical orders and rustication and of the interior stuccos and frescos (Chapters 3, 4, and 7) confirm the artist’s thorough assimilation and inventive reintepretation of classical and early cinquecento (mostly Roman) sources. Giulio usually avoided verbatim quotations of well-known figural models, or relegated them to the marginal or miniature. Familiar architectural motifs were deconstructed and reconstituted in novel combinations and contexts. Belluzzi (like Tafuri) analyzes Giulio’s manipulation of visual language and syntax—of placement and scale, of finish and facture, of elision and fracture—as a form of highly sophisticated, intellectualized aesthetic discourse and cultured entertainment (along with eye-popping illusionism, foreshortening, and dramatic effect—most famously in the Camera dei Giganti).

From the language of visual composition and ornament, Belluzzi turns to figural narratives and messages of a literary nature. Many of the themes and heroes (not to mention the imprese) reflected personally on the patron—although Belluzzi is far more restrained than other authors in reading allusions to Frederico’s relationship with his mistress Isabella Boschetti or his fealty to Emperor Charles V. There is no identifiable overall “program,” and Belluzzi does not accept any of the candidates previously proposed (Mario Equicola, Baldassare Castiglione, Benedetto Lampridio, Paolo Giovio, Pietro Aretino) as “humanist advisors” for the Palazzo Te. He does suggest, however, that the astrological treatises of Fermico Materno and Manilio used for the Sala dei Venti (as first noted by Gombrich) were interpreted by Paride Ceresea, advisor to Federico’s mother Isabella d’Este. In the end, Belluzzi’s comparisons of images to probable literary sources (Chapters 5 and 7) serve to further underscore Giulio’s interpretive license.

The sustained discussion of Giulio’s process of invention in the second part of Chapter 6 focuses on his drawings as a record of visual thinking and as the primary site of experimentation. The artist’s extensive graphic oeuvre is in dire need of an overview; Frederick Hartt’s handlist of about 370 drawings represents only a fraction of the total corpus. In the meantime, Belluzzi’s observations concerning Giulio’s designs for the Palazzo Te are astute and judicious. The vast majority of the more than 100 extant drawings are for specific narratives or ornamental elements (but not grotteschi) in the interiors, although some important rooms, such as the Sala dei Cavalli and Camera dei Giganti, are scarcely represented, and about a half dozen spaces, including the Loggia di David and Loggia delle Muse, are not represented at all. Hardly any of the designs for the decorative ensembles or for the exterior architecture survive. The drawings probably played a role in the dissemination of Giulio’s ideas, which seem to have had a greater influence on palaces outside Italy—at least as can be judged by extant examples, from Landshut in Bavaria and Fontainebleau in France to Granada in Spain. The last chapter of the book greatly expands the post-Giulio history of the complex, including the changing aspect of the gardens, the restorations of the buildings, and their adaptions to new functions, thus presenting the “life” of the monument over the last four-and-a-half centuries.

Belluzzi’s well-written, lucid text is followed by detailed descriptions of the exteriors and interiors—room by room, surface by surface—using as guideposts the designs by Giulio, as well as later graphic and literary records. Likewise, the second volume of color reproductions—including many never-before-published details and views—offers an armchair tour of the site, with diagrams and plans to help the viewer or reader locate each image in situ. One only wishes that Belluzzi’s essays included more frequent references to the figures and plates of these nearly 1,500 pictures. (Also, the orientation of some diagrams is disconcertingly reversed vis-à-vis the corresponding plan and organization of illustrations on the page.) A brief precis on each area or room and all the captions in this volume, dedicated to illustrations, are in English and Italian, hence the bilingual title. In the end, however, the exquisitely detailed physical exposé of wall and ceiling surfaces underscores the dearth of information about contents of the interiors and, therefore, about the relationship of furnishing and decoration. Until we learn more about the objects and about the activities of the people inhabiting these spaces, the historical image of the Palazzo Te will remain a richly ornate and complexly layered backdrop to hauntingly empty rooms.