Renaissance and Reformation, 1999


Book Reviews / Comptes rendus / 95

tures d'excellente facture, qui font tout le prix de ce document étonnant. Ces

illustrations sont ici rendues avec toute la précision et la finesse désirables.

Notons encore que, par sa présentation, par l'excellence de sa typographie et

la qualité remarquable des nombreuses reproductions qui l'illustrent, la maison

Nuovi Orizzonti a produit un ouvrage dont la manipulation est aussi agréable que

la lecture en est aisée.

On regrettera cependant qu'aucune notice ne présente les auteurs qui ont
contribué à sa réalisation, et que la seule bibliographie, d'ailleurs rudimentaire,

qui accompagne une des contributions contient quelques erreurs, la rendant peu

fiable.

LOUIS VALCKE, Université de Sherbrooke

Robert Williams. Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From
Techne to Metatechne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 243.

This compact, lucid book about the role of art theory in the later Italian Renaissance

argues that in the sixteenth century art became "essentially theoretical" and is thus

concerned as much with the invisible as with the visible. The book deals with Vasari,

Varchi, Borghini, Gilio, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, Tasso, Bocchi, and other theorists, who
claimed in various formulations that art creates culture, or at least a new idea of

culture. It raises a number of arresting questions about form, disegno, and decorum,

and about the coercive powers of art and representation— their producing, and then
their constituting, an age's reality. Above all, it explores the idea that art exercises

a "superintendency" over knowledge, is "a form of knowledge or mode of knowing

that necessarily involves a mastery of other modes," and is potentially, even ideally,

"a mastery of all modes." Williams' at times Neoplatonic, at times neo-Kantian,

thesis, which dwells on the central considerations attending signification, asserts

that this theoretical redefinition of art is itself "the distinctive achievement" of the

Renaissance. It explores the complexity of the transaction occurring in the viewer,

who subordinates his subjective perceptions to a belief in the power of an intelligible
order of an art transcending his eye, even his mind's eye. For these theorists indeed,

the artist is transformed from being a master technician into someone with "a special

kind of insight into things," who strives to create "a reflection of his entire mode
of being in the world." This orients us, predictably, towards a Michelangelesque

notion of art as "the process of self-perfection," "a prolonged process of

becoming," "a spiritual pilgrimage," "a search for valid signs," "a search for the

ground of being," for "transcendence" itself. As the "art of arts," it is the
fundamental faculty of the mind which judges and then correlates all things
perceived, designing our realities.



96 / Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme

Hence the centrality for Williams of Vasari and disegno, the topic of his

opening chapter. In the second edition of his Lives, Vasari had defined disegno in

Aristotelian terms, as that which "derives from many things a universal judgment"
and comprehends the law, form or idea of all of nature, that is, the relationship of

nature's parts to the unified whole. Along with the cognate notion of maniera^

which strives "for that beauty which comes from having frequently copied the most

beautiful things," disegno signifies, in other words, an ideal envisioning: a collec-

tive judging of analogies, which governs the practical functioning aspects of the

artist's mind, but also its "loftiest understanding." It constitutes "the most funda-

mental, most profound, rule of art," in that it supposes and creates a formal, and

thus an aesthetic, reality.

Chapter Two argues that the period's notion of style is "fundamentally a
problem of identity" conceived in an "idealized and objective way," whereas

decorum is the principle that regulates the relation of style to matter and audience

and therefore "the superintendency of style." Insofar as style rationalizes the

diversity of the modes of representation and subjects them "to a potential unity"

reflecting the world's order, it regulates the relation of art to the world beyond art,

presenting the objective in the subjective terms of decorum. Here Williams turns

to a probing discussion of the "virtues" that certain paintings, Michelangelo's Last

Judgment, for instance, are said to possess: strength, purity, and so on. Such

paintings discover what Cennini calls "things unseen" — the abstract characters
and ideals, not just the affective valencies, of their subjects. Or, rather, given their

participation in the whole cultural system of presentation and representation, they

discover conceptions and definitions.

