The Pieta in French Late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations. by William H. ForsythReview by: Rebecca ZorachThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 879-880Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544076 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 21:18

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.68 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:18:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 879

literary allusions, definitions for characters' names, and discussions of place names. Roberts' notes make clear the interaction between literature and historical texts, pointing out moments in the book where Wroth mingles fiction and topical allusion.The most interesting examples of this phenomenon, however, are covered in the introduction and seem focused on the author herself:Wroth's struggle of self-representation as a woman writer, the frustra- tion of her arranged marriage, the vagaries of life at court (or life expelled from court), and her role as a single mother.

With this new edition of a Renaissance prose romance to the offerings from the Renais- sance English Text Society, we can only hope we will see more works by women and romances more generally in the series.We might also hope that Roberts' work will become available in a more affordable paperback edition so it can be included in the syllabus of Renaissance Prose or Renaissance Women Writers courses around the world. Catherine R. Eskin ............. University of Trondheim

The Pieta in French Late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations. William H. Forsyth. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995. 219 pp. $40.00.

Connoisseurship is the repressed other of academic art history.The personal accumula- tion of stylistic memory, of a vast personal archive of visual information, is a form of knowl- edge which those of us who practice more historically or theoretically motivated forms of art history disavow and occasionally critique, all the while depending upon it for the histor- ical grounding of our own work.We depend upon connoisseurship not only for historical grounding, but for cultural grounding as well: museums and connoisseurs are still arbiters of the cultural legitimacy that helps determine our choice of objects of study (or of resistance).

It would not be hard to criticize this book for its lack of attention to issues I find com- pelling (and I will do this to a certain extent). I must first register, however, a certain nostal- gia for the kind of personal knowledge and, indeed, cultural authority this book represents- the ability to make broad statements of provenance, date, and stylistic association with little justification. Still, more attention to interpretation, and a foregrounding of the connoisseur- ial method-more ample footnotes, for example-might have been useful to scholarly read- ers.

Lest I sound snide, I should state at the outset that this volume admirably performs the work its title suggests it will. Forsyth, curator emeritus of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum, has compiled a remarkable compendium of French Pietas of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries, arranged into chapters by regional schools and organized stylistically and chronologically within each chapter. Forsyth has collected, documented, and classified a vast number of statues of this type (according to fairly strict delimitations), mapping them by region and style. The Pieta is full of illustrations which will be an important visual resource to students of regional style and popular devotion.A thorough, complete catalogue, with infor- mation on medium, attribution, date, scale, location, and bibliography, accompanies the text, along with a brief discussion of documentary sources of Pieta iconography. The work serves as a companion volume to Forsyth's 1970 The Entombment of Christ: French Sculptures of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. The Pieta, then, bespeaks considerable research and erudi- tion.

Forsyth's broad classifications are convincing. The "regional variations" of the title turn out to be strikingly coherent. However, many of his assumptions are troubling, and one might imagine other ways of organizing this material. Forsyth employs a descriptive, organ-

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.68 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:18:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

880 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII / 3 (1996)

icist, and evolutionary model of style, one that assumes that style develops, on the one hand, evenly through time, and, on the other hand, as the result of the influence of other styles. Assumptions about influence, its unidirectionality, its visual obviousness, could be problem- atized, as could the notion that there must be lost intermediaries lying between divergent iconographic models. Most troubling is the uncomplicated assumption of standards of qual- ity, a universalizing gesture which Forsyth might have staved off by avowing the personal character of his judgments.

More information on practices of devotion and artisanal practice would have been useful. Even in the strictly formal realm, there are some gaps. The text pays little attention to medium or scale-or, worse in my opinion, to the nearly universal use of polychrome. Though Forsyth's descriptions of works are frequently elegant, the massive quantities of images discussed detracts from the quality of description.This is particularly noticeable in the description of works of "lesser" quality, which are given only peremptory discussion. Missing too is any significant discussion of the relation of these works to other media or genres, despite occasional passing references, as, for example, the suggestion that a particular type of Pieta was popularized by the dissemination of prints by Albrecht Direr. The exclusion of such works as Germain Pion's Louvre Pieta on the basis of its being "too developed" seems rather gratuitous. The focus on regionalism as a strict principle of organization might blind the reader to the movement of artisans throughout France and throughout Europe, and to northern and Italian, or even Parisian, influences on French regional devotional art.

Forsyth alludes to historical circumstances relevant to the production of art, but does not link the two convincingly. For instance, he states, "New images of devotion evolved in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the result of a revolution in religious think- ing partly caused by the ravages of the Black Death and the HundredYears'War."This state- ment, which deserves much development, is allowed to stand without further explanation. But one virtue of The Pieta is its generosity in suggesting, however fleetingly, numerous pos- sible lines of inquiry that are not its task to consider at length. Brief references to donors, pri- vate and public devotion, and workshop practices might have been developed and further specified; but Forsyth makes his observations available for others to pursue.

One significant example is the importance of sculpted drapery and the clothed body in Champagne, understood in relation to the champenois cloth industry. Much more could be said than the simple fact that the fabric and textures "reflect the professional interest of the inhabitants of Champagne, who made and sold fine cloth that was famous throughout Europe." But this is, perhaps, for other researchers to develop. Additional issues that might be pursued in relation to these images include female piety, the depiction of maternal or familial affection, the display of the suffering body, and display more generally in the context of liturgy and devotion.

The book's conclusion affirms its aim to have been first "to establish the regional charac- ter of these statues and insofar as possible, to divide them into distinct regional groups" and second "to arrange the Pietas in each group by their degree of relationship to one another and in sequences that would suggest the evolution of their style." It does these things well, though with less attention to methodological considerations than is usual in current art his- torical work. Lacunae and outdated assumptions notwithstanding, Forsyth's newest book will be useful as a visual resource. Libraries should own it, and those working on related top- ics, including popular devotion, regional identity, gender, and the body, will find rich possi- bilities for further study in consulting its illustrations. Rebecca Zorach ............................................... University of Chicago

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.68 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:18:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions