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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.2 (2000) 278-280



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Review

Renaissance Venice and the North:
Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian

The Triumph of the Barique:
Architecture in Europe 1600-1750


Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian. Edited by Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown (Milan, Bompiani, 1999) 703 pp. $75.00

The Triumph of the Barique: Architecture in Europe 1600-1750. Edited by Henry A. Millon (Milan, Bompiani, 1999) 623 pp. $85.00

These two sumptuous catalogs, fully worthy of the dazzling exhibitions that they accompanied, at times suggest how steadily the interaction between historians and art historians has progressed in recent years, and at others how distinct the disciplines still remain. For instance, there is a fascinating discussion by Brown, an editor of the Venice volume, of the ambiguity inherent in all depictions of peasant life. Were the scenes of "feasting and dancing and the less pleasant aspects of overindulgence, . . . [of] foot races, bowling, and may-pole climbing" in early-sixteenth-century German prints patronizing, she asks, or sympathetic? (111) That the audience for the prints was an elite or literate artisan class, and not the peasants themselves, merely deepens the problem, but there is no question that such works require the skills of the historian, as well as the art historian, to interpret, and that the analyses resonate in both fields.

Even the most technical of the art-historical essays on style and pictorial influence in the Venice volume has to address these larger issues, because the theme of the exhibition was the interaction between northern Europe and Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a result, art and architecture have become, in some respects, merely the occasion for examining the way that ideas could flow across large distances even in an age of notoriously slow and difficult means of communication. In the process, the traditional assumption that the influences headed essentially from Italy to the north have become more nuanced. Thus, although it is true--as Bruno Bushart demonstrates--that Venetian architecture was a model for the new buildings in Augsburg, the Germans adapted the southern prototypes so extensively as to render them almost unrecognizable. And if Netherlandish and [End Page 278] German painters and craftsman took away more than they brought to Venice, their contribution was far from negligible, starting in the days of Jan Van Eyck and still visible, as Bert Meijer shows, in Tintoretto's workshop. Moreover, among musicians the main effect ran in the other direction. Yet even here the connection was complex; Peter Stabel suggests that it was largely because the Venetians invented the technique of printing musical scores that the leading Flemish polyphonists were enticed to the city where their impact was to be felt.

The exhibition itself was a ravishing display of the elegance and power of Renaissance and Mannerist art. The reuniting of the two halves of Vittore Carpaccio's Hunting Scene/ Two Venetian Women, now divided between Los Angeles and Venice, was alone worth the price of admission. But the larger lesson of the works in the show, emphasized by the essays and catalog entries in this volume, is the importance of a European-wide context--economic, social, intellectual, and political--in understanding the aims, the patrons, and the audiences that made the outpouring of genius possible. The setting helps us understand the art, and the art enables us to see the period with new eyes.

Much the same is true of The Triumph of the Baroque. To visit the exhibition in its original full panoply, in the Stupinigi hunting palace of the Princes of Savoy outside Turin (a gigantic sprawl ironically given the diminutive name of Palazzetto), was to risk exhaustion, not least because of the distance that had to be covered--well over a mile--to see the entire display. Moreover, the dozens of huge models of buildings and gardens that were...

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