Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the Renaissance/with Poets, Painters, and Bon Vivants

2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/705216

2328-207X

John Cunnally,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Note: Welcome to the Renaissance/with Poets, Painters, and Bon VivantsJohn CunnallyJohn Cunnally Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMy dissertation advisor at Penn, Paul Watson, was once approached by a new student who asked if he taught Renaissance art. He replied, “Is there any other kind?” Here Paul was following the august footsteps of Bernard Berenson, who defended his decision to concentrate on the art of the Renaissance by asserting that only during this period do we witness a pure and complete evolutionary arc of artistic development from tentative and “imbecile” beginnings, through increasing maturity and sublime splendor, and then degeneration into confusion, barbarism, and bombast (Mr. Berenson was clearly no fan of the Baroque).Even historians who specialize in other periods often follow unconsciously the critical and aesthetic principles developed by Renaissance artists and theorists, including an emphasis on individual genius, competition, partition into rival factions, self-expression, and invenzione as the driving factors of art history. This situation was noted in 1989 by Donald Preziosi, who decried the “tedious Michelangelism” that pervades our profession. In recent decades the Renaissance-centric hegemony has loosened somewhat, judging from the list of session topics at the College Art Association’s annual meetings, where panels on individual artists, regional schools, and iconographic motifs (the norm when I was a grad student) have yielded to topics like intersectionality, détournement, decolonizing the web, and constructing criticality in digital art history (I know several readers who will not consider this a progressive improvement).Nevertheless the European era stretching from Dante to Shakespeare continues to maintain a massive gravity difficult for researchers to escape, or for popular culture to let go of. (As evidence, see my quote from the Broadway musical Something Rotten in the title above or the annual Renaissance fairs sponsored by a thousand chambers of commerce throughout the land—where else can you stare at Joan of Arc, Lucretia Borgia, and Queen Elizabeth I dancing together in a circle?) You should not be surprised to find that half the articles in this issue of Source (as in most of its issues) fall into the category of Renaissance studies. Basta—let me introduce our authors and essays.Jessica Renee Streit examines two medieval pilgrimage shrines in the Loire region of France: the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Le Puy-en-Velay and the chapel of St. Michael at Aiguilhe. These two buildings are in sight of one another, perched on steep volcanic rochers. In each case, Streit observes, the pathway of the climb and the layout of the sacred spaces were designed to provide a series of dramatic views of the other shrine, reminding the pilgrims of their next stop or their last one. Organizing the two sites and their topography in a holistic manner, the medieval designers composed a sequential experience celebrating the peripatetic and liminal nature of pilgrims, who are always in transit, always on the threshold between two worlds.The Missal of Saint-Ruf, a medieval codex in the library of the cathedral of Tortosa in Catalonia, is the subject of the article by Joan Duran-Porta. The manuscript itself with its Romanesque illuminations was composed in a scriptorium in Avignon and brought to Tortosa by its first bishop after the city was captured from the Saracens in 1148. Duran-Porta reveals, however, that the ornate binding of the missal was the product of a local workshop because the silver frames of the covers display a hymn associated with the abbey of Ripoll, an important cultural center in twelfth-century Catalonia. The vibrant enamel plates that are built into the binding, showing Christ enthroned and a Crucifixion, appear to come from the Rhineland; thus the Missal of Saint-Ruf, with its French, German, and Catalan elements, can attest to the eclectic and pan-European nature of Romanesque art.According to Renana Bartal, the face of the resurrected Christ in Piero della Francesca’s famous Borgo Sansepolcro mural was modeled on the face from a far older wooden crucifix revered in a local church. An obscure provincial product of the Carolingian period, this wooden Volto Santo was believed to be an acheiropoieton, an “authorless” work of art, completed by angels after the sculptor fell asleep. Thus Piero was justified in regarding it as an authentic likeness of the Savior. But we can also surmise that the early medieval style of the wooden Christ—the simplified, geometric treatment of the eyes and other facial features as well as its masklike tranquility—convinced Piero that a formalized and mathematical approach to composition was inherently divine; we might call it the “default” style of God and his angels when engaged in artistic activity.A mysterious drawing by Michelangelo depicting a group of nude archers frantically aiming and shooting at a target but showing no bows in their outstretched hands is examined by Edward J. Olszewski. Most scholars accept Erwin Panofsky’s interpretation of the composition as a Neoplatonic allegory of uncontrollable bodily lust. Olszewski elaborates on Panofsky’s reading by explaining the enigmatic absence of the bows, offering as a clue Michelangelo’s famous sketch of himself painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1510, which was accompanied by a sonnet lamenting how his body has deformed into the shape of a “Syrian bow” with multiple curves. In the drawing of the archers, the invisible bows have been replaced by the bodies themselves, instruments of a lustful goal, bending and stretching in undulating agon.Kerr Houston offers a new contribution to the growing body of studi Vasariani, a field mostly associated with Paul Barolsky, exposing the ideological bias behind the stories collected (or invented) by the great Renaissance biographer. Houston’s subject is Vasari’s anecdote in which the painter Giotto impressed the pope with a sample of his work, namely a perfect circle painted with a single deft stroke. Giotto’s gesture of bravado and disprezza was consistent with the values of the princely culture of the sixteenth century, when virtuoso performance could earn a courtier favorable attention and advancement, but it seems quite out of place in the medieval Gothic world that Giotto actually inhabited. Little wonder the pope’s messenger was surprised and even offended by the painter’s sample, but fortunately for Giotto, the pontiff himself was ahead of his time.Though our essay by Anita F. Moskowitz focuses on a nineteenth-century painting, the long shadow of the Renaissance has fallen here as well, for the academy-trained painter Stefano Bardini did his best to replicate the style of Raphael until the changing fashions of the market persuaded him to take up the business of restoring and selling Renaissance art instead of imitating it. Moskowitz identifies a fading madonella overlooking a piazza in Bardini’s hometown of Pieve Santo Stefano as an original by that master, whose career as a painter has been little studied thanks to the fame he later acquired as the principe degli antiquari, with a list of clients including Stanford White, Isabella Gardner, and J. Pierpont Morgan.Our issue ends with a short note sent in by Moshe Behar as an addendum to an essay he contributed to our Winter 2017 issue. Readers may remember that Behar’s article called attention to a mysterious face formed by the folds of the curtain in Jan Vermeer’s Girl Reading at a Window in Dresden. Acknowledging that this observation might be met with skepticism because such surrealistic pareidolia seems out of place in seventeenth-century Holland, Behar noted Salvador Dalí’s recognition of Vermeer as a kindred spirit. In the addendum here, the author further demonstrates Dalí’s particular interest in the Dresden painting. Incidentally Girl Reading has been in the news of late because the museum’s conservators discovered the image of a cupid on the wall behind the lady, covered up long after its creation, and are now in the process of uncovering it. The restoration will confirm the erotic content of the girl’s letter, and Behar might note that the same spirit of Philistine conformity that caused Vermeer’s cupid to be censored is still active in those who will deny the possibility of a surrealist motif in a Dutch painting. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 39, Number 1Fall 2019 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705216 © 2019 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.