A Man and a Prince

A Prince of Mantua: The Life and Times of Vincenzo Gonzaga, by Maria Bellonci. Translated by Stuart Hood. 312 pp. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $5.00

Vincenzo Gonzaga made his principal contribution to civilization when he subsidized the heartbreaking beauty of Monteverdi’s finest music, but as a man and a prince he is a worthy representative of the age in which the Renaissance ebbed into the Baroque. This is a well written biography in the modern manner in which history is decked out in some of the trappings of fiction. One notes with some annoyance that in this, as in many contemporary books, a theoretical decency is ostenstatiously maintained by an indecent compromise. The physical reasons why Vincenzo’s first marriage was not consummated are known and could be stated in five lines. On the plea that anatomical facts are too lascivious for words the author treats the reader to fifty pages of sly, often misleading innuendo.

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A Prince of Mantua: The Life and Times of Vincenzo Gonzaga, by Maria Bellonci. Translated by Stuart Hood. 312 pp. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $5.00

Vincenzo Gonzaga made his principal contribution to civilization when he subsidized the heartbreaking beauty of Monteverdi’s finest music, but as a man and a prince he is a worthy representative of the age in which the Renaissance ebbed into the Baroque. This is a well written biography in the modern manner in which history is decked out in some of the trappings of fiction. One notes with some annoyance that in this, as in many contemporary books, a theoretical decency is ostenstatiously maintained by an indecent compromise. The physical reasons why Vincenzo’s first marriage was not consummated are known and could be stated in five lines. On the plea that anatomical facts are too lascivious for words the author treats the reader to fifty pages of sly, often misleading innuendo.