Human Emotions by Carroll E. Izard (review)

Books 69 fundamental to and pervasive in Renaissance creative thinking. The Renaissance concept of harmony in nature can be traced to classical writers such as Pythagoras and Vitruvius. Koenigsberger demonstrates the importance of this concept and of the use of analogy, in particular, in the work of Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and Nicholas of Cusa. She begins with Alberti. He proposed that the different parts of nature were related to each other by means of an analogy based on numbers. Features of the analogy, he suggested, must be extended to art if works of art are to be aesthetically satisfying. Works that are aesthetically pleasing represent by analogy divine harmony. She suggests that Alberti's revolutionary ideas on perspective are based on the assumption that painting should use perspective to harmonize the things depicted, that in architecture the parts of a structure should relate to form an harmonious whole, etc. Da Vinci, it is explained, extended the application of the concept of harmony to temporal events by viewing formal relations progressively. He studied, for example, repetition, the cyclic motion of things and rhythm. She continues by suggesting that Cusa's ideas strongly influenced the epistemological assumptions of the early Renaissance , in particular, his ideas on empirical method. He suggested that experience must precede all understanding and held original views on the relationship of human knowledge to reality, creativity and divine creation. He gave analogy an important place in scientific method-one can 'use an image and try to reach analogically what is as yet unknown'. Analogy is not only a way in which to make more comprehensible things that are known but to make known things that otherwise would remain unknown. She digresses with a brief look at the psychologyof da Vinci, comparing him with the Faustian personality, and then continues by considering Renaissance notions of harmony in music. She concludes with a review of the universality of the concept of harmony, considering whether the Vitruvian ideal that theory ought to be shared among disciplines was, in fact, adopted, that is, whether the concept of harmony was universally applied. She often provides long and somewhat tedious expositions to explain the use of the concept of harmony and the use of analogy-ideas that, granted, are often abstruse and not easily made intelligible. Her style is dry and sometimes rambling, and at times her speculations become rather unconvincing, as when she is discussing the influence of Cusa or trying to explain da Vinci's peculiar notion of 'nothingness' by analogy with the zero in arithmetic. The book is at its best when it relates ideas to their practical realization. For example, Alberti's concept of proportion in architectural design and his hypothesis of perspective are presented as a theoretical framework for ensuring that a harmony exists between the whole and the parts of a work; da Vinci's conception of a painting as an 'instant' from a continuous motion (which should imply the whole action) is seen as an extension by analogy between the whole and the parts of the motion. This book contains many interesting insights into Renaissance thinking and shows how the artists and creative thinkers of a time are influenced by the ideas and assumptions of their time. It is certainly an erudite study, though perhaps of more interest to the historian of ideas than to contemporary visual artists unless, that is, the latter should have a historicalphilosophical bent. Human Emotions. Carroll E. Izard. Plenum Press, New York, 1977. 495 pp., illus. $30.00. Reviewed by Otto KJineberg* This book, written by a psychologist at the University of Delaware, U.S.A., gives a detailed account of what is known about emotions and emotional expression in general, as well as about the principal specific emotions. He describes a number of theoretical approaches and the book also contains a "43 bis Bd. du Chateau, 92200Neuilly, France. rich survey of relevant research, both old and new, covering a large number of different disciplines: the findings not only of psychologists but also of those in the fields of physiology, biology, psychiatry, anthropology and psychoanalysis. There is a healthy emphasis on the importance of cross-cultural comparisons, and an extensive...