Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (review)

In their introduction to Early Modern Visual Culture, Clark Hulse and Peter Erickson duly note that Reformation iconoclasm set out to smash visual images. Though muted, hostility persists even today in the pejorative connotations of postmodern keywords such as surveillance, gaze, and spectacle, and Hulse and Clark urge an end to this "anti-ocular" bias (12). Yet despite this declaration, several contributors invoke these terms with all their sinister associations, and even the editors themselves describe "relationships of power over others based on exploration, surveillance, and insight" (2), making sight and insight sound as oppressive as ever. At the same time, the best essays and the book's many fine illustrations give a strong sense of the crucial link between word and image in Renaissance culture. Moreover, while only one essay fully addresses Shakespeare's plays, the links shown between the visual and the textual can help to illuminate Renaissance drama's power as spectacle and script.

Race, gender, and empire are key concerns in this collection, and Peter Erickson's essay and epilogue highlight their connections. He also chastises older art historians such as Roy Strong for ignoring race by assigning such figures to "a purely symbolic realm" (381). Yet when Karen Dalton, the only art historian included here, considers images of black emperors coupled with white women in English and French jewelry, she concludes that their significance is hermetic and alchemical and thus presumably symbolic. Valerie Traub, on the other hand, contends that decorative figures on maps are part of a program of imperial conquest representing national differences as an "implicitly gendered and erotic, as well as incipiently racial, phenomenon" (46). Susan Frye deals mainly with gender in Othello and Cymbeline, arguing that both plays deprive their heroines of control over their textiles, a traditional medium for female creativity (233). Steven Mullaney shows how "the colonial imaginary" (16) could encompass other, more vulnerable perspectives when Europeans in the Netherlands found themselves colonized by Spanish overlords.

Harry Berger's essay is the most provocative, for it is, in some ways, not only "anti-ocular" but also anti-art. In an absorbing rumination on art as a supplement and prosthetic, and drawing on Petrarch, Freud, Derrida, and cyborg narratives, Berger suggests that "art adds deficiencies to life and thus diminishes nature" (106). Art's morbid and cruel underside, clear enough in the illustrations reproduced from Andreas Vesalius's anatomical treatise (121-24), is also discernible in Giorgio Vasari's Lives. Despite the title page's image of art as a rebirth and resurrection (134-35), Berger still finds something "obscene" in Vasari's enthusiasm for contemporary archaeological excavations (129). Berger's denunciation of "the fetishism of the male gaze" (132) repeats the familiar shibboleths renounced in the introduction, yet he makes a convincing case for art's ghastly as well as lifelike qualities.

Stephen Orgel is less squeamish about Renaissance efforts to revive the past, although the title of his essay, "Idols of the Gallery," suggests skepticism about their success. Henry Peacham and his contemporaries prized the Greek statues in the earl of Arundel's gallery because "they bring the past to life" and provide observers with "the pleasure of seeing and conversing with these old heroes" (255-59). Words are just as important as images in sustaining these encounters, and Orgel notes that Selden's Marmora Arundelliana focuses on Greek and Latin inscriptions. Clark Hulse shows us how words and images help us to "re-member" (163) Thomas Cromwell, disgraced chancellor to Henry VIII. A cryptic poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt includes an enigmatic image, and the portrait by Hans Holbein once included an eulogistic inscription. Despite his belief that both artists subtly betray their former patron, Hulse concedes that Holbein's mysterious painting resists legibility as its sitter "appears to hold himself apart from the...