The third chapter deals with Lomazzo, Zuccaro, and Tasso's dialogue //

FicinOy and particularly with Zuccaro' s understanding of disegno interno as "an

epistemological principle," as the power — and not a just a power — of the mind
which generates all other rational activity, including our ability to define it as a

power. Given these self-reflective premises, one might question Williams' claim

in his introduction that "the lingering power of idealism" reflects a consciousness

of the fact that "signification is not a natural process but both an arbitrary and a

transcendent — a culturally constructed — one." The Neoplatonic grounds of this
argument would seem to undermine the distinction here between "natural" and

"transcendent," in that the natural participates, however imperfectly, in the tran-

scendent construction (which neither Zuccaro nor his fellow theorists interpreted

as culturally determined). Even so, this chapter clearly sets out the intricate faculty

psychology, especially of the concetto, which undergirds these intricate specula-

tions. This is important precisely because of the theorists' assumption that art

encounters and represents ideas and is itself an idea — that it is an object of
knowledge and yet the ground of epistemology.

The last chapter turns to Francesco Bocchi's youthful but sophisticated essays

on the visual arts, which synthesize Aristotelian and Platonic arguments. Bocchi



Book Reviews / Comptes rendus / 97

emphasizes the role of the viewer, whose experience of a picture "is always

intended to be one of immediate apprehension of the ideal in the real, or of the

universal in the particular" (a response that Williams sees as a variety of Platonic

noesis). The viewer is "possessed by the absolute" and thus "reconstituted" before

being moved to action. Bocchi's reception theory thus nicely complements

Lomazzo's and Zuccaro's concern with the originating artist's possession and

reconstitution.

The book's subtitle eventually comes sharply into focus. Art ceases in the

sixteenth century to be just "a well-defined technique or set of techniques,"

emerging instead as the technique of techniques, the master art, the form of

form-making, metatechne. Correlatively, subjectivity becomes "essentially a the-

oretical subjectivity," since lived experience is now perceived primarily in its

relationship to the ideal. Art as an idealizing play of signifiers becomes the way

in which the humanists define both common humanity and individual identity,
preeminently because they have come to see "all meaning, all knowledge, all

identity" as the products of art.

This is a well written, well conceived, provocative study and will fascinate

those interested in Renaissance thought, and in the art in, and of, that thought.

MICHAEL J. B . ALLEN, UCLA

Sources et fontaines du Moyen Age à l'âge baroque. Actes du colloque tenu à
l'Université Paul Valéry, MontpelHer III, les 28, 29 et 30 novembre 1996. Ed.

l'Equipe d'acceuil Moyen âge-Renaissance-Baroque. Paris, Champion, 1998.
P. 493.

Ces journées d'étude ont permis de mettre en commun les recherches et les
réflexions de 24 communicants, des universités françaises, suisses et allemande et

d'un conservateur du musée du Louvre, sur un objet polymorphe et complexe, les

sources et les fontaines. La double dénomination s'expliquait à la fois par les

variations lexicales importantes du Moyen Âge à l'époque baroque et par le souci
d'inclure explicitement les deux formes de surgissement de l'élément aqueux,

naturel et artificiel. L'édition a distingué trois grands chapitres chronologiques : le

Moyen Age (huit communications portant sur des œuvres littéraires des XII-XIV®
siècles). Renaissance (neuf études portant sur le seul XVP siècle mais faisant place
tant aux fontaines construites qu'aux sources du monde réel nouvellement exploré,
ou aux thèmes et figures littéraires liés aux fontaines), et Âge baroque (sept essais
concernant le XVIP siècle et traitant de la présence du motif dans les jardins réels,
dans les divers genres littéraires — éloquence religieuse, poésie pétrarquisante,
roman courtisan ou galant—dans la pastorale et la musique et dans la mise en scène
d' opéras). Mais si le corpus des objets et des textes se situait entre le XIP et le XVII®