Materials Received

72 Reviews Kemp retraces some of the ground covered in his previous book, The Science of Art (1990) (e.g. perspective), but here he is concerned more with setting these texts within their own time. Thus he points to the heterogeneous nature of the texts and notes that there was no real, classifiable “art theory” as we conceive of it today (although it does have its origin in the Renaissance) and that these texts were not widely read (although some were copied). Kemp’s exposé rather deflates many modern interpretations of the intellectual nature of art in the Renaissance. As he asserts, his functional approach precludes making overarching pronouncements about art, such as linking the new modes of representation to a new way of seeing. Instead, Kemp remains within the everyday world where Renaissance artisans made (or tried to make) a living. We often take for granted the issue of value applied to “art” (Chapter 4). But in the Renaissance there was little uniformity in pricing: art works that today would be priceless masterpieces could be valued as less than an ornate bed. Only antiquities were consistently of high value. Similarly, artists’ wages varied , with only a few “super-artists” (such as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian) earning a considerable income. The average artist’s yearly wages, it seems, were about one-third that of a lawyer(!). This period also initiated an important shift whereby the value or price set for an artifact was based less on the materials required and the time spent making it and more on the skill of the maker and the aesthetic quality of the piece—another step toward our modern view. The content of such works (e.g. iconography ) poses problems, because Kemp—keeping close to the original sources—is thus sensitive to reading too much into the past, particularly from modern viewpoints such as feminism and psychoanalysis. Hence, in Chapter 5 he underscores the limitations of what we can know about the original meaning of, say, Botticelli’s Primavera. The most significant insight for me in this chapter was Kemp’s argument that for many works there probably was no fixed, preconceived single meaning; instead , such meaning evolved as an interaction between form and content while the work progressed. Hence, neither is there a documented “program” for Renaissance works nor are we always able to reconstruct unequivocally their original meanings. This chapter dovetails nicely with another important essay by Gombrich on the interaction between form and expression, “Four Theories of Artistic Expression” (first published in 1980 in Architectural Association Quarterly, Volume 12, and reprinted in 1996 in Gombrich on Art and Psychology, edited by Richard Woodfield). As implied in Chapters 3 and 4, there occurred in the Renaissance a shift toward the modern concepts of “art” and “artists,” the topic of Chapter 6. But even here, Kemp—always keeping an eye on the sources—puts a break on how much post-Romantic baggage we may legitimately read back into this period . At most, he concedes that some features of the modern viewpoint may be seen as having their genesis in the Renaissance but that they were certainly not articulated as full-blown categories of “art.” The last chapter (which could have come first; indeed, the reader need not read this book in the given order) puts Kemp’s approach into an historical context, although not a comprehensive one. To be specific: it is more of an autobiographical essay, in which Kemp reviews his intellectual development in art history after his early “inglorious” effort at science (biology, to be exact) as a student at Cambridge in the 1960s. Interestingly, he speculates that his previous training in biology may influence his “functional approach.” His range of study reads as an outline of the historiography of twentieth-century art history , beginning with the early focus on formal analyses (growing out of the “significant form” of Clive Bell and Roger Fry) through the iconographical approach (from the “symbolic form” of Ernst Cassirer) to various types of “social history”—the last (from the Marxist to the modern and postmodern varieties ) entailing semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis and so forth. Kemp is less than enthusiastic about recent “theories ,” although he recognizes that...