History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism by Judith M. Bennett (review)

REVIEWS 187 introduces many of the issues that were at play, including the rise of what Vasari later called the maniera moderna (modern manner), the development of landscape painting in secular poésie and in devotional paintings, and the increase in images of women, particularly the female nude. While Brown’s essay begins examining some of the exchanges among artists of the early sixteenth century, these connections are expanded in Peter Humfrey’s chapter on how artists interacted as masters, pupils, and rivals in Venice. Humfrey explores how northern artists, like Albecht Dürer, influenced Venetian painters like Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Palma Vecchio. Also highlighted in the essay is the importance of Giovanni Bellini’s studio in training numerous artists of the early sixteenth century, including both Giorgione and Titian. Rather than dividing the catalogue according to the three headlining artists, the exhibition organizers assembled the paintings into five separate categories: sacred images, sacred stories, allegories and mythologies, pictures of women/pictures of love, and portraits of men. The first two categories which focus on sacred, Christian imagery demonstrate how the artists of sixteenthcentury Venice revolutionized the traditional iconography established by the artists of the fifteenth century, while the three latter categories illustrate the rise in demand for these secular genres. Of particular interest are the images of women, which remain an enigma to modern scholars, as it is unclear whether these were intended to be portraits of specific women or idealized depictions of beauties. Because there seems to be little or no tradition of female portraiture in Venice, these paintings of women form an interesting counterpoint to the portraits of men, which demonstrate increasing individualization of the subject during the early sixteenth century. While the catalogue serves as a useful source of paintings from this period, some of the most interesting new information on Venetian painting methods comes in the final section on technical studies of the images. Barbara Berrie and Louisa Matthew discuss the pigments used by sixteenth-century painters and the glazing techniques employed by these artists to achieve the radiant color effects for which Venetian painting is renowned. Their essay successfully provides a detailed, scientific study of the precise materials used, while also placing the discussion in its larger social context. In its entirety, this catalogue provides the reader with a rich, detailed analysis of the Venetian artistic environment during the early sixteenth century. A bibliography is included to help guide further research on the period, but unfortunately, there is no index to this substantial text. One of the most significant and useful features of the book, however, is certainly its array of highquality color images and details, which provides the reader with a hint of the luminosity of the paintings brought together for this exhibition. LISA BOUTIN, Art History, UCLA Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2006) 224 pp. Feminism’s inattention to history threatens its very viability as a political movement. When feminism does demonstrate an interest in historical matters, it restricts itself to the previous two centuries, neglecting a long-term view that would enrich its theoretical foundations. Furthermore, the difficulties of mak- REVIEWS 188 ing space for feminist concerns in the traditionally male-oriented and maledominated field of history often leads to a watering down of those concerns, seemingly justifying feminism’s neglect, as a movement, of history. Such are the claims Judith Bennett advances in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. The book is gratifyingly bold in its feminist ardor, but the reader is ultimately left uncertain as to its implications, which manage to be both obvious and vague. Bennett, a historian at the University of Southern California, has researched and published extensively on women in late medieval England. History Matters is a plea for a sophisticated historical consciousness to play a more influential role in feminist activism, theory, and writing. It operates on several levels: as a demonstration of the value and necessity of a long view of history; as a proposal for attending to what Bennett calls “patriarchal equilibrium,” the seemingly perpetual influence of patriarchy in women’s lives across the centuries; as an analysis and...