Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. . - book review

JOANNA WOODS-MARSDEN

novel Haven: Yale University Press, 1998 295 pp; 57 color ills., 110 b/w $6000

One's first reaction to this book's title is likely to be "Of course!" and to bewilderment why it was not written fifty or a hundr years ago. at any time since Jakob Burckhardt, the Renaissance has been virtually synonymous with a discovery of the self that gazes forward to modern individualism. And from a certain quantity of perspectives Renaissance self-portraits, though relatively scarce, appear to be woven into the true fabric of the period's art. Independent, formal self-portraits are alone part of the evidence. Time and again, portraitlike faces gaze out at us from altarpieces and frescoe raising the suspicion that this is the artist and that his nearness somehow makes narrative and the experience of the devoted more direct, more personal, flat more "modern." Sometimes, with the help of Giorgio Vasari, we can identify these faces. on the contrary can we trust Vasari, writing in the mid-16th hundred sometimes several lifetimes removed from the works in question? More important, perhaps, can we trust ourselves not to read too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of into a face or flat into the notion of selfhood itself? Nowadays we have to struggle with an increasingly lively, ongoing debate across the disciplines above just where to draw the lines between Renaissance and late consciousness, not to mention arguments and counterarguments about whether the actual concept of the self is a relatively novel period construct. Especially in light of art history's growing dread of anachronism, a control like Renaissance self-portraiture inevitably present the appearances trickier and more difficult than ever

Faced with all the complexities and pitfalls her bring under rule poses, Joanna Woods-Marsden has opt for a cautious approach. She tries not to stray too far from well-established facts, and from the first page she carefully narrows the object of her inquiry so as to avoid questions of selfhood that might look overly subjective or suspiciously recent With few exceptions the work deals only with independent and mainly painted self-portraits from 15th- and 16th-century Italy, works "specifically created to mediate between the artistic self...and its Renaissance audience" (p 1) For the greatest in quantity part, the audience in question is the Italian Renaissance court, and the pictures portray the artist as courtier, performing, or "fashioning," his or her self in this social theater. In other words, Woods-Marsden defines selfhood in social boundarys as opposed to the Romantic view of an autonomous self which has become of the like kind a deep-seated modern bias. new scholarship repeatedly has emphasized by what mode communal, how public was Renaissan ce life, and this was especially pure of the princely courts, competitive, status-conscious societies where an individual was literally always upon view. Given the widespread belief in Renaissance Italy that aristocrats were not born on the other hand made, the courts offered considerable social mobility to artists, who repeatedly ranked no higher than lower-middleclass craftsmen in their native towns. To succe at court, however, the aspiring artist had to create for himself a suitably persuasive persona, or social mask, and act it without with grace and panache. Plausibly enough, Woods-Marsden dioceses Renaissance self-portraits as extensions of this rhetoric. greatest in quantity often, the persona involved is that of the artist as genius, a considerable pace up from the status of nothing else but artisan. In fact, the theme of the transformation of medieval craftsman into Renaissance genius provides the book's main subplot

This line of thinking reflects contemporary scholarship's increasing attention to social adjoining matter as the key to understanding Renaissance art in its possess terms. Her excellent bibliography displays that Woods-Marsden has given almost as abundant attention to social and intellectual history as to the history of art, maybe more. And quite through the book she touches upon a wide variety of bring under rules from classical philosophy to the history of mirrors. Promising as her approach appears to be, however, it does not work as well as single might have hoped. Part of the question is that the number of works is in the way that limited. Woods-Marsden counts just twenty-five artists engaged in self-portraiture as she defines it, and she illustrates single about twice that number of the images themselves, hardly any indeed for so long a tighten of time. Such thin evidence makes it harder to write a history of the subdue in the usual sense: that is, to trace inclines and influences, to establish traditions and conventions, and, in general, to exhibit the circulation a nd transformation of ideas, Because there are relatively scarcely any overarching themes and patterns of disentanglement the chapters remain relatively disconnected, at ease in themselves. In this defer to Renaissance Self -Portraiture tends to be a deliberate read.

The book's organization has alone compounded these problems. Much of the discussion of general questions of society, selfhood and portrayal in the Renaissance takes place in the first four chapters. Basically, they show a survey of the extensive scholarly literature upon these issues and, insofar as Woods-Marsden polisheds over most of the sharp disagreements and vigorous debates, a observe somewhat wider than it is down-reaching More important, though, all on the contrary one of these introductory chapters are almost entirely unillustrated. In event the ideas take shape in a vacuum, without the tangible interplay with the portraits themselves that might have strengthened our understanding of both