The Florentine Tondo & "Cassone" Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. . - book review

ROBERTA OLSON

The Florentine Tondo

Oxford: Oxford University Pres 2000 408 pp; 12 color ills., 297 b/w $14500

CRISTELLE BASKINS

"Cassone" Painting, Humanism, and sex in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge Studies in of recent origin Art History and Criticism

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1998 278 pp; 59 b/w ills. $8000

Italian Renaissance art history has its version of literature's "genre studies--monographs focusing upon particular categories of visual representation like as the altarpiece, the portrait, and tomb plastic art (1) The two books below review here are studies of this kind: Roberta Olson gazes at tondi--autonomous circular paintings and sculpture--while Cristelle Baskins concentrates upon painted cassone panels that one time adorned paired chests made for patrician weddings. It is usually assumed in art historical studies that these categories were recognized classifications during the time period and that significant cultural values were invested in the conventionalized formal features and characteristic typologies. In a contribution to a new volume on the altarpiece, Paul Hills calls attention to more [i]or[/i] less of the problems attending this approach to Renaissance art in an essay entitled "The Renaissance Altarpiece: A Valid Category?" While acknowledging that the altarpiece was a functional category in the period, he point s to a significant elasticity in design and designation and notes the absence of any discussion about altarpieces in theoretical writings about art. Furthermore, he cautions that the isolation of a representational genre "privileges paradigmatic relations (altarpiece as member of a class of objects) above syntagmatic relations (altarpiece as part of a larger whole--either the physical individual of the chapel and house of god that houses the altarpiece, or the 'mental' single of contemporary needs, beliefs and attitudes). An art history that is to procure beyond the stage of cataloguing wants to attend to both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, and it extremitys to be rather careful not to case itself within its own categories." (2) Hills does not tender that art historians abandon the research of categories, which he considers a valid tool of inquiry, alone that these limitations be kept in mind. Another matter to consider is the ideological investment in this approach. Tracking the emerging see the verb of new representational forms and the ra dical transformation of traditional individuals in Italy from the 14th to the 16th hundred is a hermeneutical enterprise intricately linked to perceptions about what is distinct and significant about this historical period. Determinations about artistic categories are fashioned by the agency of and, in turn, fashion "the Renaissance"--whether conceived of as a chronological demarcation or an episteme demonstrating pivotal cultural unfoldings The study of portraiture, for example, negotiates conceptions about the individual, identity, the self and subjectivity--critical confines in Renaissance historiography. Furthermore, category designations are inevitably graded classifications that are privileged within the disciplinary practice of art history, and they do their piece of work in mapping the cultural terrain. Portraits, altarpieces, and equestrian remembrancers receive considerable scholarly attention; other kinds of representational objects--engraved armor, ex-votos, and coins--find validation within a lower strata of classification as "or nament" or "material culture" (3) single can thus add to Paul Hills's script for effective art historical genre studies the ne to mirror on the currency and ideological purchase of the categories tinder consideration, the two within the historical culture and in late art historical discourse.

the couple the tondo and the painted cassone panel were treated in comprehensive, cataloguing monographs early in the 20th century: Moritz Hauptmann's Der Tondo: Ursprung und Bedeutung und Geschichte de italienischen Rundbildes in Relief und Malerei (Frankfurt, 1936) and Paul Schubring's Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienische Fruhrenaissance (Leipzig, 1915 1923) These novel publications by Roberta Olson and Cristelle Baskins show timely reexaminations of the respective categories and highlight the diversity of historiographic perspectives and methodological approaches used through historians of quattrocento and cinquecento Italian art today.

Olson's close attention is the first extended account of the tondo since Hauptmann's monograph, published in 1936 While Olson narrows the geographic mark to Florence (perhaps too exclusively), she strives for comprehensive coverage. She chronicles the emerging see the verb of the independent tondo in Florence in the 1430 and its relatively brief apogee from 1480 to 1515 She provides a prehistory and an epilogue, explores the cultural significance of the circle, gazes at the different media used and the typical make subordinates represented, and includes an appendix that falls just short of cataloguing the numerous extant tondi execut through painters who specialized in the form.