Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (review)

The illustration of biblical narrative plays an important, and sometimes paradoxical, role in art of the later Middle Ages. Although certain subjects had a long history of conventionalized treatments, narrative seems to have offered artists greater freedom of invention than images of a more iconic nature, such as those seen in the primary panels of altarpieces. Jules Lubbock attempts to cover a range of issues involving Christian narrative as seen in certain Italian paintings and relief sculptures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Best known as a historian of modern architecture and design, Lubbock offers original insights into some of these works. His insistence that artists were literate is welcome, and Lubbock gives them due credit as thoughtful interpreters of texts, not just routine illustrators of stories. Other opinions and preoccupations in this book, however, are less convincing, and even confounding.

The best chapters deal with the contrasting approaches of Duccio and Giovanni Pisano. Lubbock offers a sensitive interpretation of Duccio's narration of the Trial of Christ from the Maestà altarpiece, differentiating the settings, proportions, poses, and groupings from scene to scene in the unusually extended sequence, and drawing on a close reading of biblical and post-biblical texts. Equally strong is his analysis of the Pistoia and Pisa pulpits of Giovanni Pisano. Lubbock supports the conventional interpretation of Giovanni as a powerful dramatic artist, and he is persuasive in arguing that Giovanni's enormous pulpit in Pisa Cathedral, often seen as a less successful work, has been misread due to photographs taken from in front of the relief panels. Lubbock illustrates that Giovanni geared his narrative effects to both a low viewpoint and a three-dimensional experience of the curved reliefs. For example, when seen from straight on the Passion relief looks incoherent and confused, while when observed successively and below, as by a spectator walking around the pulpit, the scenes appear more discrete and vivid. Lubbock proposes that the viewer thus approaches the narrative on a more profound emotional level, conforming to the practices of what Lubbock calls "Devout Meditation" — what most historians would characterize as affective devotion.

So far, so good. Lubbock begins to stumble, however, when he attempts to transfer his judgments about the reading of relief sculpture to the flatter medium of fresco painting. While it is plausible to see narrative frescoes painted in the long, narrow family chapels typical of Italian churches as perhaps addressing both the viewer within the chapel, directly in front of the work, as well as the spectator restricted to the entrance of the chapel, Lubbock often insists that a slanted view of the walls, from the chapel's entrance, was the decisive one. In some cases, Lubbock ignores visual signs that the artists used to indicate a theoretical viewpoint for their frescoes: in the Arena Chapel, Giotto manipulated the architectural settings of the scenes in each sequence, especially those on the lower registers on the walls, to put the viewer's position in the center of the chapel. Lubbock suggests, however, that the Mocking of Christ and the Massacre of the Innocents — episodes immediately to the viewer's right when one enters the main door of the chapel — need to be seen diagonally from the lower right, although to this reader the oblique views he illustrates add little to the dramatic impact.

Even more puzzling are Lubbock's judgments about early Quattrocento art. It is appropriate, as Lubbock suggests, that one must address the use of perspective to fully assess narrative effects in the period. He is at pains, however, to explode what he calls the "myth of Brunelleschi's role" (177) in the evolution of linear perspective; he offers a long digression that attempts to remove Brunelleschi entirely from this development, instead giving sole credit to Alberti. There is no doubt that Alberti was important in defining and articulating the rules of perspective, but to argue against any influence of Brunelleschi seems bizarre...