Defining the Renaissance "Virtuosa": Women Artists and Language of Art History and Criticism.

Fredrika H. Jacobs, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 32 pls. + xii + 229 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-521-57270-3.

These books make ambitious inquiries into sixteenth-century Italian art theory; they have, in common, a desire to determine what is meant by the terminology that theoreticians used and how such art theory relates to other systems of knowledge organization. Both books look backwards and forwards, drawing upon the ancient frameworks that propelled much Renaissance thought as well as making claims about the importance of sixteenth-century theory to the subsequent development of the discipline of art history.

Williams, in what he calls an epistemological project, seeks to place texts by Vasari, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, Tasso, Francesco Bocchi, and others, into a "larger process of cultural formation and rationalization" (2). To do this he looks closely at the terms and arguments employed by these writers, especially their underpinnings in ancient philosophy. Overall his stated intent is to move away from explanations of Renaissance art based in naturalistic or scientific inquiry or on representational technique.

He begins with a theoretical introduction - setting out his overarching thesis - and then supports it in four chapters, each exploring individual texts or groups of texts. He starts with an analysis of Vasari's concept of disegno, focus of much post-Vasarian theoretical rumination. For Williams, Vasari's disegno provides a model for seeing what is there and for conceptualizing what is not yet made. It is a skill and a way of thinking and one that can, moreover, serve not just for the production and reception of art, but for all forms of knowledge. This is important because the author claims that - through texts like Vasari's - art came to be understood as a "superintendency of knowledge," i.e. a "mode of knowing that necessarily involves a mastery of other modes and is distinguished by being potentially, ideally, a mastery of all modes"(4). Art - as defined by these sixteenth-century theoreticians - provides a new model for representation, a key in organizing knowledge.

Because the written word has authority in discourses separate from those in which works of art themselves participated, central to Williams's project is his thesis that it is this literature that documents the redefinition of art in these terms as the distinctive achievement of the Renaissance.

To pinpoint the meanings of terms used by art theoreticians, he compares how several writers outside the field of art use some of the same terms. His erudition in art theory, intellectual history, and ancient philosophy, is evident, but his investigations take place in an abstract realm and largely internally within the specialized literature. I would have appreciated much more of an orientation to how he uses terms like "culture," "representation," and "absolute": the footnotes refer almost exclusively to scholarship in art history, although these terms have been the subject of intense interdisciplinary debate.

If these are the claims for art of the humanist high culture of Renaissance Italy, then Fredrika Jacobs traces the margins. She mines many of the same sources as Williams, but explores instead how Vasari, Lomazzo and other sixteenth-century theoreticians position women artists within the definitions of art and artist they forged. In this book she seeks specifically to spell out the patterns that govern the designation and description of women artists and their achievements.

She notes, regarding the sample group of 40 women artists she has located, that - significantly - the amount of written text about them is often inversely proportional to the number of known works, the most remarkable such case being that of Irene di Spilimbergo, about whom there is a large collection of laudatory poems, but no remaining works.

To describe the fully fledged artist, Jacobs invokes the term virtuosa, the feminine of virtuoso, a variant of virtu. Virtuoso was a frequently used word - derived from vir (a male person) - by sixteenth-century theoreticians to describe artistic talent and worth.

Women artists are routinely compared exclusively with other women artists, or with other women - historical or mythological - whatever their achievement, within closed rhetorical systems. As is the case in other writings, she finds that those women artists who achieved real fame or professional success are - like their sisters in other public arenas - invariably assigned an exceptional position: they transcend the role expected of them and operate as "honorary men." She searches for an intellectual ground for breaking out of the limits of the binary systems that obtained in this period, such as the Pythagorean contrarities, of which gender differentiation was a constituitive force. She argues that, for a time in the sixteenth century, there was space outside of the oppositional categories with which gender was intextricably bound, but here the evidence is meagre.

In her thematically arranged chapters she considers problems in gendered models that inform artistic production and reception. Key here are metaphors of procreation, and the gendered roles of form and matter in scientific thought. She also considers the critical model that first describes women artists themselves as objects of beauty, rather than as creators of beautiful objects. Here she investigates particularly the term grazia, which, like virtu, is difficult to pin down. She notes its usage both in theological and graeco-roman mythological terms, and makes the significant point that it is generally a relational concept grace is something that is bestowed or something that someone perceives in or assigns to a person.

Also significant is the pattern she notices for women artists being praised as portrait painters, but not for any other category of art. Upon further investigation, she finds that the praise meted out for achievement in portraiture is faint. It acknowledges a capacity "to portray" (ritrarre), a sense-based skill less taxing than "to imitate" (imitare), which requires the filtering power of intellect.

Only Sofonisba Anguissola receives, from Vasari, the kind of praise that he otherwise reserves for male artists, in calling the subjects of her portraits, "truly alive." But when Vasari wrote, she was in the employ of the Spanish court, occupying a position that he couldn't dismiss.

SHEILA FFOLLIOTT George Mason University