Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of a Renaissance Culture by Leonard Barkan (review)

Reviews Leonard Barkan. Unearthing the Past:Archaeology andAesthetics in the Making ofa Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 428p. Eugene R. Cunnar New Mexico State University Leonard Barkan has written a bold, daring, and exciting book. His study of the rediscovery ofancient sculpture in Rome during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brings together archaeology, aesthetics, and dieory to illuminate what he calls the "energy gap—the sparkingdistance—that exists between an artistic source and its destination." Barkan's purpose is not just to recover the past, but to interrogate the past as that past helped produce a multivalent Renaissance culture. Particularly compelling is Barkan's argument that in recovering ancient sculpture the Renaissance discovered the origins ofits own society. In five chapters, Barkan explores various facets of those excavations and recoveries as they shaped a very different cultural grounding from our own. In chapter one, Barkan recounts Francesco da Sangallo's account ofthe recovery and identication ofthe Laocoon in 1506 in order to establish his historical and theoretical strategies. By deconstructing the role of classical ekphrasis, he opens up the reception of these recovered works to new insights, showing both the delight and the tensions these rediscoveries held for the artists ofthe period. Chapter two provides an authoritative and original reexamination of Pliny's texts on art by contextualizing them in terms oftheir own setting and in terms ofthe Renaissance reception and appropriation of them by Vasari, Petrarch, Alberti, Ghiberti, Landino, and others. The rediscovery of ancient sculpture filtered through the interpretive eye ofPliny helped establish a new aesthetics and configure a new relationship between the ancients and the moderns. Barkan, in chapter three, explores the significance and consequences of the damaged and fragmentary state of most of the recovered antiquities. Numerous artists speculated about and sketched ways to complete statues, especially the Laocoön with its missing arm. Indeed, the fragmentary nature of the recovered works helped establish a new creative and historical relationship to the past. Barkan's examination ofthe many sketchbooks supports three central propositions in this chapter, namely that the Renaissance perceived beauty in ruins, fragmentaryworks like the Torso Belvederewere not restored because theywere considered beautiful as is, and that Michelangelo's practice of not finishing works or even defacing works was a deliberate part ofhis aesthetic. In chapter four, Barkan traces the Renaissance reconstruction ofthe fragmentary through imaginative discourses. Focusing mainly on two works, the Pasquino FALL 2001 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW -I- 89 and the Bed ofPolyclitus, Barkan discusses how these fragmentary works stimulated the beholder's imagination, producing endless poetic variations on a theme. In the case ofthe latter, Barkan imaginatively teases out all the erotic potential in a work that is not known to have been based on any classical narrative. The last chapter focuses on the unusual case ofBaccio Bandinelli, a man who rivalled Michelangelo and who was subjected to withering criticism by Michelangelo, Vasari, and Cellini. Barkan examines Bandinell's life and career in terms of the humanist concept of imitatio, especially in the drawings. According to Barkan, Bandinelli's career is shaped by the power of the rediscovered antiquities that he fully assimilated to create numerous variations on classical themes. Unlike otherartists, Bandinelli was in the habit ofplacing models in classical poses and then drawing them instead ofdrawing the originals. The mediating rhetoric ofBandinelli's draughtsmanship served as advertisements to patrons in the competitive world he worked in. Barkan's study bridges two worlds, that ofthe traditional art history and that of the new dieotetical art history. By moving in and out of these two modes, Barkan opens up a traditional topic to fresh cultural insights that reveal just how vital recovery of the past was for rhe presence in rhe Renaissance. Renaissance scholars will want to study this book. % Raphael Falco. CharismaticAuthority in EarlyModern English Tragedy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 243p. Kirk G. Rasmussen Utah Valley Statr College In CharismaticAuthority in Early Modern English Tragedy, Raphael Falco reminds us that tragedy "tends to record the failure of many kinds of human enterprise" (1), not merely the failure of the protagonist. He asks us to consider the dissolution of the charismatic group as a major...