In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews 163 on to the bones of the inarticulate masses of the past adding to the specific examples available without for the most part offering any new insights or useful methodological breakthroughs. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Starn, Randolph and Loren Partridge, Am of power: three halls of state in Italy, 1300-1600 (The new historicism: studies in cultural poetics, no. 19), Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xi, 374; 8 colour plates, 128figures;R.R.P. US$65.00. In Jacob Burckhardt's portrait of Renaissance Italy, the state became 'a work of art'. As the authors of Arts of power observe correctly, the Swiss historian shied away from the corollary of his own insight that art became a work of state. It is the complex interrelationships, exchanges, and transferences between politics and art, between power and imagination, that provides their theme. Their focus is the decoration of three halls of state in Renaissance Italy: Ambrogio Lorinzetti's frescoes, commonly known as Good and bad government, in the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena; Mantegna's frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi in the ducal palace in Mantua; and Vasari's paintings in the Sala Grande in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The last are considered in conjunction with the decorations for the state entry into Florence in 1565 of Giovanna of Austria, bride of Francesco de'Medici. The three case studies come from three different centuries and three different types of regime: the civic republics of the fourteenth century, the princely courts of the fifteenth, and what the authors define as the 'triumphalist' states of the sixteenth. The three halls of state correspond to the three ages into which Vasari first divided the revival of the arts but Starn and Partridge have no interest in working out another variant on the theme of renewal and progress. Rather than constructing a narrativeteleology,their concern is with the pictorial and political specificity of each site, the distinctive configuration of power and authority under each regime, with how different artistic styles encode distinct political messages. Four sets of premises underlie the discussion: that the halls of state of the successive regimes were an extension of politics by another means, strategic instruments of government; that art far from merely reflecting distinctive political messages, both constructs and contests ideologies; that power does not distinguish between the real and the ideal; and that the settings and forms appropriated by each type of regime depended on a particular conception of politics. The authors are concerned with the 'hows' as much as the 'whats' and 'whys', with form as much as content. The formal properties of cultural performance are also seen as representations of structures of authority. 154 Reviews Part of Starn's discussion of the Mantua frescoesfirstappeared in 1989 in The new cultural history edited by Lynn Hunt and Arts ofpower is published as a volume in the general series edited by Stephen Greenblatt The new historicism: studies in cultural poetics. Thus its provenance is explicit. Despite Starn's claim that the inquiry draws much of its energy from a 'poststructuralist' moment or mood, the authors are, to say the least, eclectic in their theoretical underpinning: semiotics, structuralism, and cultural anthropology as well as the postmodern preoccupation with surfaces. The authors draw on Mary Douglas's work on the social construction of bodies, on Michel Foucault's articulation of power, on Victor Turner's liminality, and on Erwin Goffman's theories of self presentation and encounters in every day life. Given the theoretical allegiance of the authors, it is not surprising that their analysis has its share of jargon, of discourses, texts, master narratives, structuralists' paradises, and empires of signs. Nevertheless, the authors have much to say that is accessible and enlightening. Without documentation and badly damaged, Lorizetti's Good and bad governnent frescoes in Siena have long attracted the attention of historians of politics and ideas, including Nicolai Rubinstein and Quentin Skinner. Where Starn and Partridge depart from their distinguished predecessors is in looking beyond the frescoes as programme to their form, positioning and sequence, and in regarding the images and inscriptions...

pdf

Share