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  • Creating the "Divine" Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo
  • Robert W. Gaston
Patricia A. Emison . Creating the "Divine" Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo. Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions: Medieval and Early Modern Peoples 19. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004. xiv + 388 pp. + 71 b/w pls. index. append. illus. bibl. $133. ISBN: 90–04–13709–2.

Art historians have gradually come to face the challenge posed by the emergence of artistic fame in the Italian Renaissance, and by its persistence into our own era through the medium of texts, those of early modern artists and critics, and those of the art historians of modernity. Confronting these issues means above all addressing the fame of Michelangelo, an artist whose powerful art suggested licence beyond control, but whom Vasari located at the pinnacle of "modern" art.

Patricia Emison's book offers a searching, reflective approach to these questions. She describes her task as follows: "My aim is not to reconstruct the vast historiography of the Renaissance, nor even of that particular slice of Renaissance art that adheres in issues of artist's fame, but instead, to investigate, on the one hand, the early modern application of words of praise to artists and works, and, on the other inextricable but subordinate hand, our own practices of applying verbal labels to and descriptions of artists and works. From this peeling away of some of the veneer of objectivity in the analysis of that famous art which was in its own time, and so long afterward, so passionately espoused, we may discover an enhanced sympathy toward that fervor and its history. We will understand that maniera moderna better when we can give up the effort of actively distancing ourselves from Vasari-inspired habits of praise, not because we have reassumed them, or Symonds' tropes either, but because we no longer feel implicated in them. We need now our own historical and cognitive distance from the Renaissance, so that it becomes a 'past . . . looked upon, for the first time, as a totality cut off from the present'" (17).

Panofsky, referring here to the classical past, is pointedly quoted because the book is a sustained critique of the humanistic theory of art. Emison traverses familiar ground in addressing "the precedent of antiquity," especially that of Pliny, in generating "the Renaisssance cult of the artist," in explicating the polarities of ars and ingenium, of rule and licence, the relative or complementary values of skills and materials, and how these rhetorical categories were transformed into a new discourse about the potential fame of the artist aspiring to inventio in the Albertian historia (29–35). In weaving this backcloth, however, Emison wishes to set against it a fresh account of the emergence in the Cinquecento of the evaluative term divino, and its reluctant recipient, Michelangelo. Here the terms grazia and sprezzatura and their relations with fluid notions of decorum are sensitively explored. But rather than being viewed as rhetorical echoes of classical art criticism they are taken as clues to a paradigm shift that positioned anew the creative potential of the visual artist within an unstable hierarchy of the arts.

Emison offers an illuminating analysis of attitudes to the fame and skills of artists and poets within both the humanist evaluations of the Quattrocento and the volgare publications of the poligrafi in the Cinquecento. These complex [End Page 197] interrelations in early modernity are explored with admirable attention to cultural setting, intertextuality, and historiography. Emison takes issue with prominent scholars in reestablishing what she calls the "lost topography of reputation" (347–48). She has written a probing, lively book that seeks to explain the misperceived modernity of Cinquecento art, and that comprehends in a profound sense why Renaissance texts pertaining to art are "hard to interpret," and hard to connect "to that which was made" (374). This is surely one of the most stimulating books on Renaissance art history written in recent years (but which deserved better copyediting: typographical errors intrude). Emison's analysis could have benefited, perhaps, by engaging with Leonard Barkan's Unearthing the Past (1999), which, while using diverse methodology and focusing on the reception of the classical, wrestles with similar interactions of historical perspective...

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