Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500 (review)

Devotion by Design is a practical introduction to Italian altarpieces, presenting a brief but informative look at the history and function of selected works from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries by artists such as Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Andrea Mantegna. Scott Nethersole examines altarpieces as art objects and as material objects, taking a particular interest in their physical construction. He explores aspects of their structure and design such as how they were assembled, as well as the materials and techniques used in their production. Devotion by Design includes images of altarpieces photographed from the back, so that their structure and the process of their construction can be made more visible. Nethersole also considers different forms of altarpieces like the polyptych, or altarpiece with multiple panels, and the pala, an altarpiece made of a single, unified field. He investigates their functions in their original contexts, observing how differently they appear in museum settings today than they appeared historically, above altars in churches. This book accompanies the National Gallery’s 2011 exhibition Devotion by Design, a show comprised mainly of altarpieces from the Gallery’s own collections.

Building on his survey of the structure and function of altarpieces, Nethersole proceeds to explore how these works came to be: who commissioned them, who created them, and the social function they might have served. He considers the commission for an altarpiece as a kind of social contract, emphasizing the production of an altarpiece as a collaborative effort between painters, patrons, carpenters, and others involved in their creation. Nethersole argues that altarpieces reflect not only the interests of the patron, but also his or her social position; here he considers individual patronage as well as group patronage. He discusses, for example, how the Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin and of Saint Zenobius contracted Benozzo Gozzoli’s Altarpiece of the Purification (1461–1462). Through an exploration of the confraternity’s ritual religious activities (such as their celebration of Mass and their performance of sacred plays) as well as their particular devotion to Saint Zenobius, Nethersole effectively demonstrates how Gozzoli’s altarpiece became a visual expression of the Confraternity’s corporate spirit.

Nethersole devotes a chapter of Devotion by Design to the provenance of the altarpieces, which plays a vital role in understanding how we see them today. Many Italian altarpieces were cut apart in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for sale on the art market. As a result, museums often display pieces of what were once much larger and more elaborate works. Nethersole discusses recent efforts to reconstruct dismembered altarpieces, and he offers some poignant visualizations of altarpieces as they might have looked before being cut apart. With the surviving parts of these works inserted like pieces of a puzzle into the altarpieces’ larger framework, Nethersole helps the reader imagine how these large works might have originally appeared; at the same time, the blank spaces in these images demonstrate how much of the original work has been lost. Nethersole emphasizes that this way of seeing and understanding altarpieces is often not conveyed in the way that they are exhibited today.

While Nethersole’s interest in the materiality of altarpieces is of special interest to art historians, Devotion by Design is clear and accessible to nonspecialists. In addition, his discussion of altarpieces raises many interesting and rich questions of the works he examines. While these questions might seem basic at first—for example, how do we know that a work was an altarpiece?—Nethersole explores them carefully, offering insights into the difficulty of providing definitive answers. By engaging not only the objects but their audiences (the original viewers of the altarpieces and the viewers who see them in museums today), Nethersole’s work prompts readers to reexamine their understanding of Italian altarpieces.