Viewing Renaissance Art (review)

This year Yale University Press in association with The Open University in the UK published a trilogy of textbooks dedicated to the reconsideration of Renaissance art. Each volume is composed of seven essays, largely by senior lecturers of the Open University. Making Renaissance Art focuses on the production of art. Locating Renaissance Art maps networks of commercial and cultural exchange. Viewing Renaissance Art, which is reviewed here, takes on patronage as an ethical system of liberal spending for a greater good. It also deals with the Reformation and how it changed visual culture. Rembrandt Duits in "Art, Class and Wealth" relates the expenditures of patronage to the modern concept of conspicuous consumption. In "Florentine Art and the Public Good," Jill Burke introduces the theme of magnificence as the engine for splendid art that embodies the values of a community. In "Renaissance Bibliomania" Alixe Bovey describes the Renaissance passion for books as a cultural phenomenon that reached new heights in such multiauthor volumes as the Sforza Hours. Thomas Tolley in "Monarchy and Prestige" in France argues that French art flowered well before the arrival of Leonardo in 1516 and that royal patrons welcomed the novelty and the prestige of the Italian Renaissance without abandoning local traditions promulgated by such accomplished artists as Jean Hey, the master of the Moulins altarpiece. Among the overlooked objects that fill this book none is more unexpected than an icon by the Cretan painter Ioannes Permeniates discussed by Angeliki Lymberopoulou, who in "Audiences and Markets for Cretan Icons" shows that painters in remote Crete made icons for Renaissance consumers. Carol Richardson, in "Art and Death," takes on art which instructs the living on the art of dying (e.g., the tradition of the danse macabre and the memento mori) or commemorates the worthiness of the dead in their transit from the temporal to the eternal (funerary art). The book closes with Woods's "Holbein and the Reform of Images. " Holbein's career in Switzerland and England reflects what happens when a society rejects a rich visual culture as no longer trustworthy (the scandal of the sale of indulgences) or becomes irrelevant to its concerns (the primacy of the word in the matter of Grace). The visual genre for which there continued to be a demand was portraiture, which preserves for posterity the physiognomies of the men and women of a Renaissance that was not only profligate in material culture but also —and this is not sufficiently stressed in the book —provided richly for the life of the mind and the care of the soul.

The topics in Viewing Renaissance Art reflect the trend to test modern consumption theory on the material cultures of the past. Many of the themes —magnificence, bibliomania, the culture of commodities, and conspicuous consumption —already appeared in Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996), a book that has been criticized for overemphasizing the role of the market in creating high culture and undervaluing visual rhetoric and the hermeneutical tradition. The question remains whether the present volume functions as a textbook for an upper level course at the Open University or at colleges in the U.S. Would students welcome the patterns of spending, prestige, and conspicuous consumption or would they feel lost in the maze of places, monuments, artificers, and consumers? Some of the articles seem overly long for the point that is being made and often objects remain mute in the crosscurrents of commercial and cultural exchange. At times it seems that the artists are mere footnotes in the depiction of lavish spending. Still, prestige as a key term may awaken interest and reveal the rich nature of Renaissance art to modern students who, in all their diversity, have in common the experience of patronage and the consumption of worldly goods.