Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. (Reviews).

Leonard Barkan. Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture

Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. xxxiii + 428 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-300-07677-0.

If this fine book took some thirteen years to write, it deserves to be mulled over in several, unhurried, readings punctuated by decent intervals. For Unearthing the Past is discursive in the several senses of the word, full of stories and vignettes intricately constructed, abounding in sharp, and often paradoxical, observations. It is also a highly self-conscious book, informed by explicit if eclectic theoretical concerns. One doubts, however, if even old-fashioned scholars will resent Mr. Barkan's ubiquitous but always decorous presence in his book. For in clear, if sometimes complicated prose, he has hand-crafted an intricate analysis of the contemporary dialogue (rather, dialogues) between Italian Renaissance people and the beautiful and often curious antique sculptures which were increasingly being exhumed from the mid-Quattrocento onwards. What one had thought of as a familiar story -- Roberto Weiss and all that -- is sculpted afresh in his hands, emerges full of possibilities for future enquiry.

As much a series of overlapping meditations on its central theme -- "the making of a modern culture out of the reordered fragments of past culture" (271) -- as a tightly- structured thesis, the book defies easy summary. A first chapter discusses the discoveries of the precious objects themselves, a second the "elective affinity" (115) which existed between Pliny's Natural History, with its descriptions of ancient art, and its Renaissance audience. The long following discussion of "Fragments" contains passages of novel insight, as does the almost racy "Reconstructions" which is its continuation. A final chapter draws together the threads of the book in an effective artistic, indeed psychological, portrait of that cad among Cinquecento sculptors, Baccio Bandinelli. One can only applaud Barkan's apparently perverse decision to concentrate not on Michelangelo but his "evil twin" (271), whose confident reach towards antique models always exceeded his grasp. Perhaps the most important contribution of Barkan's book is this quest to measure the "sparking distance" (xxxi) between ancient object and the viewer, to define -- in various ways and contexts -- what Renaissance people sought in the classical past; one illuminating suggestion is that "what Renaissance culture wanted was a past that was just living enough so that it might be made to speak to the present, through certain interpreters, or else to listen when certain voices in the present spoke to it" (61).

There is so much else to admire and enjoy in Unearthing the Past, which in effect is a sensitive and elaborate gloss on that indispensable handbook to which Barkan properly pays tribute: Phyllis Bober's and Ruth Rubinstein's Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture (1986). It is important that students, and perhaps their teachers, be reminded how various was the quality of the ancient sculptures the Renaissance disinterred, how "culturally fragmentary" (131) many of them had been even in the (very diverse) ancient contexts from which they had come. Barkan is excellent, too, on the erotic appeal to Renaissance viewers of ancient sculpture and of modern all'antica work. This reviewer found particularly helpful the author's gentle insistence throughout the book that art itself generates art, that the aesthetic appeal of antique sculpture was obvious not only to artists, as one would expect, but also to Renaissance rulers who well understood the political resonances and uses of the antique.

This is not to say that specialists in the various (mine-)fields into which the author penetrates will not take exception to things in this book. The present reviewer had few queries, but was unsure about one translation important to the author's understanding of his whole theme. In a passage describing the discovery of the Laocoon, Barkan has Francesco da Sangallo say that the instant reaction of his distinguished father, Giuliano, and of Michelangelo himself, to the astonishing emergence of the sculpture from the ground was "[to start to] draw, all the while discoursing on ancient things ..." (3; see too 308), whereas their response might have been rather more humdrum: to go back to lunch, during which the discovery monopolized the conversation: "Si fece crescere la buca, per poterlo tirare fuori; e visto, ci tornammo a desinare: e sempre si ragiono delle cose antiche ..." (341). Be that as it may, Barkan left this reader hungry for more, regretful that "architecture is beyond the scope of this book" (22). Now there is another grand theme worthy of Leonard Barkan.