The Renaissance, but not as they knew it

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The meaning of art cannot be sought outside the context of its own time, argues Louis Byrne

Italian Renaissance Art: Understanding Its Meaning by Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier

Did you hear the one about the two mediaeval artists working away in a busy Florentine workshop? One says to other: ‘l wish we lived in the Renaissance!’ Well Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, who apparently graduated from Harvard University no fewer than three times, could have reassured them that by 1419 there wasn't too long to wait. According to her account it began like a meteorological season and ran like a Broadway show until it closed, replaced by Mannerism in 1517. Furthermore the Renaissance was a wholly Florentine affair and if you were careless enough to be born or to choose to work elsewhere, in Siena for example, you were unlikely to benefit from its wholesome and improving influence.

On that point Joost-Gaugier seems a little critical of those who ‘sold their souls’ and chose not to adopt this pervasive style, and who reacted conservatively – as she sees it – against this proto-avant-garde. And please forgive my using such jargon: Italian Renaissance Art: Understanding Its Meaning claims to avoid it. Nevertheless, I had to take a deep breath before tackling 'the axial displacement of geometric form' and 'an icon in plastic isolation'! As for the Renaissance artist as avant-gardiste, this theme peppers the text without any acknowledgement that the notion of the ‘avant-garde’ is a modern construct incorporating broader cultural and political aims – aims that Masaccio (1401–28), Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Donatello (1386–1466) (see Background info box right) and other artists of this period most certainly did not have.

Joost-Gaugier's primary goal is, she says, 'to explain how the Renaissance can be understood with our eyes'  – a laudable enough aim but she goes on to claim that what happened in 15th-century Florence can tell us about the development of modern abstract art...wow! Fortunately she does not develop this notion in too much detail other than comparing the experimentation of the Renaissance artist with that of the 20th-century one. She views the continuation of Gothic forms in the 15th century as a search for the surface of the painting and views Mannerism as a mirror of abstractionism. Joost-Gaugier is undoubtedly a leading American academic who has set out to provide undergraduates, for whom this book is best left, with a well illustrated text book guiding them on how to read, to write about, and to discuss Renaissance art; the latter presumably in upmarket New England restaurants, for the language she uses would be likely to attract considerable attention were she to use it down our way.

Look no farther than her first pairing: Masaccio’s Trinity (c.1425–7) and Pontormo's Deposition (1528), two paintings separated by around 100 years. Both, we are told, share the same subject matter. Any art history student will immediately tell you they don’t: they are not simply images of a dead Christ. A contemporary viewer of Masaccio’s Trinity would have seen a visual representation of a key Christian dogma: the Holy Trinity with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Pontormo’s later work would have been recognized as a literally moving depiction of the dead Christ lowered from his Cross after the crucifixion: an event and part of the narrative of the story of Christ. Joost-Gaugier, however, loses herself in the optical illusion of the Renaissance masterpiece yet remains detached and confused by the dramatic activity of the baroque pretender. She sees little more than vagueness, incomprehensibility and irrationality in Pontormo. These descriptions become value judgements and the rest of the book is little more than a collection of ‘compare and contrast’ exercises tainted by the same bias.

The author’s single-minded belief that the Renaissance was nothing more than an artistic movement striving for ‘idealistic naturalism’ – an oxymoron – reduces art history to an elitist, autonomous practice beyond the scope and interest of anyone outside her Ivy League set. Furthermore her claim that the Renaissance is less a temporal period and more an ‘idea’ is undermined by her opening salvo. By reducing the scope of her study to 100 years she anchors the Renaissance within it. She must also recall that the first academy of art did not appear until the time of Vasari: late 16th century and beyond the scope of this little book. To claim it was established 50 years earlier is misleading, to say the least.

As an introduction to the period or as a primer to the history of post-mediaeval art this portable and concise volume with more than 100 images, albeit poorly labelled, is of little use beyond the university curriculum and even then Vasari's Lives of the Artists (and a bucket of salt) would be better. Still, Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy would be the best place to start for both comprehensible formal analysis and for historical and social context. (Inexplicably, Joost-Gaugier omits both these titles from her suggested reading list although she includes three of her own). For what this guide really lacks is relevant social and political history other than passing reference to the hegemonic and at times dictatorial influence of the Medicis.

For Joost-Gaugier the artist is already a fully formed individual capable of free expression, unfettered by the delimiting restraints of the dominant patron class. And as you might expect this powerful, male-dominated, religiously and materially minded group is largely overlooked. So too is God! Nearly every image under scrutiny is a religious one but their spiritual function, their reason for being there in the first place, is relegated to a footnote. Had she looked beyond mere formal analysis, which is at times stifling, she might have opened up this book to a wider audience – one prepared to look through the surface of the painting and into a world of class and inter-city conflict, self-aggrandisement and religious hegemony.

Art historians should remember that they are not art critics and the worst type of art criticism is art historicism where the writer tries to step back in time and judge the so-called good from the so-called bad with a modern eye. There is meaning to be found in all art and better routes to finding it than this one.

Italian Renaissance Art: Understanding Its Meaning  by Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier is published by Wiley-Blackwell 2013. 288pp. 150 mono illus, £26.95 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-1-118306112