Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art. - Review - book review

PATRICIA EMISON

New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1997. 209 pp., 40 b/w ills. $75

Patricia Emison's Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art is an intriguing, rather offbeat attempt to address a set of images that in some way seem to defy the qualities of technical refinement, ideality, and magnificence usually associated with the art of Renaissance Italy. Aligning herself in a general way with revisionist trends in recent scholarship, she argues for the need to get beyond the historically privileged conceptual models of Albertian theory and Vasarian historiography. In contrast to their emphasis on so-called high-style works, which "reinforce the prevailing political, social, and economic structures" (p. 4), Emison seeks to expose a subculture of "low" or "rough" (rozzo) style. Her project, she says, "is to learn how Renaissance art helped its viewers to visualize the whole world, not the ideal and magnificent parts of it alone" (p. xxx).

Several subordinate themes circulate through the text and serve to support Emison's larger argument. The first is the importance of graphic media. Prints form the bulk of the evidence she discusses, but she also claims for them an epochal collective role: "The development of print media had at least as profound an effect on the range and significance of European art as any turn toward the culture of antiquity" (pp. xxvii-xxviii). Prints encourage a less formal mode of picture making; at the same time, they can be subtle and sophisticated forms of expression. Another important aspect of the low style in the visual arts is its relation to pastoral poetry; for Emison, such poetry played a central role in encouraging "pictures without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory" (p. xxv). She sees it as influencing a shift of emphasis to "less affirmative subjects and compositional norms" (p. xxv), as well as to images less dependent on literary complexity and hence more sensual and immediate (pp. 61-62). The third ingredient in her argument is the claim that the low style is fundamentally associated in some way with women. It is not just that the works of art in question often depict women or sometimes make veiled reference to sexuality; the influence of women contributes to "a redefining of the vocabulary away from strictly heroic norms" (p. xvii); it works "against the hegemony of the heroic ideal" (p. 152) and ultimately against "the idea of art as an expression of authority" (p. xxvi).

The most compelling parts of the book are the discussions of particular images, which, at their best, are probing, nuanced, and insightful--even when they are not entirely persuasive. Giorgione's Tempesta is "a painting about love, without being about the inspiring qualities of love" (p. 66). The woman is "desirable, yet neither particularly pure nor good, no paragon of beauty or grace" (p.70). Emison's sensitivity to the subtlety of the picture's expressive coding is shown in her characterization of the two figures, in which, she says, Giorgione "used nudity to exclude the parallel with Madonna and Child and used clothing to avoid mythological reference" (p. 71). "The color, the reference to the threat of storm, the present inactivity of the figures, all imply that this is a picture of what cannot be done in the high style: love apart from its heroic narrative examples, a meditation upon love itself, rather than its protagonists" (p. 69). It registers a historical shift of attitude toward love "as a matter of stormy emotions, even of the ignoble body, rather than of the soul" (p.75).

A chiaroscuro woodcut by Antonio Tempesta, after a design by Parmigianino, showing a nude man in a landscape (pp. 77-80) is also linked to pastoral tradition. The figure is not simply a nude study, for Emison insists its nudity is "natural rather than classically poised"; the landscape is not a later addition to the design but essential; the bust of a woman, oddly placed in a lower corner, is not an afterthought but a symbol of artifice. As a result, the print is "a meditation on the irreconcilability of nature and art, personified by man and woman." An example of the way in which a pastoral sensibility extends to the treatment of other subjects is illustrated by another work of Parmigianino's, an etching of the Lamentation (pp. 42-47). It "shows us less a dead hero than a woman towering over a limp and passive man," and thus evokes the "imagery of female supremacy, so common in love poetry." The style, too, with its "flimsy line," is distinctly gendered: the image as a whole has "a passive, delicate, and qu ite feminine humanity."

