Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian by Lorne Campbell, et al. (review)

REVIEWS 272 the secular understandings of Christ’s heroism) to the possibility that Arthurian heroism was created for the sake of heroism, not for any particular results. The non-Arthurian romances of England, however—such as the Lai d’Haveloc—do articulate, albeit obliquely, the definition of a hero that is bound up with the concept of England, post-Conquest. Corinne Saunders, in the volume’s final essay, concentrates on crossing a boundary imposed on medieval romances by our contemporary medical practices : the separation of the mind from the body, and the body from the literature that describes the soul that inhabits it. To bridge this gap, Saunders surveys medical moments (from madness to leprosy to wounds inflicted by elves) in medieval romances, while also providing the historical context that makes clear the necessity for such medically-inflected readings of medieval romances. Saunders’s rereading of the bodies of the heroes and heroines of medieval romances acts as a perfect synecdochal cap to Boundaries in Medieval Romance . The project of this volume is to cross boundaries, to evaluate them, to establish and deconstruct designations, definitions, and distinctions: to reread a vast corpus of insular romances with a fresh perspective. Taken separately, each essay succeeds. Taken together, this volume contains, with few exceptions , a thematic cohesion rarely found in collections of essays. Sadly, it lacks a comprehensive bibliography; happily, it has a useful index. KATHERINE MCLOONE, Comparative Literature, UCLA Lorne Campbell, Luke Syson, Miguel Falomir, and Jennifer Fletcher, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian (London: National Gallery Company 2008) 304 pp., 190 color ill. This beautifully illustrated catalogue was created to accompany the exhibition, “Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian” at the National Gallery of Art in London from 15 October 2008–18 January 2009. The catalogue, like the exhibition, explores the art of portraiture in Renaissance Europe, tracing the development of the genre in a variety of media throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries . Significantly, the exhibition not only included well-known works from great Renaissance masters (as the title “Van Eyck to Titan” would suggest), but also incorporated important works by lesser-known artists, rounding out the viewers’ experience of the world of Renaissance portraiture. The catalogue of works is augmented by four introductory essays written by leading scholars in the field of Renaissance portraiture. Together, the catalogue and collected essays provide a valuable, though understandably not comprehensive, introduction to the complicated and provocative genre of Early Modern portraiture. Luke Syson’s essay, “Witnessing Faces, Remembering Souls,” which opens the text, is a succinct introduction to the theoretical and aesthetic value of Renaissance portraits within their historical contexts. Syson explores the rise of recognizable portraits of men and women in the artistic production of fifteenthand sixteenth-century Europe in light of Renaissance intellectual interests and European cultural exchange. His discussion highlights the wide range of media and sites for Renaissance portraiture, contextualizing this “new” interest in depicting Renaissance individuals in terms of the western “cult of personality” (14) Renaissance portraits were visually commemorative, in that they were intended to record the likeness of a particular man or woman, but also had to be REVIEWS 273 tempered with aesthetic decorum—a successful Renaissance portrait communicated both the sitter’s inner (moral) and outer (physical) self; it was the portraitists ’ role to negotiate this divide. Like the exhibition, Syson’s essay traces the links between portrait types developed in northern and southern Europe, “examining how these style melted and migrated” (14). He acknowledges both the Antique precedent for Renaissance portraiture and ties the genre’s development into Christian interests on the nature and destiny of the soul. He includes brief but provocative discussions of major themes pertinent to Renaissance portraiture including a discussion of the Holy Face, the role of physiognomy , the need for and practice of idealization, the inclusion of visual attributes and the potential for portraits to act as personal expressions of faith. Overall, Syson provides a convincing argument (accessible to novices and Renaissance scholars alike) for valuing portraits among the greatest of Renaissance arts and practitioners of the genre as highly skilled negotiators between patrons’ needs and visual reality. Lorne Campbell’s essay, “The Making of Portraits,” provides...