The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art by Luba Freedman (review)

REVIEWS 219 readers, then, we are not only negotiating literary character, but we are also renewing our knowledge of that period’s social bonds (or, rather, the dissolution of those bonds) and its views on sexuality and economic exchange. In chapter 4 (“Architectonic Person and the Grounds of the Polity in The Faerie Queene”), Fowler links the constitutional philosophy of Thomas Smith and the poetry of Spenser to argue that during the English crown’s attempts to solidify control in sixteenth-century Ireland there was a strong struggle for the people there to discover the nature of their social persons, roles, and bonds. The political, cultural, historical, and economic events of that period were changing so much that “the mutability of person and polity are a subject of jurisprudential and ethical importance both for sixteenth-century Europe and for us” (21). An analysis of a literary character (a personification allegory) such as Mutability can reveal how social persons have power to establish what Fowler calls the “nature of place,” and also how the nature of the polity can exert power upon the nature of the forms of social person. This analysis can also help us, as readers , to more fully examine the myriad changes that were taking place during this time and in this place. By the end of the book, I was firmly impressed by the strength of Fowler’s method. Her analysis often leads her from literary criticism to philosophy, theology , economics, history, and law; she says that her license to do this stems from her “interest in following questions when they lead out of their usual sphere of business” (23). By doing so, however, she has followed the lead of the authors whose work she has examined. Chaucer, Langland, Skelton, and Spenser were all certainly concerned not only with literary character, but also with the social concerns of their periods. Using Fowler’s method offers us a new, refreshing way to go about discovering for ourselves what those concerns were, how they were changing, and how these authors utilized the tools of poetry to create literary characters built upon them. LIAM FELSEN, English, Indiana University Southeast Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) xv + 301 pp., ill. With the title of this book, the author hopes to bring to the reader’s mind Jean Seznec’s classic text The Survival of the Pagan Gods. Seznec established that the image of each of the twelve Olympian deities did not die with the advent of Christianity, but survived the Middle Ages to find its way into Renaissance art. Freedman, boldly rethinking Seznec’s claim, contends that in the Cinquecento “only one category of [Olympian] images was actually revived in Renaissance art: namely the autonomous representation” (8). This mode of depiction refers to the artistic moment in which “the figure or object is seen as if either actually alone or seemingly detached from all the other figures” (20). These autonomous images were also created all’antica—in the antique style—which indicates that artists attempted for the first time to conceive of the Olympian gods as the ancients might have. To support her claim, the author presents ancient Roman artistic and literary sources for Renaissance depictions of the gods and examines the way in which Renaissance artists developed their own works in emulation of the antique prototypes. Freedman argues that in the Cinquecento, contemporary images of the Olympian deities were seen by viewers as either REVIEWS 220 pagan and immoral or powerless but aesthetically pleasing. In order to avoid the negative connotations of the former interpretation, Freedman suggests that artists intentionally de-sacralized the pagan figures by giving them non-classical attributes which humanized them and rendered them morally defenseless in the Christian world. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 offers introductory information, defining at length terms like “Olympian deities” and “autonomous representation .” Freedman also considers the artists and patrons who shaped the images, indicating that for the princely patron who typically commissioned such a work, the figure of an Olympian god linked him genealogically to the greatness of Rome and emphasized his education and status. Part 2...