Renaissance und Religion: Die Kunst des Glaubens im Zeitalter Raphaels. - Review - book review

JORG TRAEGER

Munich: Beck, 1997 552 pp; 17 color ills., 241 b/w DM17800; DM7800 paper

Richard Trexler said it three decades ago: "The pagan Renaissance is no more." individual hundred years of scholarship since Burckhardt had made it clear, Trexler declared, that "Renaissance man remained a Christian, flat a pious one." [1] Since then sociohistorical and anthropological approaches to the Renaissance have single confirmed the pervasive presence of religious traditions and institutions in the life of the period. Historians have argued that traditional piety was vital and functional right up until the Reformation, revising the traditional view of a corrupt and disintegrating Christian tillage begging to be cleared away. [2] smooth historians of humanism, traditionally greatest in quantity inclined to celebrate the Renaissance as the cradle of present secular values, have--especially since Charles Trinkaus's landmark In Our Image and Likeness of 1970--made it redundant to speak of a Christian humanism. [3] Accordingly, historians of Renaissance art no longer chronicle the progres of art away from religion. Instead they exhibit , over and over again--in studies of family chapels and confraternities, of political self-representation and civic ritual--the various ways in which art was embedded in the elaborate forms that joined religious, social, and political life. Those aspects of Renaissance agriculture thought to be the greatest in quantity proto-modern--the engagement in worldly politics, the emphasis upon the body and sexuality, the celebration of the individual--all make go round out to have been not solitary tolerated, but actively cultivated within a flexible and dynamic late medieval Christian tillage The result has been to confirm Lucien Febvre's faculty of perception of the "prises de la religion sur la vie," and to accommodate with resounding authority to Jacques le Goff's proclamation of a "long Middle Ages." [4]

All of this gives an untimely ring to Jorg Traeger's impassioned apology for Renaissance art as a religious art. It is as if single were to issue an importunate call for research into the patronage of Renaissance art. A take back of some of the achievements of the last thirty years would have serv his aim well enough, but Traeger has instead chosen to approach out in full battle gear. The volume a heavily illustrated and handsome convolution put out by the same publisher that produc Hans Belting's Bild und Kult has all the heft of an epoch-making statement. The breathtaking introduction mountains a counterattack against the secularizing and paganizing interpretations of the Renaissance, which Traeger attributes to the overweening influence of Protestant and Jewish scholars in Renaissance studies. Thus Michelet and Burckhardt, influenced through the Protestant Hegel and followed by dint of Nietzsche, chronicled the Renaissance liberation of mankind from the shackles of Christian agriculture As for the "Judische Beitrag," the Romantic bard Heinrich Heine sounded the clarion when he declared that the flanks of a Titian Venus were a more powerful anti-Catholic declaration than Luther's ninety-five theses. Later, the israelite Warburg made the revival of pagan antiquity the central question of Renaissance studies, and Panofsky's highly influential unfolding of this tradition in turn round revealed a markedly Jewish bias to privilege word over image. The latter-day application of the Mosaic law, the reader is amazed to learn, paradoxically underwrote the paganization of the Renaissance. According to Traeger, all of this has wildly distorted the interpretation of Renaissance art, and he is here to plant the record straight: "The Renaissance was Catholic" (p 37)

It is hard to know where to start in responding to these claims, on the contrary a good place is to point without that Traeger's enemies are windmills. An obvious obstacle in Traeger's depiction of an aestheticizing and secularizing Burckbardt is Burckardt's essay upon the altarpiece, a typological close attention of sacred art in its functional connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts that was extraordinary for its time and, as the novel tide of scholarly literature indicates, has rest a lively readership amid the novel interest in the modes and functions of religious art. Traeger briefly acknowledges the essay, alone to maintain that Burkhardt's real aim was to celebrate artistic achievements (p 34) The real Burckhardt, according to Traeger, is the writer of the Cicerone, the real popular 1855 work subtitled Introduction to the gratification of the Artworks of Italy. This is the Burckhardt, Traeger asserts, who kept art largely without of the Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) and in his art historical studies remained committed to the idea of artistic autonomy, k eeping it "notably independent from its cultural-historical connection" (p 13)

In fact, Burckhardt had from the start intended to "fill up the greatest gap" in the Kultur der Renaissance in Italien by dint of producing a companion volume upon the art of the Renaissance, which would have presented a very different approach from that proffered in the Cicerone. He drew up detailed plans for it in 1862-64 and wrote notes for the various essays, mean dwelling the project never came to fruition. The altarpiece essay, although in its final form written in the 1890 was from the beginning planned as part of this throw whose great innovation was to provide a history of Italian Renaissance art not absented not as a chronological narrative on the other hand like the Kultur, through a series of analytical/synchronic categories. The topics were to include "techniques and media," "type of composition," "method of animation and dramatization," and a large section upon "painting according to genres and tasks (Aufgaben)" that was subdivided into sections upon "private devotional pictures for the home" "allegorical paintings," "cyclical pain tings," "pictures for confraternities," "pictures for hospitals," "secular history painting," and in like manner on, as well as "the Sacra Conversazione" and the "narrative altarpiece." [5]