Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. - Review - book review

LEONARD BARKAN

fresh Haven and London: Yale University Pres 1999 428 pp; 199 b/w ills. $35

Sir Thomas Browne publishing in 1658 his Hydriotaphia, a treatise upon sepulchral urns lately discovered in Norfolk, was mov to comment:

We are coldly drawn unto discourses of Antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend of recent origin things, or make out learned Novelties. on the contrary seeing they arose as they lay, almost in silence among us, at least in short account unexpectedly passed over; we were real unwilling they should die again, and be buried twice among us. [1]

Browne's deferential wish in his prefatory alphabetic character not to "intrude upon the Antiquary," a notion of professionalism that had an aroma of the oxymoronic level then, was fundamental to his rhetorical intention As the consummately eloquent physician, whose profession it was "to guard the living, and make the dead to live, to hold fast men out of their Urnes" Browne effortlessly place empirical and figural justification for his remarkable essay into antiquarian scholarship, an accomplished demonstration of for what cause [i]or[/i] reason one ought "mercifully" to secure the bones of one's national ancestors, and not "pisse on their ashes."

Professional demarcation debates, arguments defining the limits and competencies of disciplines, are reaching far down structure to any serious history of Western scholarship. The flowing together in Browne's prefatory remarks of the topics of antiquarianism and medicine, and the rhetorical antitheses old-new and arising-burial is predictable in antiquarian discourse, where the gifted amateur reigned predominant And trespassing (to borrow E H Gombrich's term) into disciplines not one's have has often been the mark of innovative scholarship in the two antiquarian studies and art history. Pliny the senior was a specialist in law, grammar, and rhetoric, on the other hand turned his hand to a significant bit of art history with the help of Hellenistic biographies. The painter Vasari was a mediocre author of poems but happened to write (with a little editing from his friends) a vivid descriptive prosaic just perfect for artist's biographies. Winckelmann, trained in medicine and mathematics, wrote a clinically observant and sexually overcomeed history of Greek art f rom Roman copies. And then there was the keen-ey medico Giovanni Morelli, planter of modern connoisseurship.

a certain quantity of of the most important art history of the 20th hundred came from the Warburg Institute, where hardly anyone was officially classified as an art historian. Charles Mitchell, who wrote a seductive essay upon Renaissance antiquarian studies and literary romance and began his career at the Institute, half-jokingly said in the late 1960 (in the reviewer's presence) that the scholars at the Institute "hated art." He had spied a Picasso print he had donated to the Institute gathering dust and insisted that it be cleaned immediately. single supposes that Mitchell meant 20th-century art, on the contrary he was on risky territory given E H Gombrich's devotion to Kokoschka and Michael Baxandall's emerging interest in theory. similar manifest hyperbole was typical of Mitchell's prickly faculty of perception of humor. There he was, himself delighting in the arcane true copys of Felice Feliciano's antiquarian manuscripts, on the other hand yearning for the erotic line of Picasso's Vollard Suite. Would that Mitchell were still here to review Leonard Barkan's of recent origin book. H e would have taken pleasure in the seriousness with which Barkan approaches his body s and assuredly would not have suspected that he lacked sympathy and affection for Renaissance art.

The exemplary work of Phyllis Bober and mercy Rubinstein on the Census of Antique Works Known to Renaissance Artists, begun half a hundred ago and continued still at the Warburg Institute, is repeatedly used and justly praised in Barkan's work He describes the Census as follows:

The plan was to make as full a record as possible, principally photographic and to a inferior extent textual, of the pieces of ancient plastic art known in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and equally to document the drawings and imitations of these works which prov their familiarity in this period. What is perhaps greatest in quantity notable is that Professor Bober was by means of training a classical archaeologist and not (to begin with, at least) a Renaissance scholar at all. Thus the twentieth-century act of recuperation was a kind of archaeology--a careful mapping of material artifacts upon a grid of time and space--which was itself being applied to a rather different sort of Renaissance archaeology, a redemption of the past that was as unsystematic as it was passionate (p xxii).

sum of two units passages attract one's attention. First, that it was notable to Barkan that the director of the Census, the remarkable Phyllis Bober, should have been, to begin with, a classical archaeologist. next to the first the phrase "a kind of archaeology" used to describe the methodology of the Census as a means of differentiating it from an "unsystematic" and "passionate" Renaissance "archaeology." greatest in quantity of the pre-Census publications upon works of art discovered in the Renaissance and their survival in Renaissance sketchbook were written through classical archaeologists, and not by means of "professional" Renaissance scholars. What is "notable" here is rather Barkan's minimizing of classical archaeology's contribution to the foundations of the Census cast and to the recent close attention of Renaissance sketchbooks. These foundations were laid between ca. 1870 and 1920 in the work of identification, description, and correlation of of that kind archaeologists as Otto Jahn, Friedrich Matz the earlier born Hermann Dessau, Adolf Michaelis, Christian Hulsen Carl Robert, and Thomas Ashby. Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Erwin Panofsky (among others) mediated art history's acquisition of this material. In the 1930 many Americans had welcomed Panofsky's iconology as an antidote to a "dry" archaeological approach to art history, generated by the agency of the linking of departments of art history and archaeology. notwithstanding the archaeological underpinnings of Panofsky's research were patent in his certain handling of classical sculptural prototypes upon almost every page of his work.