An anonymous engraving of a female sausage seller surrounded by morris dancers is persuasively placed by Emison in a Florentine context and its principal figure identified as a character from local folklore, Madonna Berta (pp. 112-20). A close analysis of the costumes, as well as of related images and texts, enables her to specify the print's meaning: "The men are satirized for social pretentiousness, the woman for being typically female. Women's lust for finery, men's lust for women follow as do the apple and the Fall." Giulio Campagnola's engraving of a stag chained to a tree (pp. 127-39) "is less heraldic and more humorous than it initially seems." Though it is a variation on the image of the chained doe as a symbol of female fidelity and submissiveness, the gender switch alters the meaning fundamentally: "the static pose that had signified loyalty in the woman cannot be taken so benignly for the man. Obedience to the beloved is not being held up here as exemplary but as potentially objectionable. Otherwi se we might expect the shade to be more ample, the laurel tree less flimsy, even the testicles of the animal more discreetly tucked out of sight."

Emison's discussion of pastoral poetry in general is learned and interesting, even if, again, not always convincing. She relates the emergence of pastoral to changing ideas about wealth in the 15th and 16th centuries--a shift, as she sees it, away from magnificence and toward "liberality," from conspicuous display toward moderation and reserve, even toward a certain respect for poverty. Support for this view is gathered from humanist writers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Giovanni Pontano, as well as from an unusual account of the life of Cosimo the Elder de' Medici (pp. 10-13). Work in the low style generally reveals an "ambivalence about wealth" (p. xxx), but "pastoral was a place where it was particularly disesteemed" (p. 41). Emison even describes the shift in attitudes toward wealth as a shift "toward the pastoral norm" (p. 58). The idea of such a simple, linear shift is surely inadequate to account for the complexity of Renaissance attitudes toward wealth; there was plenty of moderation and respect for poverty early on and plenty of extravagance later. The idea that pastoral is a singularly sensitive register of those attitudes is also improbable: Why was pastoral poetry and drama so popular at the feudal court of Ferrara but neglected in mercantile Florence?

Another aspect of pastoral poetry and imagery is its plaintive quality: it exposes the "self-doubt" and "self-criticism" of an age usually perceived as confident (pp. xiv-xv). It becomes a means for the expression of" disappointment, despair, and disillusion" (p. 23). In its suggestion that suffering has no redeeming quality, it runs counter to Christian teaching (p. 88). Emison even goes so far as to claim that the "darkening of the palette" in High Renaissance painting is owed in part to the darkening mood of pastoral poetry (ibid.). Since the negative emotions expressed in pastoral are largely connected with the dynamics of sexual desire, it is through pastoral that the influence of women is particularly evident. Emison detects a shift of interest from themes of heroism to themes of love, paralleled by a shift from istoria to poesia (p. 13) and from narrative interest to the nude (p. 26 n. 112). Women thus exert a deep-reaching influence on the development of art: "A drift from concepts of Woman in Renais sance literary and philosophical thought toward the aesthetics of the visual arts was fundamental to the evolution of those arts during the period spanning from Mantegna to Michelangelo" (p. xviii). This thesis demands more attention, not because Emison supports it especially well, but because it so nicely complements a more artfully argued proposal of Elizabeth Cropper's. [1] Emison does come up with some very interesting passages from relatively unfamiliar texts about the sinister relation between women and money (pp. 108, 124-25).

The emphasis on pastoral is excessive, given the huge quantity of drollery and satiric writing of various kinds also produced in Renaissance Italy. In comparison with them, pastoral is actually a rather rarefied, sentimentalized, idealized form. Though she recognizes strains of idealism in it, Emison insists on representing it as a "low" mode, in simple opposition to a "high" one; she even speaks of a "rivalry" between low and high (p.23). In doing so she is willfully resisting the real complexity of the situation. She might wish to argue that pastoral is the "low" form most important for the visual arts--pasquinades involve the visual arts, of course, though in a completely different way--but then one would have to ask why that is the case, and the answer might well undermine her larger argument.

Emison is also way off the mark when she claims that pastoral is responsible for encouraging a new aesthetic in general, a new attitude toward ornament; that it is particularly in pastoral works that "'art hiding art' becomes a familiar idea" (p. xxv), that art "understates itself" (p. 62). In fact, the notion that art should hide art, and that lack of ornament might be a positive value, is thoroughly pervasive: its locus classicus is--of all things--Horace's Ars Poetica, and it figures again in Cristoforo Landino's description of Masaccio's style as "puro sanza ornato"; it is even evoked by Vasari in defense of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. So much for its necessary connection to low style. As for the issue of gender, austere styles were as often associated with virility, ornamental ones with femininity, as vice versa.

