Sienese Painting after the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market (review)

Solid scholarship on an understudied Sienese painter, Bartolommeo Bulgarini, active from 1338 to 1373, and attention given to late Trecento painting are positive contributions, but the strengths of this book are the source of its problems. Basing a broad discussion of Sienese painting heavily on one artist is problematic in a book that raises questions that are vital to understanding the Renaissance. How do we define changes in art and culture during the fourteenth century? In that Christian-dominated world when famine and disease regularly decimated populations, life expectancy was low, infant mortality high, and attention focused on achieving grace and eternal life, how would people have thought about mass death? How do art and the art market reflect responses to death by epidemic disease?

Judith B. Steinhoff argues that change in Sienese art from early to late fourteenth century should be evident in Bulgarini's oeuvre and that the artistic culture was "profoundly and intentionally pluralistic in style and contents" and not "conservative" (4). By pluralistic, Steinhoff means "combining earlier Sienese traditions along with newer approaches" (26) and "artistic diversity" (177). These two definitions are not easily reconciled. In painting of the 1330s and '40s artistic diversity was the result of several art market forces including "an environment of lively artistic exchange and the need to meet the various demands of diverse patrons" (220). That Siena originated art that was both creatively innovative and visually reverential toward the past has been demonstrated by several scholars using visual and documentary evidence, beginning with Bruce Cole in 1973. Steinhoff confirms that art production was related to remembrance after death as Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., demonstrated by studying testaments.

The author reaches her conclusions by studying Bulgarini, "an ordinary painter of skill and reputation but not one of the elite of his profession" who "comes close to an elusive 'Everyman'" (8). The subject of her 1990 doctoral dissertation, Bulgarini's life spans most of the century. His paintings constitute one-third of the illustrations in this book.

Taking as its historiographical starting point the debate with Millard Meiss, whose Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death was published in 1951, Steinhoff summarizes the theory he proposed about changes in painting after 1348 and examines the art history during the intervening fifty-five years. Questioned and modified already in 1952 by B. J. Rowland and 1964 by Joseph Polzer, his theory "continues to exert a strong influence even on many of those who criticize it" (20). Indeed, the title of Steinhoff's book is indebted to Meiss. After the Spanish Flu and two World Wars, scholars in many disciplines addressed the Black Death, but Steinhoff plumbs Meiss's biography for the roots of his interest.

Steinhoff moves back and forth between pre- and post-plague Siena in eleven sections contained in four parts. First, "Trecento Art History and Historiography" includes "Meiss and Method: Historiography of Scholarship on mid-Trecento Sienese Painting." Second, "Patrons and Artists: Working Relationships in Transition" includes "Economic, Social, and Political Conditions and the Art Market after 1348." Two sections on artists' working relationships follow, divided into early Trecento and "After the Black Death: A Sienese compagnia ca. 1348–1363" defined as "a flexibly organized network of painters" with Bulgarini as a principal member, although the "complete lack of documents explicitly referring to interactions among the painters . . . prevents our knowing whether we are dealing with a legally constituted corporation or a more informally organized confederation of artists" (81). Third, "Civic-Religious Imagery" is divided into pre- and post-plague sections. Fourth, "Artistic Style" includes "Stylistic Pluralism in the 1330s and '40s," "The Politics of Style in the 1350s and '60s," and "Style as Iconography." Repetitions and a concluding summary allow the sections to be read separately rather than as a coherent narrative.

Because this organization rests on chronological and...