Painting and illumination in early Renaissance Florence 1300-1450 (review)

294 Reviews that there are potential though unimagined audiences w h o might make words spoken in innocence something gudty' (p. 223). This is too clever by half. The more obvious line of inquiry might in this instance be more pertinent: why does Chaucer mention only the violence directed against foreigners, thus concealing the rebels' grievances against their English overlords? Nevertheless, this book is that very rare thing, a study entirely evenhanded in its interdisciplinarity. It may be that m y pleasure in the linguistic and literary analysis oftextsnormally treated as historical and m y suspicion of the finding of topical allusions in texts normally treated as literary merely reveal the degree to which m y own vision is still limited by the literary blinkers I have worn so long. T. L. Burton Department of English Language and Literature University of Adelaide Kanter, Laurence B., et al, Painting and illumination in early Renaissance Florence 1300-1450, N e w York, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1994; hardcover; pp. x, 398; 296 Ulustrations, inc. 120 in colour; R R P US$108.00. Large exhibitions offer one of the last great publishing opportunities for art historians, in the form of the catalogue. The exhibition will presumably provide the focus; there is a substantial lead-time; academics and curators will already be involved in selecting and describing the works; each can select an area of specialisation; the works in the exhibition are avatiable for reproduction; and, on the day, a captive throng of thousands of well-heeled visitors will be happy to part with their money to take away a memento of the art experience. Painting and illumination in early Renaissance Florence is the 408page catalogue of an exhibition mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N e w York, in 1994. It consists of three catalogue essays, followed by detailed entries for the 110 works in the exhibition, all of which are illustrated, at least in part (some are multi-paged); most are shown in colour, with many additional black and white illustrations of these and other related works. At the end comes a seventeen-page bibliography, and an index. I initially wondered what Painting and illumination was about. It turns out not to deal with painting in Renaissance Florence and illumination in Reviews 295 Renaissance Florence, as the tide may suggest. If you recommended this to your students for some understanding of the monumental arts they would get slim pickings indeed. Instead it looks to painting and Ulumination as they interact, surveying 'the accomplishments, in various media, of five generations of manuscript painters in Florence'. In other words, the connection is things that have been done by artists who also illuminated manuscripts, and this encompasses missals, graduals, antiphonaries, a laudario, a psalter, a book of hours, a Divine comedy, loose leaves and panel paintings, with a good deal of Fra Angelico. The works are drawn from the Metropolitan and over thirty other public and private collections. Laurence Kanter points out in his contribution that most illuminators in the early Renaissance were also painters on panel or in fresco, rather than isolated monks working in one medium only. The exhibition is an attempt to reintegrate the illuminators with 'the larger visual tradition of which they formed a part'. H e also notes that there was a 'dramatic slackening of demand' for illuminated manuscripts in the third quarter of the trecento, food for thought for those who argue that the Black Death did not lead to an artistic depression. Barbara Boehm describes the types of books that were illuminated. Dividing them into liturgical and devotional manuscripts and secular texts, she oudines their forms and use. If you have wondered about terms such as missal, ordinary, proper, or laude, here are definitions, with practical details and examples. One point Boehm makes is that books, including musical scores, were necessary for the operation of monasteries and convents, and while I have long wondered why m o d e m priests insist on reading from them words they must have said a thousand times, this is still more puzzling in the putative age of the oral tradition and memory. Carl Strehlke provides a...