The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style.

Hellmut Wohl. The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii + 8 color pls. + 376 pp. $85. ISBN: 0-521-57064-6.

"In this study, my objective is to suggest ways of reframing the stylistic history of Italian Renaissance art by questioning generally held assumptions about its evolution and revising them in view of what the evidence of the period itself, visual as well as textual, reveals" (1). With this statement, Hellmut Wohl launches his reevaluation of the aesthetic standards of the Italian Renaissance. For Wohl, the evidence emphatically points to a period concern for ornament and surface decoration -- for visual sensation -- rather than an assumed preoccupation with scientific and spatial rendition. Wohl's interpretation finds support in contemporary descriptions, the revival of classical rhetoric and its preference for ornamentation, and in an examination of the totality of Renaissance art to include stained glass, tapestry, intarsie, stuccos, tile work, and mosaic -- visual genre too often ignored in the past.

Wohl notes that "the modernist repudiation of ornament as aesthetically corrupt had a profound impact on perceptions and judgments of the art and architecture of the past. On the one hand, it led to an unprecedented interest in the geometric, unornamented art of Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca; on the other, it cast a long shadow over the appreciation of the decorative ornate dimensions of Italian Renaissance art" (60). The modernist eye, following the rule of "form follows function" admired, for instance, the clarity and severity of Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, forgetting that contemporaries appreciated that building more for (in the words of Niccolo de' Carissimi) its "porphyry and glass and various marbles" (155). The altered vision of post-modernism has permitted an integration of such appraisals into our conception of the Renaissance aesthetic (and, perhaps, made the publication of such a book as this possible).

Wohl's gentle polemic represents a masterful synthesis and utilization of an extensive scholarship centering around the antiquity-inspired painting style originating in Rome during the last decades of the fifteenth century. He provides a new interpretation of the roles played by such masters as Filippino Lippi and Pinturicchio and a new appreciation for such "lesser luminaries" of the early Cinquecento as Amico Apertini and Jacopo Ripanda.

Despite the attention most textbooks and art historical studies give to the narrative depictions of the Renaissance masters, it would seem that contemporaries often gave pride of place to such matters as ornateness, considering embellishment and general richness of major import -- surface qualities many prefer to associate more with the decorative tastes of the International Gothic. There was, of course, good ancient precedent for the sort of "superficial" delight Wohl attaches to his interpretation of the primary Renaissance concern. After all, it was Plato who said (Convivium, 5) that "some regard beauty as an arrangement of component parts, or to use their own words, commensurability and proportion. ... We do not accept their view because this kind of arrangement occurs only in composites and, therefore, no simple thing can be beautiful. However pure colors, lights, separate sounds, the glitter of gold and silver, knowledge, the soul, are all called beautiful and all are pure and simple."

According to Wohl, far less value in the Renaissance was accorded to such "scientific" features as perspective and spatial integrity than we have believed. Wohl challenges (84-86) the assumption that once Brunelleschi had demonstrated linear perspective, paintings were regarded as spatial continua rather than, in the words of Vasari, "planes covered with fields of paint." For Wohl, Italian Renaissance painting was not "a picture window into space." Based upon his interpretation of relevant texts, Wohl's conclusion is that the primary purpose of perspective was not to record space but to render the objects in it in relief, noting that Renaissance writers did not speak of space but of the objects (in that space) which could be seen in various perspectives. Wohl points to a general disjunction between figures and setting in Renaissance representations: "the undue emphasis that scholars of Renaissance painting, from Panofsky to Martin Kemp, have placed upon linear perspective has obscured the fact that, visually , the compositional structure and coherence of Renaissance paintings depends to a greater extent on tone, color, and light than on their perspective construction" (100). The author's point is well taken, yet even if the Renaissance artist (and his patron) had a primary "objective" aim, his method of associating the objects he depicted was distinctly different from that of his medieval counterpart. Even if the function of Renaissance perspective was not spatial, the individual objects represented were linked together within a new coherency.

As has been the case with so much of the current discourse on the aesthetics of Italian Renaissance art, this volume takes off from Michael Baxandall's now classic Painting and Experience in Renaissance Italy. Wohl draws close and clever attention to the way in which writers of the period chose the words by which they described the arts and in what contexts they evaluated them, especially the distinctions they drew between the words rilievo (the illusion of roundness) and ornato (the elements of formal embellishment) and the additional impact of the features of classicism and realism. In an age of contextualization and hyperhistoricism, Wohl's affirmation of "pictorial problems" and formalistic concerns is as refreshing as is his particular thesis that ornato must be considered alongside of (if not ahead of) rilievo.

Wohl organizes his arguments around a centerpiece chapter devoted to the ornate classical style. Three chapters dedicated to Renaissance style, to ornato, and to rilievo lead up to it and from it flow three sections on materials, on ornament, and on transformations. An intriguing element in Wohl's discussion of the way in which relief was coloristically achieved by Renaissance painters is found in his second chapter. For those of us still concerned about the veracity of the Sistine Chapel restorations, his brief but careful reading of the "hue-shift" tradition in Italian painting will be thought-provoking (81).

Throughout, the text presents a methodically constructed effort to refocus our visual evaluation of the varied arts of the Renaissance and to encourage us to see the works from the actual standpoint of those for whom it was intended. At each juncture in his argument, Wohl carefully states his objectives and the course he will follow. The text, however, does not make for a quick and easy read; it is somewhat Panofskian in its apparatus and encumbered by lengthy quotations in Italian, German, and Latin, as well as by frequent parenthetical translation clarifications. The tangential digressions (i.e., on the Poliphilo Master, 138-40), while interesting, prove somewhat distracting. While the wealth of information presented on such matters as attributions, patronage issues, and stylistic and chronological details will serve as a convenient resource for the specialist, they do detract somewhat from the thematic unity of Wohl's presentation and might better have been presented in article format. Yet for those inter ested in seeing the totality of the Renaissance vision, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art is well worth the effort. The endnotes are substantial and, often, quite illuminating, and the bibliography offers evidence of the author's wide-ranging and thorough knowledge of the pertinent literature from the familiar to the more obscure.