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<i>Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni</i> (review)

2010; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.0.0762

1534-0708

Sheila Barker,

Early Modern Women Writers

Reviewed by: Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni Sheila Barker Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni. By Pamela M. Jones. [Visual Culture in Early Modernity.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Pp. xiv, 360. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-754-66179-5.) To answer the question, “What does this painting mean?”, art historians have traditionally trodden the paths of authorial intentionality, patronage studies, and material culture. Pamela M. Jones addresses the question by striking out onto the rather fresh path of the social history of reception. While acknowledging the contributions of John Shearman and David Freedberg in this arena, she distinguishes her project from their sweeping visions, arguing that response can differ dramatically from individual to individual, even within the same society to which the painter and patron belonged. Thus, to some degree, her approach is indebted to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the “historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). In Jones’s five chapters treating so many religious altarpieces on public view in seventeenth-century Rome, the meanings of these works are understood to be ultimately open-ended. Nevertheless, each of the essays prioritizes the documented or probable responses of specific viewing communities sharing similar cultural and social backgrounds. In the case of Tommaso Laureti’s Martyrdom of Saint Susanna in the church of Santa Susanna, the focus is on the Cistercian nuns housed in the annexed convent. In the case of Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto in San Agostino, the focus is on locals who were irritated by the throngs of beggars in Rome. Andrea Commodi’s Saint Charles Borromeo Venerating the Holy Nail in San Carlo ai Catinari is compared to the concerns of a confraternity at this church that tended to the indigent sick. Guercino’s Penitent Magdalen, formerly in Santa Maria Maddalena al Corso (now destroyed), is presented from the point of view of local prostitutes forced to hear sermons in that church, while Guido Reni’s Holy Trinity in Ss. Trinità dei Pellegrini e Convalescenti is presented from the point of view of published Baroque art critics. With such a kaleidoscopic vision of seventeenth-century society—one which is admirably supported by highly original research—this book is sure to reward all its readers with new insight into the early-modern Catholic world. Jones’s book puts on display an abundance of cultural artifacts—ranging from monastic rules, chapbooks, and morality plays to religious books for laymen—to suggest how each of the five images resonated with viewers. The meaning of an artwork, it is suggested, was constructed in an ad-hoc dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, the artwork itself as well as the ritual and physical circumstances in which it was encountered and, on the other hand, each viewer’s own specific cultural formation. As a result, a viewer’s response could hinge on any number of associations: the deteriorated brick walls of a pilgrimage site, the disturbance caused by beggars during Mass, a play about a chestnut farmer victimized by the miscarriage of justice, the ritual blessing of a nun’s vestments, the stereotype of the coarse-mannered [End Page 580] laundrywoman—or even no association whatsoever, in cases where the artwork was ignored. Jones concludes that in the post-Tridentine era, despite ecclesiastical concern about the didactic and emotive uses of religious art, it remained “impossible to control reception” (p. 327). Readers of this thought-provoking study might be tempted to take this line of questioning even further, especially given Jones’s admonition that “modern cognitive psychologists have disproved Aristotle’s theory” that the human eye can “see and record every detail of a painting simultaneously” (p. 250). If viewer responses are indeed born amidst a barrage of splintered associations irrespective of any holistic comprehension of the image itself, how frequently did individuals ever actually arrive at coherent interpretations of artworks? Was the normative experience of art a haphazard encounter rather than a reasoned search for meaning? Jones’s research certainly stands at the opposite pole from structuralist hermeneutics; yet perhaps it also reveals the limits of any hermeneutical approach to artworks of...