The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist & Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne. . - book review

FRANCIS AMES-LEWIS

The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 322 pp.; 50 color ills., 100 b/w. $40.00

ROBERT WILLIAMS

Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 243 pp. $49.95

Contemporary scholars of the Renaissance operate within the shell of a 19th-century conception of the period, which is now mostly invoked in order to be discredited. The period acquired its modern definition through narratives of spiritual and intellectual rebirth or renewal, of the centrality of scholars, writers, and intellectuals in public life--when culture, as Jacob Burckhardt conceived it, superseded the "powers" of religion and the state. Figures such as Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo were allowed to speak for a broader totality of historical experience. In the wake of Burckhardt and Jules Michelet, art was pressed into the service of such mythmaking, and it appeared to offer powerful visual and material testimony to the ascendency of humanism and to the transformation in consciousness that was its telos. In the apparent collapse of such confidence, what can the term "Renaissance" now usefully mean, other than as a hollowed-out (and probably misleading) synonym for "Early Modern "? The alternative has been a healthy pluralism of historical approaches, mostly centered on the local, the microhistorical, the normally tradition-bound world of religion, marriage, and the family--but perhaps at the price of a certain conceptual disunity, a lack of synthesis, and an absence of dialogue among the practitioners of the multiple byways of the field. Exorcizing the myth of the "Renaissance Man," however necessary, has also had serious consequences for the understanding of the relation of art and intellectual life. Humanism takes its place alongside other ways of considering artistic activity in this period--the state, religion, the organization of gender, the market for consumer goods-- and is itself seen as subordinate to and conditioned by these other phenomena. This may mean no more than the fact that just as it is presently inconceivable to us that the world of scholarship and the humanities could ever be central and defining elements of our own culture, so we could no longer think of them a s having an important generative role in the visual culture of an earlier epoch. It may also mean that the question of humanism and its relation to art calls out for reconsideration. The singularity of such an alignment might be grasped once more, for its strangeness and remoteness as much as for any connection it may have to our experience or to our modernity.

Both of these books, in varying degrees, suggest a deliberate and specific usage for the term Renaissance art," making a generally persuasive case for the proposition that it was humanism that provided the most important terms in which art is reconceived and redefined in the period, and that this had a transforming effect on the status of the artist. The authors share an evident debt to Michael Baxandall's Giotto and the Orators of 1971. However, in their extreme differences from each other, both manifest the effects of the disciplinary fragmentation referred to above, notwithstanding the common ground that, given the titles of their books, one might expect them to share.

Williams's book, the more ambitious and the more original of the two, makes large claims for the writing on the visual arts in the Renaissance yet defines its territory so as to exclude discussion of any actual works of art. Ames-Lewis provides an excellent retelling of a familiar narrative, that of the "rise of the artist" in Renaissance Italy, which includes many unfamiliar examples and gives some attention to non-Italians like Albrecht Durer. There is much that is relevant for a consideration of the artist in intellectual culture: chapters on painting and poetry, on the idea of the artist's inventive license, on artists' literacy, their writing and reading habits. In these chapters the notion of what constitutes an "intellectual" is not subjected to historical scrutiny, but it appears to be mainly determined by the standards of humanism; we are told of how humanists perceived and judged artists, and of how some artists sought to fashion themselves as learned individuals. Relatively little agency is concede d to works of art themselves, which largely remain at the level of illustration; they are assessed for their correspondence with classical texts ("literal" in the case of Titian's mythologies for Ferrara) or humanist learning, rather than as transforming or extending that learning, or as possessing their own discursive power. The author, for instance, pronounces on the naivete of the printmaker Girolamo Mocetto, who copied Andrea Mantegna's drawing of the Calumny of Apelles but "arbitrarily and absurdly" placed it against the background of the Campo S. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice (p. 198). But what was Mocetto doing here other than drawing on a classic topos in the service of a new rhetorical invention about Venice and its political culture of intrigue, private surveillance, and slander, of which he may himself have had personal experience (having designed the stained glass for the Venetian church he depicted in the engraving)? Mocetto here follows Leon Battista Alberti and Mantegna in conceiving an image acco rding to a rhetorical model, where motifs from past texts and works of art are redeployed according to the demands of a new situation.

