Into the Southern Playground

Julian Bell

• 'The Quattro Cento’ and ‘Stones of Rimini’ by Adrian Stokes
  Ashgate, 668 pp, £16.99, August 2002, ISBN 0 7546 3320 9
• Art and Its Discontents by Richard Read
  Ashgate, 260 pp, £35.00, December 2002, ISBN 0 7546 0796 8

Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini is an extended obeisance performed by a young Englishman before some marble panels in an Italian church. The panels were carved in the 1450s, mostly by a Florentine called Agostino di Duccio, who was working in Rimini for the local warlord. Three dozen illustrations punctuate Stokes’s reissued text of 1934. Many show astrological figures: Aquarius wading through water, Mercury standing among clouds, Venus in a chariot drawn by swans. There are a couple of tall landscapes, almost like Chinese handscrolls, showing steep peaks and swirling seas. There are also putti riding dolphins and angels with fluttering tunics pressing against their epicene bodies. In its own time, this iconography was thought provocatively un-churchlike, adding to the charges on which Pope Pius II had Agostino’s patron, Sigismondo di Malatesta, burned in effigy for heresy. The slightly gauche figure-drawing adds to the carvings’ fey allure, but their chief trait is an obsession with describing drapery and water in very low relief through swathes of sinuously convoluted line.