Watch out – the unexpurgated truth about the Renaissance

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Rosalind Ormiston found challenging arguments in this fascinating book, showing the Renaissance in a new light

The Renaissance: Revised Expanded Unexpurgated edited by D. Medina Lasansky

The title The Renaissance: Revised Expanded Unexpurgated, sets the scene for a provocative set of essays on the relevance of the Renaissance today, by 17 art historians who include D. Medina Lasansky (editor), Gloria Kury, Patricia Simons, and James S. Saslow amongst others.

The essays analyse:

anxieties about gender, class, professional affiliation, family identity, and religious conviction; commodity fetishes, taste, and codes of behavior and consumption whether in architecture or clothing; popular literary genres – the ‘how to’ manual, melodrama, and the pornographic compendium; the top-down ‘improvements’ of urban space; and art and artists, the premier sources of the continuing attraction of Renaissance Italy.

From its title, which promises a new interpretation of Renaissance history, the texts are thematically arranged ‘from great artists to Jews and slaves, people stigmatized throughout the Renaissance’. Section headings include ‘Sex matters’ and ‘Originals, mutants and copies’, leading to ‘Follow the Itinerary’ – with a short photo essay on ‘Hitler consummate tourist’,  ‘A moral compass’ and ‘Blind spots'. Sections are interspersed with photo essays. 

To begin, colour illustrations of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c.1482), the ancient sculpture known to us as the Venus de’ Medici (first century BC) , Andy Warhol’s Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482) (1984) (on front cover), and the pop singerLady Gaga wearing a Dolce & Gabbana ‘Birth of Venus’ dress, visually illustrate art as a commodity, and a Renaissance ideal of beauty. The illustrations support the first section ‘Revise, expand, unexpurgate’, by D. Medina Lasansky with Gloria Kury. They discuss ‘Venus in the sphere of the mind’. In 1864 Ralph Nicolson Wornum of London’s National Gallery described Botticelli’s Venus as ‘void of taste’, disliking the artist’s vision of ideal beauty. Notably no image of it, or early Renaissance paintings, appeared in the painting Interior of the Tribuna, Uffizi (1850) by John Frederick Lewis (1804–76), but the Medici Venus was prominent, as well as Titian’s painting Venus of Urbino (1538).

Kury and Lasansky state that today ‘crowds at the Uffizi know little about the treasures once installed in the Tribuna’ but they argue that enthusiasm for the Renaissance has never been higher, including people who have never set foot in Italy or studied art history. Historical fiction, from Dan Brown’s 2003 book (and subsequent film)  The Da Vinci Code to more serious novels such as those of Sarah Dunant, has gained a new audience now interested in the period. Action-adventure video games such as Assassin’s Creed II (2009) have introduced Renaissance Italy to gamers and captured, according to the authors, the pessimism of the period. It may influence players around the world to visit Italy too. The authors suggest that diminished enrolment in courses on Renaissance art is because professors ‘fail to keep pace with changes in the study of culture and changes in culture itself’. Our view of the Italian Renaissance is different from those of art historians Jacob Burkhardt (1818–97) and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), who might be regarded as ‘founders’ of the modern discipline.

James S. Saslow is renowned for his pioneering study of homosexuality in the Renaissance. In ‘Inventing Michelangelo’, he traces the artist’s historiography, from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in the 16th century to the present day, to discuss the reinvention of Michelangelo after the artist’s death. Saslow seeks to show how discussion of the artist ‘became enmeshed in issues of gender and sexual non-conformity’, which has evolved through time, affected by social and moral beliefs.  Saslow refers to the ‘heterosexuality of elite culture’.

In ‘The golden girl’ written by Carole Collier Frick, the text focuses on Renaissance portraiture, particularly of young women.

Wearing a variety of ceremonial or court dress a few young females from the pinnacle of society were transformed into commodity fetishes that made them ideally suited to later use as poster girls for the entire Renaissance.

Frick asks if the daughters of Florentine merchants and bankers, dressed expensively for portraits, are forerunners of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘golden girl’ Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925), and 21st-century fashion models whose design teams ‘transform young women into high style robots’.

I enjoyed ‘The Medici McMansion?’ by  Denise R. Costanzo, which brings together the ideals of the Renaissance palazzo with present day ‘McMansions’, vast aspirational homes created for the newly rich, the ‘Mc’ being a derisory term, for ‘a fancy home that fails to impress its audience’. Parallels drawn between the Palazzo Medici in Florence and present day custom-built palatial houses in the USA (and UK) create an interesting argument on the underlying aims of the urban palazzo owner. The example of the fictional character Tony Soprano’s home, in the HBO TV series The Sopranos, with its Palladian windows in the sitting room, ‘hollow Tuscan columns... in the foyer’, plus ‘the fluted one... which hides a cache of weapons’ worked perfectly.

Each essay is a worthy discourse and challenges previous art historical interpretations of the period.  The back cover promotion of The Renaissance: Revised Expanded Unexpurgated (2014), states ‘A book like no other about the Italian Renaissance’. I agree. The texts made me engage with their challenging arguments and see it in a new light.

The Renaissance: Revised Expanded Unexpurgated  edited by D. Medina Lasansky is published by Periscope Publishing, 2014. 640 pp. £27.50 (ppb). ISBN-13 978-1-934772-25-6