italian renaissance paintingby james beck;artists of the renaissance (vasari)by george bull
TRANSCRIPT
Italian Renaissance Painting by James Beck; Artists of the Renaissance (Vasari) by George BullReview by: MICHAEL LARSENJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 131, No. 5326 (SEPTEMBER 1983), pp. 630-631Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41373643 .
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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS GENERAL NOTES
Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706-83), A spray of flowers tied with a yellow ribbon, an orange tip butterfly
and an ichneumon moth; gouache
Barbara seems to be saying that truth is beauty and that is all you (the viewer) are going to know. All her near relations line up to say 'Amen'. The others of this terrifyingly gifted family whose
talents were poured into this area of high speciality, while painting landscape, one supposes, to take a holiday from intense concentration, were Johann Siegmund, Johann Christoph, who was particularly friendly toward butterflies and moths, and younger sister Margaret Barbara.
It is a fascinating exhibition, set up in the scholarly intimacy of the Graham Robertson Room which, for reasons of economy, is open only in the afternoons. But even this is only a curtain raiser to an exhibition of 100 flower paintings and drawings covering three cen- turies - all from the Broughton Collection - which is due here on 15th May next year after its tour of the United States. The present exhibition is on view until 16jh October.
RAY RUSHTON
NOTES ON BOOKS
ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PAINTING By James Beck New York , Harper and Row, 1981. £17.50; paper, £7.50 ARTISTS OF THE RENAISSANCE (Vasari) Selected and Translated by George Bull Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1982. Paper, £4.95
Method plays a very considerable part in the presenta- tion of any history of Italian Renaissance painting, for the Italian Renaissance does not take the form of a simple progression of ideas and their transformation into painting and sculpture. It is a complex develop- ment from which the art historian must elicit a sense
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SEPTEMBER 1983 NOTES ON BOOKS of order, from his own points of view. So many schools, so many artists, so many strands of style and purpose cannot be organized well without strong thematic discipline. Professor Beck, in the excellent introduction to his
Italian Renaissance Painting first examines with care all those alternative methods of thematic presentation open to him. Having rejected the notion of a primary division into schools, of a division along aesthetic and iconographical lines, and of a thorough examination of the Quattro- and Cinquecenti decade by decade, he then proposes two entirely novel schemae , the second broadly governed by the first. In Professor Beck's own words: This book organizes
the main exponents of Italian Renaissance painting according to the generation in which each artist was born. The cohesive qualities of each generation, includ- ing broad intellectual currents, considered as given and irrevocable facts, are stressed over differences between one city and another or one region and another.' The author admits that artists were not born to order, so to speak, but it is his thesis that three generations are clearly discernible. Professor Beck's first schema , therefore, is to define these generations. The second schema is more complex in conception
and somewhat more controversial. It consists of divid- ing all artists of each generation into two classes of artist, the 'lyric' and the 'monumental'. Again, both categories override state and urban frontiers, but artists are seen where appropriate as exemplary of their own geographical milieux: the essentially Venetian quality of Giovanni Bellini is a case in point. The distinctions between those masters whom the
author categorizes as essentially 'lyric' and those deemed 'monumental' are not, it is scarcely necessary to point out, absolute. The lyric vein is characterized by gracefulness, elegance and refinement; in the monumental it is gravity of form and the posed or poised theatricality of figures. These are the extreme definitions, however, and Professor Beck is quick to acknowledge the extensive middle-ground. It is a dis- tinction, as he reminds- us, much akin in character to that of 'classical' and 'romantic' in the nineteenth cen- tury, and the comparison is apt. Professor Beck discusses the artists whom he has
selected for close scrutiny, forty-one in all, with great sensitivity. He speaks of an artist as a man with a career to pursue, a career which Beck chronicles documen- tary; and possibly more than any other recent historian of the Renaissance, he makes us appreciate something of the Man behind the artist, through the work of the artist. The author's purposes are achieved in part by the
meticulous care which has been accorded to the selec- tion of plates (395 in all) and their accurate positioning within the text. Scarcely ever does one need to turn the page for reference to an illustration. Messrs. Harper and Row are to be congratulated on their exceptionally
close co-operation with the author. What I cannot for- give is bad punctuation: I hope that this is the last time I ever see the word 'co-worker' spelt without an hyphen. Professor Beck, in common with every historian of
the Italian Renaissance, re-echoes the complaint of the Florentine antiquary, Vespasiano da Bisticci, made in the late fifteenth century, that biographical accounts of notable Italians of his time were virtually non- existent. Fifty years later Giorgio Vasari was largely to make good their absence, at least as far as artists were concerned, by the publication of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in 1550. Vasari is essential reading, for, without the human
dimension which he adds to our knowledge of Italian Renaissance artists, we would know them almost exclu- sively by their works. So George Bull's well edited and very manageable selections from the Lives comes as a most welcome addition to our libraries. In the form of Giorgio Vasari, Artists of the Renaissance , George Bull's editing heightens the achievement and the value to us of Vasari's own work. This achievement is most pro- nounced in two ways. First, George Bull has reduced the Lives to twenty
from Vasari's original one hundred and sixty, select- ing the most important biographies thematically, and the theme is the progress of the High Renaissance. His selection cannot be faulted, and is much in line with what one imagines Vasari's own order of merit to have been. Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Alberti vie with the great painters, beginning, almost inevit- ably, with Masaccio. Each of Vasari's biographies is thrown into relief superbly by illustrations of the highest quality. Once again, as in Professor Beck's work, we see both aspects of the artist, the man and the executant. George Bull's second method, and it is an ingenious
one, is to intersperse the text with essays of his own. Possibly the most interesting of these is the author's portrait gallery of thirteen of his chosen subjects (including a self-portrait of Vasari). Readers will undoubtedly be familiar with some of the portraits, but not with all of them, and their presentation en bloc comes as a most interesting surprise. Though this book is a foreshortened version of George
Bull's complete translation of Vasari's Lives of 1 965, it is, in its own way, no less valuable through being briefer and more profusely illustrative.
MICHAEL LARSEN
THE ARCHITECTURE OF IRELAND From the Earliest Times to 1880 By Maurice Craig London , Batsford, 1982. £20 It is fitting that the first comprehensive history of Irish architecture should be by Maurice Craig, the most eminent of the growing band of Irish architectural his- torians. Dr. Craig is not only a great scholar, but knows
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