Renaissance Florence, The Art of the 1470s.

Patricia Lee Rubin and Alison Wright, Renaissance Florence, The Art of the 1470s

London and New Haven: Yale University Press for National Gallery Publications, 1999. 352 pp. incl. 50 b/w + 230 color illus.. $50. ISBN: 0-300-08171-5.

This handsome and intelligent book, the exemplary catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Gallery in London from October 20, 1999 to January 16, 2000, explores the active interplay among artists and media in Florence in the 1470s. Seeking to redress the regrettable, anachronistic divorce of painting from the decorative arts, sculpture, and even the drawings on which all artistic enterprise in the Renaissance so thoroughly depended, the authors have produced introductory essays and catalogue entries (some contributed as well by Nicholas Penny) that reintegrate the arts and artistic production into a convincingly dynamic whole. They demonstrate remarkable crossovers among the arts, bringing the actual process of art-making alive.

The catalogue entries are preceded by three general essays that are admirably incisive and succinct, the sort of well-informed and broad ranging presentations that are of great and necessary service to the museum-going public and undergraduate students. "Florence in the 1470s" surveys political and historical events before offering a panorama of art and architecture in the city. "Patrons and Projects" lays out the role Lorenzo the Magnificent played as arbiter of taste and then explores the great range of private and public patronage situations on which artists depended. It ends with a tantalizing discussion of private building, unfortunately left unexplored in the exhibition itself. Artists and Workshops" discusses guild practices, contracts, and the day-to-day operation of multi-media workshops, followed by sketch biographies of the chief artists active in the city and represented in the exhibition. Pride of place is given to the workshops of Verrocchio and the Pollaiuolo brothers, undisputedly the most int erdisciplinary in the city and the subject of major sections of the exhibition. Sculptors like Antonio Rossellino, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Maiano, who have regularly been cited in prior discussions of the interaction of the arts, are given somewhat short shrift, but then this exhibition took as its point of departure the painting collections of the National Gallery, for which these artists had less importance.

The catalogue entries are divided into seven sections. "The Art of the 1470s" is particularly wide-ranging, including not only works by such expected artists as Botticelli, Leonardo, and the Verrocchio workshop, but splendid manuscripts and ancient objects owned by Lorenzo de' Medici, among the most highly prized and significant works in the visual culture of the time. Two sections on Verrocchio and his workshop secure that artist's reputation as the central figure of the decade. Not only do we see him interacting with his bright young assistants, Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo da Vinci, but the catalogue entries fully reveal the intelligent dialogues he held with himself and his own works, especially as his thinking moved from drawing to modeling in terracotta to painting and back again. It should be noted that the authors constantly revisit their main themes in the catalogue entries, developing ideas and unraveling the creative process in such a way as to make each a pleasure to read. These are true mini-ess ays and explorations of the ideas they presented in their introductory chapters.

Two further sections of catalogue entries, largely devoted to the Pollaiuolo brothers, significantly complement the Verrocchio entries, demonstrating alternative working methods, moods, and media (especially prints, metals, and enamels). Exploring themes absent from Verrocchio's oeuvre (e.g. Hercules, violent athletic activity) and documenting interactions with the arts of embroidery and printmaking complicates and enriches the story. "Sacred Beauty" moves well beyond the characteristically lovely Madonnas of the period, exploring both intimate devotional objects and what the authors rightly call "the spectacle of devotion" (288), primarily works associated with the Adoration of the Magi.

The final section of catalogue entries, "The Beautiful Chamber," clinches the authors' argument, including the widest range of media and subjects seen anywhere in the exhibition: carved, painted, and gilt cassoni, a wooden mirror frame, luster-ware maiolica, painted and carved portraits, a devotional tondo, panel paintings of mythological subjects (some of which were certainly intended for furniture), and engravings. This was the art of the 1470s: various, addressed to a wide range of audiences, created for numerous specific purposes, and informed by constant and fruitful interactions among the arts. All readers should be extremely grateful to Rubin and Wright for having assembled this material so sensitively and evocatively.