One has the sense that the rich material collected by Ames-Lewis will sustain several different stories, which the reader is left to disentangle. At times we seem to be reading a history of the gradual recognition of the artist as practitioner of a discipline founded on a rational and theoretical foundation, one who works with the mind as well as the hand. This form of recognition was available to very famous artists from the time of Giotto onward, regardless of the artist's actual claim to humanist learning (Titian was acclaimed as a poet but had no pretensions to literary expertise). A different story is presented by artists who adopted the language and concepts of humanism for the definition of their art, usually through writing (such as Cennino Cennini and Filarete), or who sought common ground with humanists by learning Latin and studying the classics (Mantegna and Raphael went in this direction). More could have been made of the observation that artists also created their own areas of expertise, which c hallenged and extended the organization of knowledge in the period. That this point is not developed is a result of the author's pronounced emphasis on the artist's social advancement and self-fashioning; fields of knowledge that artists mined as their own did not qualify them for automatic recognition as the equal of philosophers, historians, or poets, nor is it apparent that they made any difference to their social status. For instance, a number of artists by 1500 had acquired a certain expertise as antiquarians (we might think of Jacopo Bellini, Sperandio, Mantegna, Andrea Bregno, Amico Aspertini, Francesco di Giorgio, Gian Cristoforo Romano), but their expertise was centered on things rather than on texts. In practical terms, it meant that they were consulted not to interpret but to testify to the quality or authenticity of an ancient gem or work of sculpture; did this then qualify them for "intellectual status"? What was the value placed on such an empirical way of knowing the ancient world, as distinct from that of, say, Flavio Biondo? There was something rather new about the emergence of art as a form of knowledge, one related to but not commensurable with literary measures of intellectual merit, and a sustained analysis of this tendency is lacking here. Instead of the emergence of the artist as a new category of learned person, we are told of his always inadequate emulation of a series of already available categories.

The author refers to a "shift in the intellectual purpose and nature of the artist's workshop," which "From being a center of craft practice... became the locus of activities that were recognized as intellectually valid" (p. 57). But how was this intellectual validation bestowed, and by whom? The distinction between social ambition and intellectual aspiration is often elided here, and the latter always stands as a sign for the former: for instance, [the court artist had] a position from which he could aspire to become a courtier, but he did not yet rank intellectually alongside courtiers" (p. 61). But did courtiers necessarily possess "intellectual" rank? Courts were indeed important enabling mechanisms for those who sought to traverse social boundaries, since courts in the 14th and 15th centuries were themselves often created in defiance of traditional aristocratic claims and privileges. Artists who from the 15th century onward attained distinction as courtier or familiar in the service of a prince were acco rded recognition by humanists as a matter of course; Pisanello was praised by contemporary Latin poets because he "rivaled nature's works," yet it is not clear what the courtly self-fashioning of Pisanello really signifies in terms of a study of the artist's "intellectual life," Other artists achieved success by adding the accomplishments of a gentleman to their professional skills: Lorenzo Costa, Leonardo da Vinci, and Gian Cristoforo Romano were all accomplished musicians, while the last may also have been proficient in the forms of civil conversation on polite topics, which Baldassare Castiglione claimed to have recorded in his Libro del cortegiano. Musicianship, an amateur's command of literary topics, and an ability to compose poetry might now be considered intellectual qualities, but while they might be considered attributes of social class in 1500, they were not necessarily identifying features of intellectual communities as they then existed. Maintaining an identity as artist in the civilized recreati ons of the court may indeed have given one a license or outre quality, the exotic distinction that falls to what John Berger long ago called the "vertical invader" in elite society. (1) An artist's success could thus equally well have been determined by his difference from a humanist or a philosopher, his ability to call into question the limits of their knowledge. The "courtly" identity of Leonardo is likely to have been particularly multifaceted, and only partly founded on the model of "humanist" or "philosopher" (which he frequently disparaged), combining elements of the engineer-functionary, the magus, the pageant-master, the sage, and the eccentric. After 1490, a remarkable number of artists (especially those connected with the courts or with the Medici) are seen to manifest a typical characteristic of bizzarria, of "not fitting in" (Mantegna, Ercole Roberti, Amico Aspertini, Piero di Cosimo, Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, Parmigianino, Silvio Cosini, among others).