One might have expected Emison to deal in more detail with the principle of decorum, and especially with the hierarchy of the genres, which, while still not fully formed in art theory in the decades around 1500, was very fully formed in rhetorical and poetic theory. She obviously wants to develop her ideas from the images rather than depending on theory--and there may be good reasons for wanting to proceed in that way--but all she does is deny herself the tools with which to ground her argument more solidly. At one point she claims that "the istoria is closely allied with portraiture" (p. 78), yet if there was one element of the hierarchy of the pictorial genres in existence by 1500, it was the belief that the idealizing style preferred for ambitious figure compositions was distinctly unlike the more straightforwardly descriptive mode associated with portraits. This distinction, elaborated in later 16th-century theory in terms of imitare and ritrarre, is already found in Leonardo's notes. Artistic practice m ay well have been more complex than the surviving theory indicates, but it cannot also have been less complex.

There are times when it seems that the book is not really about style at all, but rather about a cluster of themes and representational strategies. While there is something to be said for approaching the issue in just this broad-ranging way--many Renaissance theorists blur the distinctions that modern stylistic analysis presupposes--the result is that this complex issue never gets the kind of sophisticated discussion it demands. The evidence of Leonardo's work, for example, suggests that the development of some kind of "low style" is necessarily linked to the perfection of a "high style," that it is the product of a more comprehensive rethinking of the possibilities of representation in general. The effect of this rethinking can be seen, for instance, in Paolo Giovio's reference to Dosso's landscape paintings as parerga--distinct from, yet necessarily linked to, the artist's "proper works." Emison might also have sought more guidance from recent scholarship on the issue of style. Though she cites Cropper's w ell-known work on Petrarchism, she ignores Alessandro Nova's superb essay on Romanino's approximations to the macaronic poetry of Teofilo Folengo [2[--an essay that might have both enhanced and inflected her case.

As in her accounts of attitudes toward wealth and love, Emison superimposes a simple linear pattern on the art historical development she describes. She clearly wants to see the emergence of the low style as a herald of modern attitudes and strategies. Heroism and idealism are dead; their passing can even be pinpointed to the "later 1490's" (p. 96). Low-style works, in their concern with the "ordinary and imperfect" (p. 20), anticipate our own view of reality. They constitute a "new art" (pp. 48, 88); they have a "critical" (p. 53) quality; they "embrace contrariety" (p. 90); they refuse to "endorse the status quo" (p. 169). As a result, they offer us "a more complex Renaissance" (p. 92); they "make the Renaissance worth knowing again" (p. 24). This historical construction depends on an absurdly one-dimensional conception of high art, as well as a disturbingly unselfconscious and uncritical understanding of modernity.

Emison succinctly expresses the fundamental assumption underlying her approach: "In studying the Renaissance, the less we rely exclusively on concepts of magnificence, the heroic, and the unchallenged cult of classicizing beauty--on art as an expression of power--the more chance we will have of recuperating the undercurrents of the period and so its authentic complexity" (p. xxx). Congenial as this assertion may be to a now common kind of middle-brow revisionism, it should be met skeptically. One wonders how an approach that circumvents the expression of power can hope to recuperate the authentic complexity of any period. Just as importantly, there is no basis whatever for the belief that a low-style image is any less an expression of power than an idealized one. Indeed, idealism may be an attempt to modify or transcend the myths that the stereotypes and formulas of "popular" or conventional culture continually reinforce; it may be, in other words, a "critical strategy," a form of utopianism. The case can be made that the real modernity, the "authentic complexity" of the Renaissance lies in the very impulse to idealism and an exalted conception of art that Emison dismisses; the deepening awareness of the coercive potential of representation was accompanied by a need to survey the possibilities comprehensively, to arrange them hierarchically, and to prefer those that would yield the highest truth. In the process, art became the complex critical practice we recognize: the mobilization of our susceptibility to illusion against our susceptibility to illusion.

Notes

(1.) Elizabeth Cropper, "The Place of Beauty in the High Renaissance and Its Displacement in the History of Art," in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. Alvin Vos (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 159-205.

(2.) Alessandro Nova, "Folengo and Romanino: The Questione della Lingua and Its Eccentric Trends," Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 664-79.

COPYRIGHT 2000 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group