The Literature of Classical Art, 2 vols.

Franciscus Junius. Ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl. 2 pls. + lxxxii + 418 pp. Vol. 2: A Lexicon of Artists and Their Works: Catalogus Architectorum . . . Ed. and trans. Kelth Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl. viii + 611 pp. (California Studies in the History of Art, 22.) Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991. $195.

It would be difficult to think of another Renaissance polymath so influential in his own time, so important to the subsequent history of scholarship, and yet so little studied himself, as Francis Junius the Younger (1591-1677). Today Junius is recognized most widely among medievalists as a pioneering student of Gothic and Old English manuscripts: among many other philological projects, he published the Old English Genesis A and B texts in 1655, and ten years later dual versions of the four gospels in Old English and Gothic, with a Gothic glossary of his own compilation. The large parchment folios containing the Genesis A and B and three other crucial Old English poems -- Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan --are known to us as the Junius manuscript in honor of the virtual founder of Anglo-Saxon studies.

In his own lifetime, however, and for the next century, Junius' reputation--not only in England, where he served as librarian to the Earl of Arundel for the twenty years before the civil war, but across Europe--rested on the authority of his De pictura veterum (Amsterdam, 1637), republished in Junius' own English translation soon after a On the Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638). Just as Junius' lifelong researches laid the foundation of the modern disciplines of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon philology, this book marks the beginning of the systematic study of classical art. Hailed at its appearance by no less a celebrity than Rubens, the De pictura stood as the standard work on the art of antiquity until Winckelmann, who made extensive use of Junius' evidence in writing his own Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums in 1764. Such was Junius' enduring influence that in 1766 Lessing regarded him as a still formidable opponent, arguing in the Laocoon that much of the critical confusion of painting and poetry stemmed from Junius' practice, in the tradition of ut pictura poesis, of loosely applying to the visual arts quotations from classical authorities speaking of rhetoric or poetics.

The Latin text of the De Pictura was published in a new edition at Rotterdam in 1694 by the German classical scholar J. G. Graevius. Graevius prefixed to it a life of Junius, from which we learn that the author was also a pioneer of aerobic fitness, maintaining his robust health into very old age by jogging in the morning or, on rainy days, running up and down the stairs of his house. Graevius also appended Junius' Catalogus, an alphabetical list, published by him for the first time, of ancient architects, painters, sculptors and other artisans from Aaron to Zosimus, together with a notation for each of the works attributed to him in the literary sources, and including also works by anonymous artists and such generic entries as "Alexandrian tapestries" or "Campanian dishes." The 1638 English version of The Painting of the Ancients has been available in a 1972 facsimile from Gregg, but the two monumental volumes under review here represent the first critical edition of Junius including the Catalogus in three hundred years. Few scholarly projects could be longer overdue--and fewer could be so meticulously accomplished.

This edition was already years in the making when the lead editor, Keith Aldrich, died in 1978; another fourteen years were to go into the work before its appearance under the hand of the two surviving editors, Philipp and Raina Fehl. The first volume contains Junius' English text of 1638, exhaustively annotated, with a long introduction and five appendices including a very useful glossary of Junius' rhetorical terms in praise of art. The Painting of the Ancients is in fact a compendium rather than a narrative history, a cento of quotations gathered under general headings from the "beginnings of Picture," to the "diverse means tending to the advancement of this Art," to the "maine grounds of Art"--invention, color, action, disposition and "grace"--that brought the old artificers "nearer to the height of perfection" (1:9). With such a text the indispensable editorial task, here carried through with a fortitude of scholarly endurance to match Junius' own, is to document the sources and contexts of the authors' profuse citations.

Volume two contains an English translation by the editors, likewise scrupulously annotated, of the Latin text of the Catalogus as it appeared in the 1694 Graevius edition. It is rounded off by four separate indices to the two volumes, the first of which, the "Index Locorum Antiquorum," itself runs to nearly fifty pages and shows at a glance all of Junius' references to a particular classical authority.

All future work on Junius, whether from the point of view of classical scholarship, the discourse of art history, or the career of aesthetic theory, will not only depend on this edition but will be virtually unimaginable without it. It may seem ungenerous to quibble in the face of such an Herculean achievement, but two reservations are unavoidable.

The first is a disappointing introduction, which, although it duly marshals all the facts, otherwise occupies itself with effusions over the brilliance of Junius' work and the moral strength of his character, and ends with a curious if heartfelt encomium on Junius' role in demonstrating the "potential of the arts for good and evil" even in such "bad times" as our own, when "academic theory. . . has "often deteriorated into sanctimoniousness, inflexibility, and sheer mouthing dullness" (I:lxxxi). Improbably a faint shadow of the Holocaust seems to fall over these pages on Junius' "timelessness," which poise the dignity of art against the "realities of survival" in an age like our own when "wars tore at the heart of civilized Europe," and which remind us that Junius was "the child of a refugee and in his middle age a refugee himself" when he returned to Holland in the 1640's (I:lxxx).

All this fritters away an opportunity these diligent editors have amply earned by their labors to set an agenda for future critical work on Junius that might succeed in being unsanctimonious, flexible, and sharp. Wherein lies the imaginative interest and power of Junius' text, which attempts, as it were blindly and even paradoxically, to reconstruct a whole lost world of art on the basis of its traces in the literary record? In the short view, what cultural conditions in the Stuart court led to the production of such a text at just such a particularly fertile moment in the history of patronage, connoisseurship, and the interchange of poets and painters? Of what significance is it that Junius' whole project began in Arundel's desire to "put together what information ancient literature could provide to help in studying and, above all, identifying and evaluating" the Earl's hoped-for acquisitions (I:xxxvii), and that the Catalogus itself may have been intended in part as a shopping list to be carried by Arundel's agents on the prowl for antiquities in Greece and Asia Minor? In the long view, how is this founding moment in the history of art history to be reassessed on the basis of the fuller textual picture presented here? The key questions are left for others to ask.

The second reservation concerns the sticker-shock price of the two volumes: hefty and slip-covered, they are nonetheless listed at an amazing $i95 for the set. At that price the book will not only find few if any individual purchasers, but will also be pegged beyond what many university libraries can justify spending on an individual title of relatively specialized interest. The final irony is that this splendid edition of 1992 may be little more accessible to readers of Junius than the editions of 1638 and 1694 to be found only in special collections.