Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages: Studies in Society and Visual Culture. (Reviews).

Jean C. Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages: Studies in Society and Visual Culture.

University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. xvi + 256 pp. $65. ISBN: 0-271-01653-1.

Dr. Wilson's thorough, learned publication is devoted to a relatively thankless undertaking, that of searching through the contents of Bruges archives, abounding in names, places, and dates, for significant correlations between such tempting, if raw, data with the relatively sparse surviving works of art. In some ways she has necessarily followed upon Lorne Campbell's key article "The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century," Burlington Magazine, CXVIII, 1976, and the fine studies of Jellie Dyjkstra. But Campbell's fundamental study went about as far as one could go in terms of establishing a viable mise-en-scene for a somewhat elusive subject. What Wilson has had to do in order to make a book out of a necessarily fugitive area, is to resort to the injection of an almost indigestible amount of theory and supposition. Like most such publications with similar inherent problems, it necessarily tells the reader more about the writer and his or her Weltanschauung than about the putative cha racter of the publication's fugitive area.

The problem with the author's perspective is that her book and mind-set are so relentlessly Bruges centered that there is relatively little awareness of the remarkable similarities between that international mercantile city, its society and its artists, and those in analogous communities such as Nuremberg, Cologne, Venice, or even Florence. All of these extraordinarily prosperous cosmopolitan trade cities, though several were putatively republics, are marked by a perpetually upwardly mobile, unusually ambitious commercial class. These merchant-would-be-princes shared almost exactly the same social imperatives.

Wilson's omnivorous assimilation of cultural theories, these a relatively recent and needed addition to classical Kunstgeschichte and its narrow connoisseurship, include the Goldthwaitian (her "Culture of Display", the Annalian or the Montian, along with many other contextually re-oriented points of view, usually lead to startlingly similar results.

"Vivre Noblement" is the title of the first section of her Part I, "The Desire for Painting," the second half dealing with "Painting and the Popularization of Vivre Noblement" yet identical social aspirations and their implementation are true too for all socially ambitious Monsieur or Madame or Herr and Frau or Signore and Signora Gotrocks (most notably the Medici), all striving in parallel fashion to avail themselves of the prerogatives of bluer blood reflected in fancier lifestyles. By marriage, cultural acquisition, moving to better neighborhoods, building more lavish houses, employing all the other methods used since time immemorial, art fills the same function. Climbers' ladders must necessarily be more or less the same from Lascaux to today, so there is very little that is unique to Bruges' cultural situation.

What Wilson deems phenomena (6) seem to this reviewer to be the most predictable of middle class "monkey see, monkey do" emulation of social "superiors." There is an endearing naivete to Dr. Wilson's scientificization of the most obvious rules of human behavior, for which none of the perceptive, patient analysis of the Annales School need be applied.

Similarly, the author's extensive, complex consideration of "Replication" in Part II -- "From representation to replication" was common to all art centers with best-selling formulae eagerly sought after by an art buying public. "Multiples" and copies prevail whenever demand exceeds supply. This copy-cat process, using a theme with several variations, was as true for the Bellini studio and its many followers, as for the Perugino circle, and for works by the Cologne artist formerly known as Lochner as it was for Bruges.

Dr. Wilson seems surprised that drawings were highly prized by workshops (192) but great value placed upon the model books and cartoons, with related material, is, once again, prevalent throughout the West. She refers to Lorne Campbell's seminal articles on aspects of art production in the Netherlands and, of course, these are fundamental to her study. So too are the discoveries of Jellie Dijkstra, the source for much of Wilson's "The Production of Replications [sic]: The Visual Evidence," all these and many more acknowledged in her exhaustive bibliography.

Thorough study of Bruges' art market ("Documentary Evidence of Painter's Workshop Practicers and Methods of Reproducton," Chapter Four) is a helpful presentation of a well documented subject. Yet the marketplace with its booths-- the Pand--is less significant than it might seem as the city's leading painter, Gerard David, eschewed it (195). Since so many of the other exhibitors' oeuvres remain unidentified (194) it is difficult to draw any satisfactory conclusions as to the nature of the Bruges Pandt.

In her fifth and last chapter "The rise of a mass market for painting," Wilson once again returns to the middle class copying the nobility. But the latter had relatively little use for painting (as Wilson surely knows), goldsmiths' work and tapestry were ever the daunting, costly, readily portable media of choice.