The artist could not simply perform the role of "practitioner of the liberal arts" in the terms that this was understood and then be accepted as of equal rank with poets, humanists, and academics. Such an identification was attempted by Cennino Cennini (a figure constantly quoted but generally not valued highly by Ames-Lewis), who provides a remarkably precocious conception of artistic imitation, emerging directly from his contacts with Paduan humanism (imitation, as part of a theoretically informed conception of style, might have received a fuller treatment here). (2) While the modern concept of an intellectual does not exist in this period, it might be seen as coming into existence as contested territory awaiting definition. Intellectual culture conceived according to the terms of humanae litterae and the liberal arts was simply too exclusive; what artists had to do, in effect, was reshape the whole definition of intellectual merit beyond the paradigm of the liberal arts or the university disciplines, in or der for it to accommodate practical resourcefulness, manual skills, experimental knowledge of optics and anatomy (all of which could be laid claim to by Leonardo), and powers of visual discrimination (Mantegna's expertise as an antiquarian).

In his understandable decision not to venture far into the cinquecento, Ames-Lewis had to forgo the hindsight this would have afforded, but such a perspective is to some extent provided by Robert Williams's highly engaging book. Essentially a reading of a number of texts about art composed in the century between Leonardo and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, it is far from a mere survey of such writing. With a highly selective and economical approach goes a degree of austerity and a fair amount of sacrifice--no illustrations, no biographical account of the writers, and little sustained attempt to ground them in the specificity of their historical circumstances (such as is recently provided for Vasari by Patricia Rubin's recent study of the Lives). (3) Yet the claims made on the basis of such reading are enormous: art theory, Williams writes, was not superfluous to the achievement of Renaissance art; rather, "the fundamental achievement of Renaissance art was a theoretical one" (p. 2). Williams makes it clear that he is not pursuing the aspect of theory that deals with representational technique; he proposes instead to take seriously the claim of the visual arts to constitute a form of universal knowledge (even as he acknowledges that similar claims were made for the universality of other arts, including poetry and music). Rather than being parasitic on other areas of learning (optics, mathematics, history, poetry, and rhetoric), art reveals itself to have a "superintendency" over all other areas of inquiry, even being conceivable as a "knowledge of knowledge." Such assertions, it is argued, are more than mere rhetorical hyperbole and are developed with intellectual consistency in the work of several writers. What is ultimately being avowed in such claims is the extraordinary power--and cultural centrality--of visual representation: "The cultural work that art thus comes to perform, the work of managing the relation of signs to things, makes it culturally and politically sensitive" (p. 11). In fact, the Renaissance itself c an be identified as a recognition of the fundamental dependency of culture on representation, a new understanding of the primacy of the image in securing religious and ethical ideals, social order, personal and collective identity. Yet the fact of representational power and the awareness of it are more fundamental and important than any ideas such representations might serve in a programmatic sense. In such formulations Williams stands apart from the classic Renaissance historiography I referred to at the outset, where art stood as the reflection of broader intellectual tendencies.

What kind of support is offered by the texts themselves for claims about the superintendency of art? Leonardo da Vinci wrote rhapsodically of the power of the artist and his universal knowledge and xyof the capacity of representation not just to reproduce but to "make" truth. Federico Zuccaro, almost a century later, dwelt at length in his writings on the universality of the artist and the centrality of disegno, which is nothing less than "the singular form of the soul, and the virtue that makes it discourse and understand completely, and with which it participates more fully in the divine image impressed in us...." (p. 142). In between was Giorgio Vasari, who anticipated Zuccaro in the pursuit of a fundamental principle within which the power of art could be said to inhere, and for Vasari, too, this was disegno, which, "proceeding from the intellect, derives from many things a universal judgement, like a form or idea of all things in nature...." (p. 33). The chapter on Vasari and disegno is one of the most i nteresting for its historical argument (and one that speaks directly to the concerns of Ames-Lewis); it is particularly significant because of the current tendency to characterize Vasari as intellectually impoverished and derivative, a mouthpiece at best for the views of his literati friends--such as Vincenzo Borghini--to whom anything of real substance or even literary polish tends to be attributed. Williams is here able to show that Vasari's ambitious use of the term disegno must originate with the artist-author himself, since Borghini's notes on Benedetto Varchi and Pliny that were produced as an aid to the writing of the Lives reveal a far less elevated understanding of the term disegno. Vasari's view corresponds much more with that of a fellow artist-writer, Francisco da Hollanda, whom he is unlikely to have read, which suggests that his account of disegno constitutes an artist's point of view. Vasari's lack of commitment to (not to mention lack of training within) the Aristotelian tradition meant that h e could think outside the givens of Aristotelian thought. Artists themselves here emerge as makers of theory, and it is their experience and expertise that finally transform the philosophical and rhetorical norms of post-Albertian writing about art: "artisans make bold claims on their own behalf, while aristocratic literary men seek to remind them of their proper place" (p. 50). Where some would belittle Vasari for his failure to observe Aristotelian distinctions properly, Williams makes a strong case for the writer's challenge to traditional hierarchies of knowledge, and he demonstrates this again in his accounts of Lomazzo, Zuccaro, and Francesco Bocchi.

