Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700. - book reviews

If anything might be said to characterize art history in the nineties it is the acceptance of interdisciplinarity as an inevitable fact of life. Recognition of the value of other disciplines is, of course, not novel to art history; substantive scholarship in the field has always involved a certain number of measure of familiarity with the meanss and materials of other disciplines - history, literary studies, philosophy, and anthropology are among the greatest in quantity obvious examples. Yet this acknowledgment of the value of other fields to the art-historical enterprise used to pass hand in hand with a fairly clear notion of what was and what was not art history specific By contrast, much current historical scholarship upon art and visual culture is marked by dint of a blurring of disciplinary boundaries, together with a more inclusive faculty of perception of what might be appropriate subdues for art-historical study, and a more elastic notion of art-historical "method" This disciplinary fluidity has had many salutary events on the field. These are perhaps greatest in quantity evident in the variety of stimulating studies which have powerfully shaped and raised the horizontal of critical discourse in art history during the past twenty years. I am thinking here of the influential work of Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, Louis Marin, TJ Clark, and the thought-provoking contributions of Norman Bryson Mieke Bal, and Griselda Pollock to name just a scarcely any This interdisciplinary scholarship has also had its impact outside the field, especially among historians and literary scholars interested in visual culture

As exciting and beneficial as these exchanges among the disciplines have been, they have also brought in their wake pressing challenges which face everyone seeking to do art-historical scholarship effectively across disciplines. With each aspect of visual culture make open for exploration and with the interpretive protocols of many disciplines at hand, the possibilities can sometimes induce a faculty of perception of intellectual vertigo. Where do we begin? by the agency of what criteria do we decide that particular historical circumstances are relevant to the visual artifacts of our study? And by what means do we construct historically explanatory linkages in our interpretive analyses between, say, pictorial representations and quite dissimilar kinds of data and cultural productions? There are clearly no fixed answers to these questions. The replys we offer will depend to a certain number of extent upon our intellectual, political, and ye level disciplinary commitments.

The difference of the like kind commitments make is tellingly and instructively evident in Christopher Braider's Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 Braider, a professor of French literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder try to finds in this ambitious study to elucidate the "deep and pervasive commitment to forms of picturing" which he dioceses as a signal feature of "Western thought" from the late Middle Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment. His duplicate aim is to examine these forms of picturing and to reveal "their contribution to postmedieval agriculture as a whole." Ultimately his goal is to uncover the fundamental role of pictorial naturalism, the couple in images and texts, in shaping a novel experience and understanding of reality that is recognizably "modern"

Braider displays the terms "modern" and "modernity" in various faculty of perceptions but perhaps most crucial to his argument is the notion of the present as inextricably bound to the metaphysical meaning and vicissitudes of representation, which he dioceses most clearly manifested within the discourse and doctrine of the Sister Arts. The historical parameters of Refiguring the Real thus deliberately coincide with the three-hundred-year period during which European art theory recognized the kinship of painting and poesy as a key principle. Braider strives that the discourse of ut pictura poesis reinforced the theoretical and critical privilege accorded to visual images with obvious textual referent while at the same time obscuring the significance of pictorial naturalism itself as a bearer of a novel conception of reality. His argument for the ontological importance of the painted image as the paradigm for other styles of expression is therefore also an argument against the use of ut pictura poesis as an explanation of the enhanced status of the pictorial arts in early recent Europe. Braider sees his throw as a response to previous studies of the meaning and influence of the ut pictura poesis topos, of that kind as those of Rensselaer to leeward Murray Roston, and Clarke Hulse(1) In Braider's view none of these scholars has addressed sufficiently the step to which the doctrine of the Sister Arts was a symptom rather than a cause of painting's privileged epistemological status. Braider's "revisionist" propel is to propose another master narrative, which treats the disentanglement of naturalism in the arts as a catalyst in the ontological shift to a to the full modern conception of reality.

In theory, Braider's revised account should proffer a much more inclusive explanation of the pair the privilege accorded to the painted image and of the pictorialism evident in the discourses of philosophy, literature, science, and religion than does the humanist figure of speech of the kinship of painting and numbers His epistemological brief draws into his discussion true copys of many different sorts as well as the descriptive impressed signs of paintings which he considers to have been marginalized below the influence of ut pictura poesis. Braider makes a point, for example, of choosing Netherlandish rather than Italian pictures as the main focus of his analyses. at the same time at the same time, Braider's totalizing throw of showing the "identity embracing the several arts and sciences as integral jiffys of a single evolution" (p 4) works in precisely the opposite direction, necessitating other exclusions and elisions, and occasioning a interdependence on canonical images and body s as privileged evidence for his claims. The change of his argument is at one time expansive and reductive, and the shifts from detailed analysis to larger historical transformations are sometimes dizzying. The tension between the sweeping claims of Braider's master narrative and the selectivity of his evidence and his interpretive strategies frequently undercuts the credibility of his arguments.