The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop.

The Craft of Art is a collection of essays that attempt to unravel the often complex relationship between mental and manual aspects of image-making, a subject initially the topic of an exhibition held at the Georgia Museum of Art where the papers were first presented.

The impetus for such an inquiry stems, at base, from the Burckhardtian notion that, for the first time since antiquity man had come to view himself as an individual, as a singular, creative being whose unique characteristics distinguished him from all those around him. Such a notion had, however, gained currency long before Burckhardt made his famous claim, finding expression in Giorgio Vasari's influential treatise, The Lives of the Artists (1568) where the topos of the solitary genius figured prominently in his history of art. Recently, however, scholars have begun to redress the concept of self-determinism and, in its place, have proposed a dialectical definition of human endeavor that emphasizes the intersubjective nature of man and his products. It is in keeping with this revisionist spirit that the present scholars confront the relationship between art and its apparent opposite, industry, exploring the connection between inventiveness and artistic collaboration, pedagogy, workshop practice, imitation, and appropriation.

Of particular interest is the article by Paul Barolsky, "The Artist's Hand," which discusses the artist's own burgeoning awareness of personal style, a concept that depends as much upon his manual as his intellectual involvement in his work. Thus, for Barolsky, originality remains inextricable from industry, that is, from the actual physical process of making. Recommended too is the essay by William Wallace, "Instruction and Originality in Michelangelo's Drawings," which explores the relationship between master and pupil (Antonio Mini) and which demonstrates how an imaginative piece of work can emerge from a routine, pedagogical exercise. Also of importance is Malcolm Campbell's "Volterrano and the Role of Imitatio in the Seventeenth-Century Practice of Art in Florence," which reexamines the dynamics of emulation, maintaining that the imitative process is one that finds explicit approbation in the writings of Vasari, whose work otherwise functions as a panegyric to the notion of individuality.

But despite their consistently high quality, the essays in this collection have far from fully explored the issues at hand, neglecting the more philosophical aspects of craft in art and tradition in originality. Rather than working together to form the basis of the creative act, these dyadic structures reveal image-making to be a dissimulative process, one whose integrity and sense of balance is threatened by an intrusive Other. While this disjunctiveness is contained within all human endeavor, it is perhaps most evident in the visual arts where the object serves as a record of such dialectical encounters. In this manner, the creative process can be seen, first and foremost, as a function of desire where individuality and industry pursue each other in an endless and shifting struggle for power.

PAULA CARABELL Arkansas State University