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  • The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe
  • Marcia B. Hall
Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams, eds. The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe. Histories of Vision 4. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. x + 234 pp. index. illus. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–0679–6.

This book offers ten essays on the interaction between the work of art and its audience. Such studies have become an important approach to early modern art in the past generation. Related to reception and reader response studies in literary scholarship in the 1960s and '70s, in art history the methodology derives from [End Page 1387] contextual studies, which took definitive shape almost a half-century ago. Both were intended to replace connoisseurship and its market-driven preoccupation with authenticity, provenance, and originality, which had dominated art historical inquiry in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Such studies proceed from the premise that meaning is not inherent in the object, but in the complex interaction between it and the viewer, and they recognize that the significance of the work in its culture was often more pragmatic than it was aesthetic. Because the essays cover subjects from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, its principal interest is as a display of the possibilities of the methodology.

The editors, who avoid the term reception, cite as pioneers in the study of the beholder's share: E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion), Michael Baxandall (Giotto and the Orators and Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy), Moshe Barasch (Theories of Art), John Shearman (Only Connect), Hans Belting (The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages and Likeness and Presence), and David Freedberg (The Power of Images). The volume opens with a study by David Summers ("The Heritage of Agatharcus: On Naturalism and Theatre in European Painting"), who, taking his cue from Gombrich's examination of devices and conventions that shape our viewing ("The Heritage of Apelles"), traces the "optic plane" from its origins in Greek theater to early Renaissance painting.

Contemporary sources can provide insight into the way a piece would have been viewed by its own culture. A rich case, in which there survive both the program and letters exchanged between patron and painter, is examined by Martina Hansmann, "Giovanni Battista Agucchi's Programme for Ludovico Carracci's Erminia among the Shepherds." Drawings, like contemporary sources, can document the viewer's experience. Raphael Rosenberg studies drawings by artists of Michelangelo's Medici Madonna as a nonverbal source to understand how artists experienced art ("Artists as Beholders: Drawings after Sculptures as a Medium and Source for the Experience of Art"). Giovanna Perini ("The Reception of Art in the Oeuvre of Sir Joshua Reynolds) combines and compares Reynolds drawings with his texts.

The expectations of specific genres comes to prominence in studies of the beholder's share, so here portraiture is studied by Robert Williams ("Bronzino's Gaze"), and still-life by Michael Baxandall ("Attention, Hand and Brush: Condillac and Chardin"). Both writers use contemporary texts to illumine the way the works were seen in their own day.

Examinations that impute complex iconography to works have been pushed aside in the study of the beholder. Hubertus Günther ("Michelangelo's Works in the Eyes of His Contemporaries") takes a skeptical view of the search for such meanings, arguing that "the general attitude that artistic quality was more important than iconographic meaning was widespread" in Michelangelo's time, and that "during the Renaissance in the eyes of many artistic merit was genuinely more important than meaning" (79).

One of these studies takes as its point of departure the expectations of the artist vis-à-vis his beholders. Thomas Frangenberg ("'As if . . .': Pietro Francesco [End Page 1388] Zanoni on Filippo Gherardi's ceiling in S. Pantaleo, Rome") examines pamphlets by painters that not only explain the iconographical meaning and promote the propaganda message of their work, but also guide the beholders' viewing and train them "in the subtle art of connoisseurship" (172). Striking to this reviewer is the absence in this volume of a study of artist's technique and working practice as one model for understanding the expectations...

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