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  • The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts ed. by Joost Keizer and Todd M. Richardson
  • Marcus K. Harmes
Keizer, Joost and Todd M. Richardson , eds, The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts (Intersections, 19), Leiden, Brill, 2011; hardback; pp. 404; R.R.P. €109.00, US$149.00; ISBN 9789004212046.

This edited collection is a recent contribution to Brill's series 'Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture'. As expected, therefore, this is an interdisciplinary collection, in terms of not only examining works and topics from a variety of European cultural contexts but also examining various literary, visual, and historical discourses.

The binding theme is the emergence of vernacular forms of cultural expression. The texts and traditions examined by the authors are all set within a common European intellectual framework where Latin was the lingua franca and the standard means of intercultural and international intellectual, legal, and religious exchange. As such, the collection moves back from this supra-national intellectual dominance of Latin to look at a variety of local vernacular expressions from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Local should not be taken to mean obscure: some of the most significant names in late medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art and letters are represented and examined, including Hans Memling, Donatello, Frans Hals, Dante, and Serlio, the architectural theorist. They are, however, evaluated as carrying local significance and as inscribed within local rather than international frames of reference. In particular, editors Joost Keizer and Todd M. Richardson suggest the limitations to contemporary theoretical ideals that art carried universal understanding. Beginning with Leonardo da Vinci's expressed ideal that painting needed no interpretation and carried universal meaning, the editors propose an alternative reading that binds the meaning and style of the visual and plastic arts as well as architecture and letters to historically and geographically distinct areas.

Although the essays span the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the collection makes important contributions to understandings of the Renaissance and the intersection of a supposed rebirth of the classics with vernacular idioms, forms, and priorities. The collection builds on recent re-evaluations of Italian Renaissance art in particular, including works by Elizabeth Cropper. In earlier works, Cropper proposed a realignment of understandings of Renaissance art as grounded in 'life, corporeality, and vividness'; in other words bringing the Renaissance down to earth (p. 6). Doing so suggests that what have often been evaluated as works that revived the classical past could instead be thought of as in dialogue with the past, doing so in ways salient to a particular time and place. Alongside works by Martini, Leonardo, and Raphael that are read this way, the collection also invokes Petrarch and Dante as vernacular writers. [End Page 208]

The collection surveys not only literature and art that are expressions of the vernacular, but also surveys medieval and Renaissance debates on the value of the vernacular. The efforts to make vernacular languages adhere to rules and styles is one outcome that is assessed, as is the irony that non-classical languages were subjected to treatment as though they were classical languages with rules of style following the principles of Cicero or Quintilian.

Engaging with the vernacular brings with it questions about the arts of the period, such as those relating to the intersection of high art and low art, and folk art versus the polite (p. 99). The essays draw diverse conclusions about the distinctions between these categories or even the validity of making them. Lex Hermans suggests that making these distinctions is not necessarily a methodologically valuable approach, although in studying Dutch landscape art Alexandra Onuf insists on this particular vernacular form as being a locally distinct counterpoint to the universalising tendency of classical art (p. 232). Vernacular art forms were capable of carrying multiple meanings and the acceptance of the vernacular by different levels of society is also addressed, an approach that again permits evaluation of the links between high and low and even the artificiality of such distinctions. For example, David A. Levine's chapter on Frans Hals, the celebrated Haarlem portraitist, discusses at length the artist's distinctive brushwork that removes him from the naturalistic tendency of...

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