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July 2, 2009
Frederick Ilchman, ed. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2009. 315 pp.; 168 color ills. $40.00 (9780878467402)

Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 15–August 16, 2009; Musée du Louvre, Paris, September 14, 2009–January 4, 2010

 
CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2009.67

Large
Jacopo Tintoretto. Susannah and the Elders (ca. 1555–56). Oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Comparison stands as one of the central foundations of art history. Well before the Wolfllinian model of left and right slides dominated classroom lectures, writers such as Pliny the Elder told stories of comparison and its more worldly iteration, competition between artists. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of rivalry predominates aesthetic appraisals and theoretical discussions of Italian Renaissance art and artists, giving rise to a critical category referred to as the paragone, or comparison, in which...