Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies and the Levant (review)

194 Reviews of a linear progression from orality to literacy during the medieval period. Furthermore, she rejects the perception that private reading practices of the era were more progressive and nurturing of authorial creativity than public reading practices. This is an important and interesting book which deserves scholarly attention and should change the w a y w e think about reading in the past. Susan Broomhall School of European Languages The University of Western Australia Derbes, Anne, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narr Painting, Franciscan Ideologies and the Levant, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; paper; pp. xvi, 270; 96 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$36.95. Almost a decade ago now, three major books appeared, all probing accounts of various issues to do with the image, especially in the Middle Ages: David Freedberg's The Power ofImages (1989), Michael Camille's The Gothic Idol (1989), and Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence (1994;firstpublished in German in 1990). Each of these studies had a different agenda, and each has had its critics, but a l l three are richly stimulating if diverse accounts of the way in which medieval images (or, in Freedberg's case, images in general) carried intense, complex and sometimes uncomfortable meanings. Anne Derbes's book, first published in hardcover in 1996, seems a good example of h o w recent students of medieval art-history have taken up the challenge of those earlier studies. Picturing the Passion mines a narrower vein of the same field, in a way which is attimesrather conventional, but also adventurous and even provocative (in a Camillean sense). Reviews 195 In Derbes's view, duecento painting, far from being stagnant, or merely a slavish reflection of Byzantium, w a s a vital and inventive phenomenon, informed above all by the n e w Franciscan ethos. Serious scholars of the period could hardly take issue with any of her central propositions—the growing inventiveness of Italian painting in the era preceding Duccio and Giotto, the powerful influence of Byzantine art, and the crucial impact of St Francis—but Derbes challengingly combines all three in an intricate and detailed argument, taking as her central material the scenes of Christ's Passion contained on the painted crosses and other panels made in Tuscany and Umbria in the period between c.1235 and 1300. She points out that the well-known duecento shift in the representation of the crucified Christ, from Christus Triumphans to Christus Patiens, is matched by the choice of Passion scenes, with new emphasis on episodes involving Christ's suffering, as the century evolves; and also by the treatment of individual scenes— so that, for instance, in versions of the Arrest and Betrayal by Coppo and others, one sees a 'new image of a vulnerable Christ, almost engulfed by his captors' (p.40). Further, she contends, Byzantine influence—long seen as a fundamental source of duecento monumentality and expression—must be understood in terms of the specific needs of local Italian patrons, especially the Franciscans, rather than proof of a generalised fascination with Byzantium's aura, or deference to its authority (here Derbes takes direct issue with Belting). The old-fashioned aspect of the book is due mostly to the iconographic case studies which comprise the bulk of the text. These detailed comparisons of the variations in selection and pictorial treatment of Passion episodes in individual representations from central Italy, the Byzantine world and (occasionally) elsewhere, will have a rather familiar ring to those 196 Reviews brought up on a diet of Millet, Male, and their disciples, and betray the fact that the author's original work on this material dates back to a doctoral thesis completed in 1980 (as do the sometimes overblown footnotes). There is a rather plodding quality to these analyses at times, and some conclusions are leapt to on the basis of scanty evidence, a point made in detail in a review of the book by Laura Jacobus in the April 1998 issue of the Burlington Magazine. But readers inclined to be put off by 'desultory themechasing ' (as someone once caricatured the iconographic method) should persevere with this book, which also has sharper edgeswitness for...