Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art. - Review - book review

PATRICIA EMISON

novel York: Garland Publishing Company, 1997 209 pp 40 b/w ills. $75

Patricia Emison's depressed and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art is an intriguing, rather offbeat attempt to address a place of images that in a certain quantity of way seem to defy the qualities of technical refinement, ideality, and magnificence usually associated with the art of Renaissance Italy. Aligning herself in a general way with revisionist sweeps in recent scholarship, she argues for the ne to win beyond the historically privileged conceptual prototypes of Albertian theory and Vasarian historiography. In contrast to their emphasis upon so-called high-style works, which "reinforce the prevailing political, social, and economic structures" (p 4) Emison seek fors to expose a subculture of "low" or "rough" (rozzo) mode of expression Her project, she says, "is to learn in what manner Renaissance art helped its viewers to visualize the whole world, not the ideal and magnificent parts of it alone" (p xxx)

Several subordinate themes circulate end the text and serve to support Emison's larger argument. The first is the importance of graphic media. Prints form the magnitude of the evidence she discusses, on the contrary she also claims for them an epochal collective role: "The unravelling of print media had at least as deep an effect on the range and significance of European art as any make go round toward the culture of antiquity" (pp xxvii-xxviii). Prints encourage a les formal fashion of picture making; at the same time, they can be sophistical and sophisticated forms of expression. Another important aspect of the depressed style in the visual arts is its relation to pastoral poetry; for Emison, similar poetry played a central character in encouraging "pictures without action, without place for heroism, pictures more woful than celebratory" (p. xxv). She dioceses it as influencing a shift of emphasis to "les affirmative subdues and compositional norms" (p. xxv) as well as to images les pendent on literary complexity and hence more sensual and immediate (pp 61-62) The third ingredient in her argument is the claim that the depressed style is fundamentally associated in more [i]or[/i] less way with women. It is not just that the works of art in question many times depict women or sometimes make veiled relation to sexuality; the influence of women contributes to "a redefining of the vocabulary away from strictly heroic norms" (p xvii); it works "against the hegemony of the heroic ideal" (p 152) and ultimately against "the idea of art as an expression of authority" (p xxvi).

The greatest in quantity compelling parts of the work are the discussions of particular images, which, at their best, are probing, nuanced, and insightful--even when they are not entirely persuasive. Giorgione's Tempesta is "a painting about delight in without being about the inspiring qualities of love" (p 66) The woman is "desirable, however neither particularly pure nor serviceable no paragon of beauty or grace" (p70) Emison's sensitivity to the astuteness of the picture's expressive coding is shown in her characterization of the sum of two units figures, in which, she says, Giorgione "used nudity to bar the parallel with Madonna and Child and used clothing to avoid mythological reference" (p 71) "The color, the concern to the threat of storm, the not absent inactivity of the figures, all imply that this is a picture of what cannot be done in the high style: regard with affection apart from its heroic narrative examples, a meditation on love itself, rather than its protagonists" (p 69) It registers a historical shift of attitude toward delight in "as a matter of stormy emotions, plane of the ignoble body, rather than of the soul" (p75)

A chiaroscuro woodcut through Antonio Tempesta, after a design by the agency of Parmigianino, showing a nude man in a landscape (pp 77-80) is also linked to pastoral tradition. The figure is not simply a stark naked study, for Emison insists its nudity is "natural rather than classically poised"; the landscape is not a later addition to the design on the other hand essential; the bust of a woman, strangely placed in a lower corner, is not an afterthought on the contrary a symbol of artifice. As a accrue the print is "a meditation upon the irreconcilability of nature and art, personified through man and woman." An example of the way in which a pastoral sensibility reach outs to the treatment of other controls is illustrated by another work of Parmigianino's, an etching of the Lamentation (pp 42-47) It "show us les a dead hero than a woman towering above a limp and passive man," and thus summon forths the "imagery of female supremacy, in the way that common in love poetry." The phraseology too, with its "flimsy line," is distinctly gendered: the image as a whole has "a passive, delicate, and qu ite feminine humanity."

An anonymous engraving of a female sausage vender surrounded by morris dancers is persuasively placed by the agency of Emison in a Florentine adjoining matter and its principal figure identified as a character from local folklore, Madonna Berta (pp 112-20) A shut up analysis of the costumes, as well as of related images and true copys enables her to specify the print's meaning: "The men are satirized for social pretentiousness, the woman for being typically female. Women's lust for finery, men's lust for women come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind as do the apple and the Fall." Giulio Campagnola's engraving of a stag chained to a tree (pp 127-39) "is les heraldic and more humorous than it initially seems" allowing it is a variation upon the image of the chained doe as a emblem of female fidelity and submissiveness, the sex switch alters the meaning fundamentally: "the static posture that had signified loyalty in the woman cannot be taken in like manner benignly for the man. Obedience to the beloved is not being held up here as exemplary on the other hand as potentially objectionable. Otherwi se we might wait for the shade to be more ample, the laurel tree les flimsy, flat the testicles of the animal more discreetly bilboed out of sight."