Abstract
The scholarly controversy that has raged over the last half-century and more regarding the centrality of the High Renaissance for the formation and understanding of subsequent European visual culture provides Alexander Nagel with his starting point in this book. This is not, however, the controversy of which his title speaks. Nagel looks to move on from those debates by radically reimagining the Renaissance. Instead of being an epoch of triumphant harmonization or aesthetic resolution, he characterizes it as a period of experiment and controversy in which the artist’s studio was the principal laboratory or forum for debate: this is a book about ‘controversy as a condition of [Renaissance] art’ (p. 2). Prominent among the artists’ interlocutors in all this are the early reformers such as Erasmus, Luther and, most immediately, Girolamo Savonarola, firebrand Dominican friar and de facto ruler of Florence during the last decade of the fifteenth century. These men, in their different ways, were heavily critical of the direction taken by late medieval piety and the intrinsic role of the image-makers within it, yet none of them were iconoclasts. Religious art, like religion itself, was in need not of destruction, but reformation.
The book is divided into three parts, which deal in turn with painting, sculpture and architecture. The majority of Part I is concerned with exploring what Nagel calls the unmasking and excavation of the grounds of Christian art in the first decades of the sixteenth century. He moves from the dissonance engendered by the confusion of devotional imagery with contemporary portraiture, through the increasing awareness of both the limits of Christian iconography and the implications of subjectivity with regard to an image’s meaning, to that dislocation of ‘true religious sensibility’ in image-centred saints’ cults that provoked the rebirth of quasi-Platonic, proto-anthropological suspicion in the likes of Luther and Erasmus. In the process, we are offered the opportunity to see key works of the High Renaissance canon – including Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, and Antonello’s Annunciate Virgin in Palermo – with new eyes.
The rest of the book, to varying extents, deals with the variety of responses – reframings, remediations, reconstructions; of art itself, of subject-matter, iconography, and use – by patrons and artists in the period up to the Counter-Reformation. In all this, whilst re-presentations of the Virgin and saints play their part, Nagel identifies the most fundamental shift in an objective refocusing of the devotional vision, particularly with regard to altarpieces. First, central images of the Virgin Mary or other saints are replaced by figures of Christ; this figural representation of Christ then yields ground to Christ himself, in the shape of the sacrament tabernacle. This process (which Nagel calls ‘soft iconoclasm’) is traced through Part III in a journey that ends in front of the high altar of Vincenza Cathedral: ‘The most abstract altarpiece of the Italian Renaissance’ (p. 261). Having shown how, in early sixteenth-century Italy, ‘the Virgin was often allegorized … as an image and symbol of the tabernacle of God’, Nagel observes in his conclusion that, ‘now the figure is replaced by the thing, a real tabernacle holding the actual body of Christ’ (p. 284).
Nagel’s achievement is something of a tour de force: an argument of elegant sophistication is supported by a prose style that combines clarity with beauty, and makes significant strides towards establishing anew the importance of Italian art of the first half of the sixteenth century in the cultural history of Western Europe. In his attempts to reshape our understanding of the very nature of Italian Renaissance art, Nagel indulges in a certain amount of iconoclasm of his own. A reacquaintance with the riches of the Eastern Christian icon is shown to exert a more direct influence on the artistic reformulations of Leonardo and Raphael than the wealth of classical antiquity. Against the assumption that this was essentially an era of secularization in artistic production, Nagel shows the artworks of the Italian Renaissance to be fundamentally religious pieces that explore and work through questions pertaining not only to the proper role and nature of Christian art (although they do that), but also to the reformulation of fundamental issues of Christian theology, ethics and devotional practice. If the sixteenth-century religious reforms are too often portrayed as a result of the Renaissance, Nagel provides a corrective, showing that the Renaissance (in Italian art, at least) also owes much to the prevailing spirit of reform. Not all will accept his conclusions, but in this excellent book Nagel has produced a work that will provide essential reading for students and scholars of the Renaissance for many years to come.