Review of Gazzola (2018): L’Arte de’ cenni di Giovanni Bonifacio

Written in the 1590s and published in 1616, Giovanni Bonifacio’s L’Arte de’ cenni is a unique treatise that offers valuable insights on the late Renaissance/baroque understanding of the value and meaning of gesture in Western European culture. The study by Silvia Gazzola, resulting from a doctoral dissertation in art history, now provides the modern reader with a transcription of the original text, in which all textual references to the author’s sources are identified; and in a separate, accompanying volume, a critical apparatus is provided including a short biography of Bonifacio, a reconstruction of the nature and structure of the volume which inserts it in the context of the intellectual tradition to which it belongs, and a history of its reception, from the time of its publication to the present. The publication under review must be more than welcomed for the contributions it brings to the understanding of a remarkable text and of its historical context, as well as for the rich information and stimuli it can offer to a variety of disciplinary approaches to gesture in the humanities and social sciences.