The Self-Aware Image. An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting.

Victor Stoichita. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xv + 131 pls. + 364 pp. $85. ISBN: 0-521-43393-2.

It is often said that whatever else a great work of art is about, it is about art, Victor Stoichita's book, first published in French in 1993, concentrates on the painting of early modern Europe, which offers some stunning displays of artistic self-reflexiveness. Stoichita believes that the proliferation of highly articulate "meta-painting" during this period occurred for good historical reasons, This was a period when the very nature and status of painting was under acute critical reevaluation. The old categories of religious art had been destabilized by inner transformation or reformist intervention, but the modern conception of"the painting" - as designated by the French word tableau - had not yet been established. A wide array of paintings produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he argues, register and confront this critical episode in the history of art.

Stoichita begins with an extended reading of Pieter Aertsen's Christ in the House of Mary and Martha in Vienna, where the traditional relationship between religious subject and still-life details is overturned. The kitchen still-life occupies the center foreground of the picture and the diminutive religious scene - Christ with Martha and Mary - is viewed through a picture-like embrasure in the background. Two pictorial modes are juxtaposed: the still-life is Northern, profane, and "real"; the biblical scene is Italianate, it is sacred, and it is "a painting." Aertsen has recapitulated the theme of the choice between secular and sacred that is central to the biblical scene (Martha busies herself with housework while Mary, sitting at Christ's feet, "has chosen the best part") in terms of the sixteenth-century controversy over images - a controversy that Aertsen, who saw his paintings destroyed by iconoclasts, witnessed first-hand. Aertsen stages a crisis in religious art, and places the viewer at a crossroads.

The devices of splitting, insetting, framing, mirroring, and mise-en-abyme are consistent concerns of the first two parts of the book, and serve to shed light on the emergence of the secular genres. Rather than simply appearing as independent alternatives to traditional forms, Stoichita argues, the new genres resulted from a process of internal dislocation, where a dialogue between sacred and profane often took the form of a dialogue between the old and the new art. This approach allows Stoichita to see the early painting collections and the cabinets of curiosity in relation to the reform debates of the period m two histories that are too often told separately, despite the fact that major cultural personages, such as Federico Borromeo, figure prominently in both arenas. The basic historical framework owes a good deal to Hans Belting, for whom the early sixteenth century marks the end of the era of the Christian image on the eve of a modern and secular "era of art." Stoichita picks up where Belting leaves off, concentrating full attention on the array of claims made in the name of painting during the following two centuries. The third and final part of the book, studded with references to Descartes, includes an extended analysis of that most "modern" of pictorial problems, the scenario of self-portraiture.

The three parts of the book ultimately offer only a loose structure. The book is best as a series of readings, a kind of curiosity cabinet of early modern pictorial reflections on painting. Some of these, such as the analysis of Aertsen or the reading of Gabriel Metsu's pair of panels on the theme of the Letter in Dublin, are quite simply tours de force. Others, especially those involving more famous works such as Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Velazquez's Las Meninas, are ingenious but insufficiently developed, as if Stoichita were skirting the mountain of earlier interpretations. But the book's contribution is to have put this collection together in the first place, to have found a frame for what have often been treated as disparate phenomena. In directing our attention to what paintings have to say about painting, Stoichita in fact broadens the range of issues and contexts in relation to which they can be understood. One can only lament that such a refreshing new view of the period did not include more in the area of Italian art, which is the most burdened by traditional historiographical schemas. But it is a first foray into a broad field, and it is up to Stoichita's readers to incorporate his way of reading pictures into their more specialized studies.

University of Toronto