Michael Jeanneret. Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne.

Trans. Nidra Poller. (Parallax Re-Visions of Culture and Society.) Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xii + 320 pp. illus, bibl. indexes. $49.95. ISBN: 0-8018-6480-1.

In this sublunar world of ours, where everything is in constant change and flux, one cannot bathe twice in the same water of a running stream. If this sounds flat and not at all original, do not bother to read this book. If, on the other hand, a very personal thesis, an intellectual and verbal tour-de-force of interpretation on the subject of the vision of flux in the Renaissance appeals to you, grab a copy of it. The connecting thread, the common denominator, that binds together the different essays ranging in scope from cartography to artistic inspiration, from linguistic theory to theology is, as the title says, perpetual change and its corollary, continuous transformation. The idea that only in the sixteenth century (actually around 1480) people began questioning the reality of reality, and to turn away from the dogmatic certainties of Thomism will seem simplistic to Renaissance specialists, but this is what the author wants us to believe. The period and the area taken into consideration, contrary to what the title promises, cover only a part, and perhaps not the most interesting one, of the Renaissance. Curiously missing are, among others, the contributions of Spain, Germany, and England, to what was a European, and not specifically French, intellectual and artistic renewal. The reader is treated to large doses of Du Bartas, Ronsard, Rabelais, and Montaigne, as if they, and only they, represent and typify the protean urge of the time. For good measure Jeanneret throws in a bit of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Piero di Cosimo, and the pan-European Erasmus, but it seems that they are there only to provide a continental flavor. For the most part these protagonists are overwhelmed by what can only be described as a Francocentric understanding of culture that would have pleased even De Gaulle.

Notwithstanding the copiousness and the variety of literary, artistic, and religious references the book suffers because too often these references are bent, compressed, and squeezed into a straightjacket of homogeneity in which the rich diversity of the originals, their different and contrasting voices, are forced into a monotonous uniformity. Over and over again the only means used to verify the validity of a proposition is subjective interpretation, and in the short run this becomes tedious and enervating. The wealth of Latin phrases--"hic et nunc," and "natura naturans" are his favorites--or of verbal acrobatics--"the immensity of the central point" (84) is only a tiny sample--after a short while leave the reader longing for a simple, clear phrase, with a direct, clear meaning. What would otherwise be the pleasure and excitement of reading a study on the topic of perpetual change is put to the test by a series of questionable conclusions that steadily chisel away the patience of the reader. For instance, the most tender, elegiac, melancholic poem by Ronsard, "Comme on void sur la branche au mois de May la rose" strangely becomes for Jeanneret nothing more than another proof that in nature "where everything is reborn" the body of Marie can be at the same time dead and alive (38).

The book is stimulating by default and in a very strange way since often, too often, its questionable utterances trigger in the reader a rapid search for alternative, more acceptable, interpretations. True, the author is cautious enough to precede his most abstruse suggestions with a "possibly" or an "it is possible" but the whole results in an intellectual construction based on very shaky foundations. Is, for example, Leonardo's sfumato really a by-product of Neoplatonism (267)? Was the Renaissance artist "fed on the spectacle of death" and his culture flowering "in a field fed with cadavers" (96)? Is Michelangelo's non finito a product of his awareness of the "tragic, insurmountable hiatus between the beauty of the ideal and the imperfection of opaque matter" (227)? Or more prosaically, taking historical factors into consideration, was the nonfinito of the Julius Tomb the inevitable result of financial overstretching and of contingent changes such as the change of mind first, and then the death of Julius II? Was Ronsard truly a pantheist or it is simply the theological imprecision of the author that makes him so? Many scholars of the Renaissance will take issue with the ideas presented in this book. One can only wish that the author had made a judicious use of Ockham's razor. It would have simplified matters and made the work less ponderous, more agile and nimble, and, all-in-all, more convincing.

NORBERTO MASSI

Rhode Island School of Design