When Williams writes, "Art creates culture," or refers to Vincenzo Borghini as a "cultural historian," yet refers to identity as a "cultural construct" (p. 232), which sense of culture are we to understand to be the subject of this book, or as signaled by its title? Does he here mean the kultur of Burckhardt, the privileged realm of individual reflection and conscious creation, which is often translated as "civilization"? Or does he mean culture in the anthropological sense-a set of habits, mentalities, traditions, many of them unconsciously observed, that organize the daily life and thought of a society? Since Williams writes of art in terms of absolute and "transcendent" knowledge on the one hand and as the basis of representation which mediates power within society on the other, it might seem as if the word is being used to close the gap between elite and popular, high and low, conscious and unconscious--even past and present. The prolix writings of these Renaissance mandarins are being clearly valorized, treated as far more global in their significance, even--as Williams states in his conclusion--as having real "documentary value and enduring significance." Williams chooses to define "humanism" as a philosophical search for synthesis between alternatives, as a reduction of disparate phenomena to concentricity. This is not an uncontroversial definition; while it might work for the late Renaissance (and, it must be said, distinctly premodern) dispensation he is largely concerned with, it is a long way from the critical philology of a Valla, an Angelo Poliziano, or a Joseph Scaliger, through whom humanism is usually defined.

The notion of "power" is also handled somewhat equivocally. There is recourse to a principle of ideology, a broader conception of state power that both constrains and enables, yet it is never in itself fully articulated or described beyond a few largely metaphoric analogies between the "absolute" artist and the political phenomenon of Absolutism. Williams presents the texts he discusses in terms of the intentions of their authors, of meanings conceivable to them and to their readers; ideology operates in the rhetorical and conscious register but not in any apparent sense "beneath" the text or beyond the consciousness of its author. If there is ambiguity or tension, this is in accordance with authorial design (p. 232). In a study in which the term "superintendency" resounds, authorial consciousness is also apparently sovereign, and there is no allowance for the tension of contrary imperatives, the dispersal of authorial voice, between intention and the act of writing. This is all the more extraordinary given t he Herculean reduction to unity, toward totalizing systems pursued by these authors. Lomazzo and Zuccaro are characteristic of a major paradigm of late Renaissance thought in which resemblance or analogy between terms are understood as disclosures of a common essence. (4) In these later writers there is an overwhelming sense of the paradigm under strain, of words and concepts being stretched to their limits in the service of a series of polemical equations, so that "art" can be made coterminous with "virtuous conduct" or "prudence" or "philosophy" or "judgment." An author like Lomazzo shapes his all-encompassing edifice--an allegorical "temple of painting"--which seems about to collapse on account of a stretching, overburdening, or compacting of terms (the term forma, for instance, is used to mean "ideas," "forms," as well as "iconographic attributes") (5). Lomazzo, in Williams's account, is always the architect, as distinct from dialogic elements that might be shaping and speaking through his text.6 But why was such an elaborate system necessary? Why the constant protests of orthodoxy or respectability? Who or what are these texts arguing with? An alternative reading might infer that what is being held at bay here is the anxiety that art is a specious power of making illusions, the arbitrary and chaotic exercise of fantasy, a form of madness that threatens to seduce the viewer. These are the charges of the reformers such as Gabriele Paleotti, the kind of challenge to the authority of the artist to which the theorists must be seen as responding. It is this tension that animates the ehphrases of Bocchi, who is constantly drawn to the uncanny, specious life and alluring sense of presence of the work of art while insisting on the identity of art with virtuous conduct.

The chapter "Style, Decorum and the Viewer's Experience" argues that discussions of decorum should not be seen as manifesting a repressive, Counter-Reformation concern with the control of artistic individuality and expression, but that at stake in discussions is the revelatory power of art itself. Decorum governs the fitness between a representation and a mental conception: it was a principle "for accommodating the work of art to the diversity of the world--not just individual objects or persons to their prototypes in nature, but the mode of representation to a larger understanding or purpose" (p. 88). The purpose is the capacity of art to reveal essence, to affirm and to make intelligible concepts such as "justice," "piety," "modesty," "honor," and unlimited other qualities. Leonardo's famous passage on the godlike power of the artist is cited at this point, but this passage has nothing to do with style and decorum. It possesses radical, even heterodox implications, but it is not matched in any of the later cinquecento writings on decorum, which never invoke the principle of the artist as a "god" who "creates" his own reality.

