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112 Reviews Aston, Margaret, ed. The Panorama of the Renaissance, London, Thames and Hudson, 1996; cloth; pp. 368; over 1,000 illustrations, most in colour; R.R.P. AUS$59.95. When CD-ROMs began to appear at the start of this decade, there was concer that the market for printed books would collapse, or at least be seriously affected. That has not yet happened. The physical manufacture of CD-ROMs is now much cheaper than the production of an equivalent quantity of text or images in print form, but the cost of assembling and integrating the content and designing the interface and look of a C D - R O M remains comparatively high; multimedia designers enjoy an advantage in job opportunity and salary over, say, academic authors. Nonetheless in the short time that electronic media have existed, they have had an effect on print. Books have begun to look like CD-ROMs. The new Thames and Hudson Panorama ofthe Renaissance is one of a number of recent art books with many of the characteristics of a multimedia project, though the Australian representatives report that it has not been released in CD-ROM form, nor is such a release contemplated. Most notably, it is image rich and text poor, a balance which fits it for the skittish minds of today's young people, w h o are characterised by multimedia designers as adept with channel changers and computer games but indifferent readers. Panorama is divided, within eight chapters, into a hundred sub-themes such as Government, Venus, and The Theatre. Each is accorded a double-page spread, the latest print cliche which has worked its way into academic publishing from magazine and advertising layout, consisting of 150-odd words and between five and eleven (or more) illustrations squeezed in with little margin. In multimedia terms, this is as much text as can fit on a screen without scrolling, and a selection of images which would be present as clickable thumbnails. The function of hotlinks is performed by colourcoded cross-references, placed at the foot of the page, which refer to other spreads. Apart from the chapters, there is an 18-page introductory essay by the editor, and a reference section including a series of potted biographies, a five-category timeline, a few maps, a glossary, and thematic bibliographies. The strong advertising pitch made on the dustjacket can be discounted. The blurb claims that previous assessments of the Renaissance seem oversimplified . This is used to justify the 'lucid, innovatory system of crossreferences ' which is used instead of other people's 'watertight divisions'. It also claims to direct attention away from art history and towards subjectmatter . The danger of such a piecemeal or thematic approach is that it loses the big picture and the grand sweep of events, for the particular series of thematic interconnections which have been identified and highlighted by the editor. To take one example, nothing before p. 31 makes it clear to the reader when the Renaissance took placeā€”or when the events designated as the Renaissance were reputed to have taken place. Throughout, the thematic Reviews 113 approach casts the Renaissance as a monolithic bloc instead of showing it as a period of flux. Where five images of the baptism of Christ are arranged together it is to highlight the subject matter, rather than to point out the stylistic and technical differences as art history would do. The authorial voice is not so much absent as transposed from the text to the structure. Despite the publisher's claim that this is a 'completely new and thoughtprovoking exploration', the novelty lies in the arrangement of material rather than the content. Readers will be aware of various illustrated surveys of the Renaissance, from John Hale's Time-Life Renaissance (1965), recent editions of Burckhardt, and Toman's The Art of the Italian Renaissance (Konemann, 1995) to Jardine's Wordly Goods (Doubleday, 1996) and Hale's Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (HarperCollins, 1993). For comprehensiveness rather than personal interpretation, Hale's Encyclopaedia ofthe Italian Renaissance, also with Thames and Hudson (1981) remains an intelligent, usable and text rich resource. For quality and exhaustiveness of fine-art illustration, it is...

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