The Renaissance Print: 1470-1550 - Review

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 434 pp.; 50 color ills., 355 b/w. $65.00

The two books considered here contribute to our view of the Renaissance as an international phenomenon that developed in Italy as a revival of antiquity and was then adopted by the artists and patrons of northern European states, where the Italian model was reinterpreted in light of particular needs and existing traditions. Yet what makes these books mutually illuminating is not so much what they have in common but the ways in which they differ from each other, the two most significant of their differences being historical method and range of study (both of chronological boundaries and media covered). Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann set himself a colossal task with Court, Cloister and City: a survey of the visual arts of central Europe from 1450 to 1800. His book accounts for the common thread of classical culture running through the art, while at the same time acknowledging the diverse reception of such culture throughout the region. In The Renaissance Print, David Landau and Peter Parshall scrutinize a brief span in the history of one medium in order to show how, when, and why that medium was delivered from common objecthood and raised to the status of art. Chapters in The Renaissance Print follow a temporal progression, with each chapter divided by region. Landau wrote the Italian material and Parshall wrote the northern European sections.

Kaufmann's central Europe is hound by the Rhine, the Alps, the Baltic Sea, and the Ukraine's Bug River. Though it does not comprehend Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Russia, what remains - the old Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, and Poland - is shown to have a visual culture far richer than most of us ever imagined and more unified than scholars have been willing, for ideological reasons, to acknowledge. The source of that cultural unity is a common debt to classical culture, particularly as it developed in Renaissance Italy. From the quelling of late medieval iconoclasm to the advent of the modern era, this region adopted the common visual language of the Italian Renaissance.

An early example of central European engagement with the Italian Renaissance is found in the patronage of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1458-1490), who fostered a love of humanist learning and classical art at his court at Budapest that was comparable to the patronage of the princes of the Italian city-states. The royal palaces at Buda and throughout the kingdom were designed according to the classical language and concepts of architecture, including the classical orders, fountain courtyards, and hanging gardens. Leading artists from Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany provided architectural and freestanding sculpture, paintings, decorative, and ceremonial art laden with classical subjects and fashioned in the Florentine Renaissance style. The subtly and beautifully modeled relief portraits of the king and queen by Cristoforo Romano in the stile all' antica announce the style of royal portraiture that would remain dominant in central European art until about 1700. Kaufmann shows that the Hungarian adoption of Italian Renaissance subjects and style was not a simple matter of copying the latest artistic fashion but sprang from an understanding of and participation in the ideals of the rinnovazione romana. Matthias Corvinus himself was educated by humanists who had been brought to Hungary by his father. He corresponded with Florentine humanists, assembled a great library, and fancied himself a successor of the Roman emperors. The revived classical culture of his court and kingdom was, therefore, a manifestation of his place in the translatio imperii. Kaufmann's sensitivity to variations in the reception of the Italian Renaissance in different areas and by different patrons is demonstrated in his analysis of classicism outside the patronage of the royal circle. We see that Corvinus imparted to his nobles, gentry, and clergy a love of the new Italian style, which resulted in the spread of the style throughout the Hungarian provinces. These provincial adaptations of classicism are remarkably free of local vulgarization, although the crude lettering on the gateway in Trebova, which was inspired by a triumphal arch, shows that the norm of purity had its exceptions.

Italy is not the only source of the diffusion of Renaissance classicism in central Europe. As the Renaissance took root across Europe, central European patrons and artists drew on other regional interpretations of classicism. The Netherlands, Spain, and France, in addition to Italy, became sites of artistic exchange. By the early 17th century, says Kaufmann, central Europe itself had become a contributor to the international dissemination of Renaissance art and design. Kaufmann's view of Renaissance stylistic exchange entrains two particularly welcome effects. First, he is able to convey the true internationalism of Renaissance art and design. Second, he is able to correct the overemphasis placed on French design as a source for the rest of Europe. From the 1660s France did assume an authoritative position in the European art world, but as those who have looked carefully at French influence know, much of what is attributed to the French actually came from the Netherlands. Seventeenth-century French artists and patrons were much like those in central Europe in that they freely combined Italian and Dutch classicism to meet their aesthetic, functional, and symbolic needs. While the French synthesis became a model in its own right, the constituent role of the Netherlands and the precedence of Dutch classicism in the creation of other national syntheses must be acknowledged, as it is in Court, Cloister and City.