The opposite is very much the case. One of the most sophisticated and subtle accounts of artistic decorum produced in the cinquecento, and a pioneering theorization of pictorial genre, is the Dialogue on the Errors of Painters by Giovan Andrea Gilio, a work that places itself entirely in the service of a newly rigorous, militant, and vindictive Catholic orthodoxy. It is certainly worth taking Gilio seriously; like the child in the story of the emperor's new clothes, Gilio confronts aspects of Michelangelo's Last Judgment about which other writers prefer to remain silent. Yet Williams insists on the "perfect congruity" of Gilio with a liberal humanist tradition, regardless of the fact that his command of Horace, of Aristotle, of Alberti, was placed in the service of attacks on the work of Michelangelo, Sebastiano, Salviati, and Vasari--to an utter refusal, in effect, of the artistic achievements of the previous sixty years. Gilio's is the first work of art theory to be more than a codification of contemporary practice and to impose norms and limits explicitly dictated by nonartistic concerns. Yet this treatise might in fact support an important observation that is not investigated here--that artistic practice had itself emerged as a self-consciously theoretical enterprise, exceeding and challenging the treatises and itself proposing new bounds for artistic performance. Gilio even seems to concede this with regard to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, recognizing (without approval) that it is a painting "about" art, yet in which an artist lays claim to kinds of competency (theological interpretation) that are not his own. Michelangelo as such would epitomize Williams's notion of the artist as one who commands a more all-encompassing field of knowledge; with the Last Judgment he created what treatises from Alberti to Giovanni Battista Armenini would regard as an istoria--a kind of super painting in which the only decorum observed is that of the "order of art" most ambitiously conceived, where "the parts of art are presen t in their highest perfection." Instead, istoria is replaced by Gilio with prescriptions for the accurate portrayal of historia, subjected to exacting and artistically meaningless criteria for the accurate rendering of "truth." It is hard to obliterate the evidence that decorum, rather than being a principle of the artistic superintendency of knowledge, appears here as a principle for the surveillance and subordination of art. Yet Williams follows his discussion of Gilio with the assertion that decorum, while it might be a principle of "abjection before authority," "stands for the potential of art to resist coercion, to argue the claims of the ideal" (p. 100). This is a generous reading, which goes far beyond the claims of any 16th-century writer.

The book for the most part serves its sources well, being untypical in its respect for the texts it discusses and in its appreciation for their intellectual achievement. Williams suspends any discussion of the relation of theory and practice, because ultimately this is not where the value of these texts can be said to lie. Hence the emphasis on metatechne: the treatment of the texts as philosophical meditations on the nature of art rather than for their prescriptive or pedagogical dimension. At the same time, the book points beyond itself to directions for further work, not least of which is the nature of the progress from techne to metatechne. What are the ultimate consequences, for art and artists, of a progressive separation and hierarchization of theory and practice, which are not apparent in early usages of the term "theory" (Cennino uses the term, and Perugino is ascribed with a personal "theory of art" by Vasari). How can practice, or the material being of the work of art itself not be entirely devalue d in the intellectual system analyzed by Williams? What can finally be enabled by a systematization of disegno that tends to assimilate everything from drawing proper to thought itself? These are the questions raised by Williams's mapping of the central concerns of cinquecento art theory. Answering them would require a much longer book than the one he has written, but what has been achieved here is already substantial, and one looks forward to its impact and development in subsequent work by himself and others.

Notes

(1.) John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965).

(2.) See Andrea Bolland, "Art and Humanism in Early Renaissance Padua: Cennini, Vergerio and Petrarch on Imitation," Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 469-88.

(3.) Patricia Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

(4.) See Brian Vickers, "Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580-1680," in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 95-165; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973); and Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Towards a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

(5.) Its history before Lomazzo has been recently explored by Stanko Kokole, "Cognitio formarum and Agostino di Duccio's Reliefs for the Chapel of the Planets in the Tempio Malatestiano," in Quattrocento Adriatico; Fifteenth-Century Art of the Adriatic Rim, ed. Charles Dempsey (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1996), 177-207.

(6.) For readings of late Renaissance literary and musical theory that argues for the legibility of meanings not present to authorial consciousness, see Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Tomlinson (as in n. 4).

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