The Painters of the School of Ferrara. By Edmund G.
Gardner. (Duckworth and Co. 5s. net.)—This is a useful if somewhat
superficial study of one of the minor schools of Italian painting.
We have used the word superficial in describing this book because it deals so largely with dates and documents, and gives only a secondary place to the study of the various painters' actual outlook upon the problems of form, colour, modelling, and the other purely artistic questions, which are really the things which matter. An inferior painter is not made any better from the fact that his history and evolution can be traced by means of documents. The account of that most interesting painter Cossa
is a case in point; his great qualities of concentration and pointed statement of form are scarcely touched upon, and the qualities which make his little predella shine in the gallery of the Vatican remain unconsidered. Mr. Gardner has done useful work in collecting information of the documentary kind, but his technical equipment appears not to be sufficient to enable him to write a really valuable book on pictures. The best thing in the work before us is the study of Dosso Dossi, a painter whose freakish imagination lends himself to literary treatment.
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