On Williams’s BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 203 view, Bembo harnesses the symbolic potential of typeface to convey a sense of freshness and novelty that matches the adventurous spirit of his trip to Sicily and ascent of the menacing volcano. Williams’s book explores Bembo’s creative collaboration with Aldus and his use of the print medium to project an innovative self-portrait articulated simultaneously in relation to the classical tradition and to contemporary trends in humanism and visual culture. During the same trip, the two friends visited and climbed the slopes of Etna-an expedition that furnishes the topic for a Latin dialogue about the topography of Etna and its volcanic phenomena that Bembo would subsequently publish with the Aldine Press in Venice. In 1493, Pietro Bembo travelled with his friend Angelo Gabriele to Sicily to study with the renowned Greek scholar Constantine Lascaris. While the main focus is Bembo’s short dialogue entitled De Aetna, first published by Aldus Manutius in an exquisite 1496 edition, this text is also a jumping-off point for a set of interrelated investigations into topics such as fifteenth-century print technology, the history of mountaineering, Renaissance portraiture, the “classical phenomenon of mnemonic topography” (74), the Venetian spatial turn, and early modern collecting practices. Williams’s approach falls on the immersive side of the spectrum: it offers “thick description” (5) both of the interwoven strands constituting Bembo’s Venetian humanist milieu and the “ongoing process of invention” (7) that Williams calls the Etna Idea. Williams’s monograph on Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna and Venetian humanism. It is therefore especially gratifying to encounter G. The less reductive approach, a true voyage of intellectual exploration to a new continent of material, is more challenging but also potentially more rewarding. The potential disadvantages of domesticating and distilling emerge with particular sharpness in the case of the Renaissance humanists, who are still sometimes treated as the predecessors of modern professional classicists or packaged as limited case-studies of post-classical literary imitation. In some recent work, a more immersive approach to post-classical subject matter is attempted, one that both seeks to be accountable to the knowledge of other fields and does not require the explicit pretext of a “Classics” label. This tendency, while perhaps reassuring, has the downside of confining vast terrains of history and culture within the disciplinary niche of Classics. In one line of approach, the study of classical reception has the status of a sub-field within Classics. Classical reception studies are currently marked by diverging tendencies. Colgate University Elizabeth Marlowe Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist. This volume is important reading for anyone who has ever wondered about all the broken statuary in museums-and even more important for anyone who has not. Collectively, what they showcase is the variety of responses exhibited by people in late antiquity to the statuary landscape they inherited, the multiplicity of motivations that may have shaped their behaviors, and the dangers of overgeneralizing from any particular act of salvage or destruction. While there are many outstanding essays in this volume, the whole is even more than the sum of its parts. Greenhalgh is also the only author in the volume to link the pre- and early modern destruction of antiquities with the modern and contemporary depredations of looters and collectors. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ģ02 PHOENIX occasioned the loss of antiquities “in far larger quantities than had supposedly happened in the days of idols, treasure, and the fanatical actions of eastern barbarians” (347).
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