Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting.

Marcia Hall's account of color in Italian Renaissance painting gives priority to practice over theory, and this grounding in close examination of the paintings is surely to be welcomed. The book is divided into five sections, each of which ends with a discussion of paradigmatic examples. Of twenty of these, ten are by artists associated with Florence, four are sixteenth-century Venetians, and one, Jan van Eyck, is Netherlandish. It is essentially a Florentine story, running from Cennini and Alberti, through Leonardo to the Mannerists, which has shaped the author's approach.

The development of color is traced through changing conventions of modeling draperies, whereas the treatment of flesh, landscape and aerial perspective receive little attention. Much can be learned from the author's observations of paintings, which are always informed by the findings of conservators, and there are many sensitive accounts of figures who are not always given their due, such as Perugino and Sebastiano del Piombo. Sebastiano's use of a purplish-grey tint in the intonaco of his Farnesina frescoes is rightly highlighted.

It is the search for a clear line of development which raises difficulties. Much play is made of the shift from "up-modeling," where the full intensity of color is in the shadow, and the lights are desaturated with white, to "down-modeling," where it is the shadows which are desaturated by the addition of black. Such a distinction between pre- and post-Albertian practice does not allow for the many modeling combinations recommended in medieval handbooks that could be termed down-modeling. Flesh had long been painted with a range of pigment mixtures to shade in the darks - the posc of Theophilus and verdaccio of Cennini. By the fourteenth century inhibitions about mixing pigments were certainly on the wane. Dull colors, such as bigio, berrettino, and cinerognolo, are common in Taddeo Gaddi, and if one looks outside Florentine painting, to Vitale da Bologna or Giusto de' Menabuoi or Taddeo di Bartolo, the view that painters before Alberti did not add black to their shadows becomes difficult to sustain.

The root of the critical problem lies in the enduring influence of Vasarian teleology which has lead to an acceptance of the progression from medieval "absolute" color to the "tonal unity" of Leonardo as inevitable. The variety of practices in late medieval painting in Italy are not all comprehended in Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte, invaluable as he may be as a source. Dazzled by Leonardo's notebooks, it is still too readily assumed that Leonardo's treatment of color is explained in terms of an advance in naturalism, rather than having to do with a socially conditioned set of choices. Once we interrogate Vasarian prejudices - such as that bright colors hurt the eye - the reasons why High Renaissance color developed in one direction rather than another is laid open to new kinds of historical and anthropological interpretation. Definitions of vulgarity as opposed to gentilezza had as much effect on attitudes to color as developments in technique or the knowledge of optics.

The most rewarding part of Hall's book is the central chapter, entitled "The Modes of Coloring in the Cinquecento." She argues that in the High Renaissance there evolved four systems of coloring, each demonstrated by a major master: sfumato (Leonardo), chiaroscuro (later Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo), unione (Raphael), and cangiantismo (Michelangelo). Painters who followed, such as Beccafumi, would choose whichever of these modes was most appropriate to their subject. Some readers will question the demarcations between the modes that Hall proposes, and others will point out that they are not explicitly categorized in sixteenth-century criticism, but provided these limitations are recognized, then they do offer a useful set of tools.

What Hall intends by "meaning" in the book's title is puzzling. I would suggest that some of the difficulty arises from isolating the history of color in painting from color in other manufactures and materials, such as glass, ceramics, textiles, and marbles. If some allusion to them were included in the discussion it would become easier to track how the meaning of color relates to material and value. How significant this might be is hinted at in a mention of the revival of gilding in late Quattrocento painting in Rome and its possible relation to the Golden House of Nero. There are other asides which point to the importance of the antique, both as style and material. It is a pity that the structure of the book, based on a progression of painters, prevented this topic from being followed up.

Paul Hills UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK