The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist & Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne. . - book review

FRANCIS AMES-LEWIS

The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist

of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 322 pp; 50 color ills., 100 b/w $4000

ROBERT WILLIAMS

Art, Theory, and tillage in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1997 243 pp $4995

Contemporary scholars of the Renaissance operate within the shell of a 19th-century conception of the period, which is now for the greatest part invoked in order to be discredited. The period acquired its recent definition through narratives of spiritual and intellectual rebirth or renewal, of the centrality of scholars, writers, and intellectuals in public life--when tillage as Jacob Burckhardt conceived it, supersed the "powers" of religion and the state. Figures of that kind as Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo were allowed to speak for a broader totality of historical experience. In the wake of Burckhardt and Jule Michelet, art was compressed into the service of of that kind mythmaking, and it appeared to proffer powerful visual and material testimony to the ascendency of humanism and to the transformation in consciousness that was its telo In the apparent collapse of of that kind confidence, what can the confine "Renaissance" now usefully mean, other than as a hollowed-out (and probably misleading) synonym for "Early late "? The alternative has been a healthy pluralism of historical approaches, mainly centered on the local, the microhistorical, the normally tradition-bound world of religion, marriage, and the family--but perhaps at the price of a certain conceptual disunity, a lack of synthesis, and an absence of dialogue among the practitioners of the multiple byways of the field. Exorcizing the myth of the "Renaissance Man," however necessary, has also had serious results for the understanding of the relation of art and intellectual life. Humanism takes its place alongside other ways of considering artistic activity in this period--the state, religion, the organization of sex the market for consumer goods-- and is itself seen as subordinate to and conditioned by dint of these other phenomena. This may mean no more than the fact that just as it is pretty soon inconceivable to us that the world of scholarship and the humanities could at any time be central and defining simple bodys of our own culture, in the way that we could no longer think of them a s having an important generative character in the visual culture of an earlier period It may also mean that the question of humanism and its relation to art calls on the outside for reconsideration. The singularity of of that kind an alignment might be grasped one time more, for its strangeness and remotenes as plenteous as for any connection it may have to our experience or to our modernity.

the couple of these books, in varying steps suggest a deliberate and specific usage for the bourn Renaissance art," making a generally persuasive case for the proposition that it was humanism that provided the greatest in quantity important terms in which art is reconceived and redefined in the period, and that this had a transforming event on the status of the artist. The authors share an evident due to Michael Baxandall's Giotto and the Orators of 1971 However, in their most distant differences from each other, the couple manifest the effects of the disciplinary fragmentation referr to above, notwithstanding the for the use of all ground that, given the titles of their works one might expect them to share.

Williams's work the more ambitious and the more original of the sum of two units makes large claims for the writing upon the visual arts in the Renaissance still defines its territory so as to shut out discussion of any actual works of art. Ames-Lewis provides an admirable retelling of a familiar narrative, that of the "rise of the artist" in Renaissance Italy, which includes many unfamiliar examples and gives a certain number of attention to non-Italians like Albrecht Durer There is plenteous that is relevant for a consideration of the artist in intellectual culture: chapters upon painting and poetry, on the idea of the artist's inventive license, upon artists' literacy, their writing and reading habits. In these chapters the notion of what constitutes an "intellectual" is not subdueed to historical scrutiny, but it appears to be mainly determined by dint of the standards of humanism; we are told of in what manner humanists perceived and judged artists, and of in what manner some artists sought to fashion themselves as learned individuals. Relatively little agency is grant d to works of art themselves, which largely remain at the horizontal of illustration; they are assessed for their correspondence with classical body s ("literal" in the case of Titian's mythologies for Ferrara) or humanist learning, rather than as transforming or extending that learning, or as possessing their have a title to discursive power. The author, for instance, pronounces upon the naivete of the printmaker Girolamo Mocetto, who copied Andrea Mantegna's drawing of the Calumny of Apelles on the contrary "arbitrarily and absurdly" placed it against the background of the Campo s Giovanni e Paolo in Venice (p 198) on the other hand what was Mocetto doing here other than drawing upon a classic topos in the service of a of recent origin rhetorical invention about Venice and its political agriculture of intrigue, private surveillance, and slander, of which he may himself have had personal experience (having designed the stained glass for the Venetian house of god he depicted in the engraving)? Mocetto here come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds Leon Battista Alberti and Mantegna in conceiving an image acco rding to a rhetorical prototype where motifs from past true copys and works of art are redeploy according to the demands of a of recent origin situation.