Raphael
By Bette Talvacchia
Phaidon, $39.95

Part of a new series of monographs from Phaidon, this coffee-table-sized book aims, in the words of its author, to “disclose the compelling story of Raphael’s striving for achievement, at the same time hoping to unfold the breathtaking pleasure of seeing the results.”

The unfolding takes place on nearly every page, from large reproductions of most of Raphael’s paintings—some of them spread over two pages—to an extensive offering of preparatory drawings and architectural plans to works by other artists that influenced him. A real treat is an ink-and-brush study Raphael did as an assistant to Pinturicchio for the latter’s frescoes portraying the life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. As is to be expected from this legendary art publisher, the quality of the reproductions is very high.

Bette Talvacchia, a professor at the University of Connecticut, gives a detailed account of Raphael’s methods and workshop procedure, including red chalk (then a new medium), the use of counterproofs to examine how an image would look reversed and a special adaptation of silverpoint.

The book truly excels in its biographical sections. Not that there’s a great deal of information about the master’s private life; this is a professional biography, the story of a man’s transformation from an extraordinarily talented painter into a new kind of being—the artist-courtier. Raphael’s massive and efficient workshop, his commissions for the Roman nobility and Pope Julius II, and his architectural and decorative work on St. Peter’s Basilica gained him acceptance as a peer from his patrons. For the first time, a mere painter had reached a level of society previously reserved for the aristocracy.

When Raphael died suddenly of illness at the age of 37, the artist was at work designing his own palatial house in the most desirable district of Rome, a residence fit for a man of his stature. In death, he was turned into a kind of saint by his contemporaries. Talvacchia reveals a more interesting figure.

Born Under Saturn
By Margot and Rudolf Wittkower
New York Review Books, $18.95

The idea of the artist as unconventional or above convention, alienated or maybe even crazy dates back long before the Romantic era. In the Renaissance, it was believed that creativity went hand in hand with melancholy—what we would likely call depression. For the Florentine philosopher-doctor-astrologer Marsilio Ficino, mel-ancholy was an ambivalent trait. Conferred at birth by the influence of the planet Saturn, it could make a person gloomy and useless or it could open him up to higher inspiration, the divine mania of which Plato spoke. Dürer’s engraving “Mel-encolia I” is an example of this phenomenon.

The theory of melancholy was a powerful tool for artists looking to raise their status. They could be more than just super-craftsmen; they could be privileged souls whose Saturnine quirks and willful behavior would have to be endured by patrons. As this book amply demonstrates, artistic madness was often exaggerated for effect, and few artists lived up to their legends. After all, they were professionals who had to get work done. The Wittkowers spend a good deal of space debunking the claims of Cellini and Caravaggio to superachievement in crime, and even deny the latter the distinction of being the first bohemian. Always leery of Freudian attempts to psychoanalyze artists and works, the authors also punch holes in the once-popular belief that the 18th-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt must have been insane because he had a special proclivity for depicting distorted, paranoiacexpressions. They disagree with those who see in Arcimboldo’s vegetable heads a proto-Surrealist vision. Again and again, they warn against imposing the ideas and standards of the present on the past.

The Wittkowers, a husband-and-wife team who fled Hitler’s Germany, published their book in 1963, and the present volume is a reissue by New York Review Books, which is making a name for itself with its timely rediscoveries. The scholarship is, of course, old now and based on even earlier researches by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Nonetheless, Born Under Saturn deserves a new generation of readers, not only for its rich lode of anecdotes about everything from artists’ strange antics to their working methods, their sex lives and even their business practices, but also for its fundamental sanity, balance and humor.

The Memory Palace of Isabelle Stewart Gardner
By Patricia Vigderman
Sarabande Books, $14.95

In the Renaissance, learned men created “memory palaces,” elaborate imaginary architectural structures filled with vivid images for mnemonic purposes. Retrieving any piece of knowledge would be, in theory, as easy as visiting a familiar room and picking up an object one had left there. As these palaces became increasingly ambitious, their creators came to believe that the mind was capable of modeling and accommodating the entire universe. In the late 19th century, a woman, perhaps less learn-ed than a Renaissance polymath but just as ambitious, created her own architectural structure to store artworks and artifacts embodying everything she felt was worth knowing, and to preserve her memories of a life in pursuit of high culture. The woman was Isabella Stewart Gardner, and her memory palace was an actual building called Fenway Court, today the museum that bears her name.

In this book, another learned woman, Patricia Vigderman, plays with the concept of the memory palace to produce a delightful and thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of biography and the nature of museology. Each room in Vigderman’s palace is named for a work of art in Fenway Court, which serves as a gateway to a discursive passage on some aspect of Gardner’s life and collecting pursuits. This small volume in no way pretends to be an analysis of pictures or a treatise on art history, and the use of the artworks, though quite ingenious, is often more whimsical than substantive. For example, Paolo Uccello’s “Young Lady of Fashion” is playfully identified with Henry Adams’s wife, Clover, a good friend of Gardner’s.

With Vigderman as our guide, we browse through the museum in search of its long-dead creator, who stipulated that not one thing in it be changed or rearranged. While the collection remains intact—except, of course, for the works lost in the robbery of 1990, about which Vigderman has mercifully little to say—its compiler proves elusive. Behind her carefully created persona of the flamboyant eccentric hid an intensely secretive personality. Vigderman’s rigorous insistence on understanding her subject as she really was rather than as a prefiguration of present-day concerns leads her to acknowledge a certain remoteness, and to rely as much as possible on testimony from Mrs. Gardner’s more voluble friends and associates, like the Adamses, Henry James, Bernard and Mary Berenson, and the Japanese savant Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea. These Bostonians took culture very, very seriously indeed, and while they left behind thoughts and words (some of them dated, some of them not), Mrs. Gardner left us Fenway Court. After reading this book, a visit there will never be the same.