Making Renaissance Art (review)

Making Renaissance Art is the first of three texts (with the forthcoming Locating Renaissance Art and Viewing Renaissance Art), developed for the Open University course "Renaissance Art Reconsidered." The series provides a thematic, process-oriented alternative to traditional textbooks based in regional style and individual oeuvre. The authors aim expressly to question both the "traditional bias towards Italian centers of production," and "the exclusive focus on the 'fine arts' of painting, sculpture and architecture" (11). The trade-off for covering more geographical and visual territory is a time frame narrowed to a century commencing ca. 1420. Making Renaissance Art is at once a freestanding book and a component of a larger whole. This review treats this volume's success on its own: when all have appeared, they will merit ensemble consideration.

Making Renaissance Art is comprised of seven richly illustrated chapters: one each on the media of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; one treating the altarpiece as an object with a distinctive set of functions and requirements; and a last that considers the relationship of Renaissance theoretical texts to actual workshop practice. Each is individually authored, allowing for one of the book's most welcome features: rather than the editorially homogenized, objective voice of so many texts, this one offers essays that present themselves as arguments. Carol Richardson, for instance, in her "Constructing Space in Renaissance Painting," makes the case that single-point perspective has been "overprivileged" in most accounts of the period, while Tim Benton argues in "Architecture: Theory and Practice" that medieval architectural principles inhered in the work of even the most progressive Renaissance architects. Kim Woods posits "truth to nature" as the period's unifying artistic tenet in her "The Illusion of Life in Fifteenth-Century Sculpture."

Catherine King's opening discussion of drawing not only offers examples of many styles and media but also illuminates workshop practice in general, providing essential background for succeeding essays. She selects examples evenly from North and South, and chronicles the transformation of drawing from working document to independent work of art. Charles Harrison offers a concise history of prints, covering woodcut and engraving technique, the printing business, and the circulation of images among artists and consumers. Both King and Harrison usefully question the notion of authorship without resort to intimidating theoretical language. Benton is particularly effective in using case studies (of Milan's cathedral and Brunelleschi's projects) to demonstrate the occasional clash and frequent accommodation of Gothic practice with modern architectural ideas; his brief discussion of Tuscan Romanesque deftly complicates the usual textbook landscape of classical revival.

While all the essays in Making Renaissance Art provide a wealth of technical information, in some instances they may work at cross-purposes to stated goals. While arguing the overemphasis on single-point perspective, Richardson repeatedly frames her discussion of specific works in some relation to it, reinscribing Brunelleschi's system as the comparative standard. But Richardson also does something I had hoped to see more in every essay. When she addresses Masaccio's Trinity and Domenico Veneziano's St. Lucy altarpiece, she relates the specific constructions of space in each to the work's meaning, context, and function. She thereby demonstrates that an artist's choice of spatial systems could be driven by considerations beyond style. In the volume's concluding essay, King seeks to interrogate the effect of newly written theoretical treatises on artists' actual practice, yet her heavy emphasis on the texts themselves may leave the reader with an exaggerated notion of theory's importance.

My most serious reservation about Making Renaissance Art concerns its commitment to the lifelike (whether based in observation of nature or of classical sculpture) as an organizing principle for the period's art. The authors enforce this formulation by careful selection of work dated after 1500. Illustrations in-clude Dürer's studies of proportion from 1528, yet no sculpture or painting by Michelangelo, whose work by...