Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion (review)

200 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) Muir, Bernard J., ed., Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2002; cloth; pp. xxviii, 338; 101 b/w illustrations; 17 colour plates; RRP £55: ISBN 0859897133. This collection is a festschrift celebrating the career and scholarship of Margaret Manion, who was the Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. It was edited by Bernard Muir, who collaborated with Professor Manion on two earlier essay collections. It draws on papers given at a conference organized by Kate Challis, Anne Nevile and Alison Inglis. Reading through the list of contributors provides us with a good indication of the regard with which she is held amongst eminent specialists in manuscript studies. It is an impressive array of both Australian and international colleagues. It is sad that only one of her former graduate students is included in the book, but this is a substantial and worthy gathering. While the emphasis is, not surprisingly, predominantly on manuscript illuminations , the range of approaches and time periods is wide, beginning with Muir’s own essay on the decoration of folio 188 in The Book of Kells to Gerard Vaughan’s essay on the eighteenth-century collector Charles Townley and his medieval links. The collection also includes a list of Margaret Manion’s publications. The volume itself looks impressive but there are several irritating features. The first is the introduction. Muir, after outlining very briefly Manion’s career, simply summarises the contents of each article. This is unnecessary, as the scholarly readership for whom these essays are clearly aimed, are probably well able to work out what each is about. It is also a missed opportunity. There are thematic linkages that could readily have been made, or an extended examination of the title’s theme would have made this something worth reading, rather than something to be skipped. An explanation for the title could have produced an interesting argument, given that not all of the contributors worked on material that made connections between text and image in any overt way. My other complaint may, in part, reflect my review copy which, instead of containing 16 colour plates, only contained eight, and these were then duplicated. This meant that key images discussed in the texts of half the essays weren’t available for consultation. In addition, Kren’s essay had not been carefully enough proofread so his numbering of images did not always coincide with the images which were included. I can only hope that this was a problem restricted to my copy, as this makes the reading of some excellent essays a frustrating experience. Reviews 201 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Fortunately the essays themselves are well worth the reading. They are arranged in roughly chronological order and, as is appropriate, most focus on manuscripts. There are some notable exceptions. Joan Barclay Lloyd writes about the river motif in Torriti’s thirteenth-century design for the apse mosaic in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. As is to be expected, her work is a model of careful analysis of both antique and contemporary visual resources, as well as a variety of written texts, drawing out connections between the motif of the River of Life and Franciscan Marian devotional writings. Louise Marshall focuses on images of Saint Sebastian in Italian Renaissance art, contrasting narrative representations with a more abbreviated single-figure devotional image, arguing that such images reflect late-medieval and Renaissance forms of piety that encouraged the beholder towards a more intimate, emotional engagement with the saint. Two of the essays in the collection focus on the Melbourne manuscript, the Wharncliffe Hours, the subject of some of Manion’s best-known work. J. J. G. Alexander draws out some interesting ideas about how to interpret an otherwise perplexing sequence of secular images. Thomas Kren places the manuscript in a group of seven, all of which were written by a single scribe, Jean Dubreuil. Kren makes some important observations about the production of late fifteenthcentury books of hours, arguing that the uniformity of design, iconography and textual content, despite the different artists involved, reflects the...