This past winter, the Frick Collection in New York held a small but captivating exhibition about the Renaissance sculptor Andrea Riccio. The show was a revelation, not only because it presented the works of a celebrated but little-studied artist. More importantly, the exhibition raised fundamental questions about the nature of the classical revival during the Renaissance. Active in Venice and Padua at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Riccio chiefly represented subjects drawn from ancient literature, and he worked almost exclusively for a group of erudite scholars, writers, and intellectuals who were at the forefront of the creation and dissemination of humanist learning. Riccio personifies the period’s intense regard for Greco-Roman antiquity, and yet, for the modern viewer, what he treasured about classical art is completely unexpected.

According to standard art-historical opinion, Renaissance classicism is typified by its esteem for reason, restraint, order, and clarity. But Riccio’s sculpture, made for the greatest authorities on classical culture of the time, is of a wholly different character. He emphasized intensity of emotion in the depiction of expression; he felt a keen fascination for representing moments of poetic or religious inspiration; and he often made sculptures that entailed the promise of magical or miraculous power. To be sure, Riccio, on occasion, portrayed classical civilization as a preserve of great learning and rational discourse, but he also depicted it as a time of mystery cults and blood sacrifice, ecstasy and rapture. Dionysus as well as Apollo beckoned to Riccio and his