Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700.

The admirable "central aim" of this ambitious but unsuccessful book "is to restore and reorient our sense of the essential reciprocity of the relation between image and text at the root . . . of modern Western culture at large" (13). To this end, Braider argues that the naturalism of northern Renaissance and baroque painting undermined the belief in allegory necessary to sustain an "ut pictura poesis" conception of art and thereby paved the way for modernist "analyses of the possibilities and constraints embedded in the actual material medium" (251) of painting and literature. The argument turns on the author's presupposition that naturalistic representation was incompatible with spiritual and intellectual meaning simply because holy and allegorical figures were not part of "demotic" visual experience.

Braider arranges his eight chapters chronologically and claims to present a historical development. But he explicitly disavows discussing works in light of their intended purposes (e.g., 69). Instead, he interprets Bruegel through William Carlos Williams, Holbein through Cervantes, and Vermeer through Descartes. This approach permits Braider to present Jan Steen as a satirical painter who undermined the ostensive Calvinist moralism of his pictorial themes through his attention to sensuous detail and his inclusion of comic figures. Most often, however, this disregard for historical context leads to trouble. A full chapter is devoted to Alberti's statement that "we will use una piu grassa Minerva" when discussing mathematical things (such as surfaces) in the commentary On Painting. Braider lambastes John Spencer for "putting words in Alberti's mouth" (21), because his translation ("a more sensate wisdom") "elides the interesting personification." But Braider never researched what kind of person Renaissance humanists thought Minerva was. Instead, twisting Alberti's sentence, he concludes: "Alberti wants to paint Minerva, a spirit-being . . . [but] winds up with something fatter, fleshier, more 'sensate' and thus no goddess at all" (36). Such reliance on modern assumptions instead of historical research and such failure to respect the contexts of the passages and works he treats is sadly characteristic of Braider's book. Consequently his account of the development of what he terms the nature of forms of picturing (3) is reduced to a series of abstract generalizations about the ontological status of things in painting and literature.

The value of books like this lies in the accuracy of generalization and the cogency of example. Here Braider's book comes up short. He is prone to half-true formulations and misguided readings. He cites the medieval paradoxical analogy of God to a mystic circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere as evidence that God "remains the very paragon of finite as opposed to infinite form: . . . [and] pre-fifteenth-century art displays the horror vacui implicit in this circular plentitude" (54). Few of the parallels between art and literature are successful because Braider fails to show precisely what is visual and hence pictorial in the texts he quotes.

Nor are Braider's analyses of painting convincing. He interprets Rembrandt's Louvre painting of a philosopher meditating by an open window as "ekphrastically refiguring" (199) Plato's Myth of the Cave, because "in the context of the general theme of the philosopher, especially given the dark, vaulted, cavelike character of the room, allusion to Plato seems inevitable" (209). The discussion of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden borders on parody. Generalizations about their sense of space leads Braider to the otherwise unsupported conclusion: "Jan prefers vertical panels that favor powerful recessive movements lifting the eye up and out toward the horizon, while Rogier inclines to horizontal ones that draw it across rather than through the plane, developing compositional rhythms recalling the scanning motion of reading" (56-57). Five paintings by Rogier are reproduced, and four of them have vertical panels. But Braider dismisses this as an exception to "the Rogierian rule" (68).

Some of Braider's positions are attractive, but his book is marred by scanty research, poor historical sense, and a weakness of vision.

Jack M. Greenstein UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO