The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist.

Martin Warnke undertakes the reevaluation of the artist in early modern society by overturning "the bourgeois revision of history undertaken in the last century [that] identified the cities and their citizens as the true promoters of culture and artistic creativity, while the courts were seen as enclaves of a restrictive cultural policy" (xvi). He notes the tenacious view in art history, despite the attention and multiple exhibitions given over to court art and culture, "that the autonomous consciousness of art and artists was one of the great achievements of the city culture of the Renaissance . . . where the guilds, as the social organ of a new secular artistic culture, were held to have played a part in giving expression to a new civic consciousness. The economic rise of the urban middle class was accompanied by the rise of the artist, who then sought to free himself from the guild in order to promote the full flowering of the middle class genius" (xiii). The introduction quickly traces the historiography of such a persistent view, from its emergence after the French Revolution to the modern avant-garde, in order for the author to set out the methodological premises of his study of the court in the late middle ages and early modern period in Europe as a mediating institution in the production of art and in the development of the role of the artist.

This translation follows the original 1985 German edition of Hofkunstler. Zur Vorgeschicte des modernen Kunstlers, and should be seen together with the author's earlier 1973 Bau und Uberbau, which includes material related to the present "Part I: The artist between city and court." Warnke's approach to the study of court culture is sweeping in its chronological, geographical, and bibliographical breadth. While this is liberating in its erasure of overdrawn distinctions between medieval and Renaissance periods, of privileging southern Europe, particularly Italy and more especially Florence, and in introducing a fascinating range of sources, it sometimes suffers from generalizations and fragmentation of topics. (The bibliography has not been updated from the original edition; for student use it would have been helpful also to have added references to English translations.) The book's layout reflects an attempt both to provide a readable narrative, yet retain a wealth of accumulated examples; this is done through the unusual expedient of interpolating a secondary text in smaller typeface, rather than overextending the footnotes.

Part I defines civic and court organization of art, the latter model developing from conditions produced by the luxury trade at the Burgundian court. Political divisions were reflected for artists not only in tangible forms of privileges attainable at court, such as freedom from membership in urban craft guilds, but on a theoretical level in terms of the art they were asked to produce: "an increasing divorce between 'high' intellectual art and simple, popular, didactic art" (17). One of Warnke's main premises for the attitude with which "we look upon art as a higher spiritual or intellectual faculty" (xiii) follows on the association of the court artist as practitioner of the liberal arts, a condition appropriate to inclusion in the princely familia, and sanctioned by classical antecedents.

"Part 2: Artists at court" explores their roles and the implications that an enhanced status at court has had for subsequent notions of the profession. In a brief, but stimulating, final chapter, "A look back in anger," Warnke anticipates the claim of modern artists as outsiders: though dependent on market forces, "they retained their former consciousness of a higher destiny for the arts," and it is the authority inherited from the court artist that entitles them to "view society from the outside" (259).

Tracy E. Cooper TEMPLE UNIVERSITY