Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. - Review - book review

LEONARD BARKAN

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, 428 pp.; 199 b/w ills. $35

Sir Thomas Browne, publishing in 1658 his Hydriotaphia, a treatise on sepulchral urns lately discovered in Norfolk, was moved to comment:

We are coldly drawn unto discourses of Antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, or make out learned Novelties. But seeing they arose as they lay, almost in silence among us, at least in short account suddenly passed over; we were very unwilling they should die again, and be buried twice among us. [1]

Browne's deferential wish in his prefatory letter not to "intrude upon the Antiquary," a notion of professionalism that had an aroma of the oxymoronic even then, was fundamental to his rhetorical purpose. As the consummately eloquent physician, whose profession it was "to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes," Browne effortlessly found empirical and figural justification for his remarkable essay into antiquarian scholarship, an accomplished demonstration of why one ought "mercifully" to preserve the bones of one's national ancestors, and not "pisse upon their ashes."

Professional demarcation debates, arguments defining the limits and competencies of disciplines, are deep structure to any serious history of Western scholarship. The confluence in Browne's prefatory remarks of the topics of antiquarianism and medicine, and the rhetorical antitheses old-new and arising-burial is predictable in antiquarian discourse, where the gifted amateur reigned supreme. And trespassing (to borrow E. H. Gombrich's term) into disciplines not one's own has often been the mark of innovative scholarship in both antiquarian studies and art history. Pliny the Elder was a specialist in law, grammar, and rhetoric, but turned his hand to a significant bit of art history with the help of Hellenistic biographies. The painter Vasari was a mediocre poet but happened to write (with a little editing from his friends) a vivid descriptive prose just perfect for artist's biographies. Winckelmann, trained in medicine and mathematics, wrote a clinically observant and sexually repressed history of Greek art f rom Roman copies. And then there was the keen-eyed medico Giovanni Morelli, founder of modern connoisseurship.

Some of the most important art history of the 20th century came from the Warburg Institute, where hardly anyone was officially classified as an art historian. Charles Mitchell, who wrote a seductive essay on Renaissance antiquarian studies and literary romance and began his career at the Institute, half-jokingly said in the late 1960s (in the reviewer's presence) that the scholars at the Institute "hated art." He had spied a Picasso print he had donated to the Institute gathering dust and insisted that it be cleaned immediately. One supposes that Mitchell meant 20th-century art, but he was on risky territory given E. H. Gombrich's devotion to Kokoschka and Michael Baxandall's emerging interest in theory. Such manifest hyperbole was typical of Mitchell's prickly sense of humor. There he was, himself delighting in the arcane texts of Felice Feliciano's antiquarian manuscripts, but yearning for the erotic line of Picasso's Vollard Suite. Would that Mitchell were still here to review Leonard Barkan's new book. H e would have taken pleasure in the seriousness with which Barkan approaches his texts, and assuredly would not have suspected that he lacked sympathy and affection for Renaissance art.

The exemplary work of Phyllis Bober and Ruth Rubinstein on the Census of Antique Works Known to Renaissance Artists, begun half a century ago and continued still at the Warburg Institute, is frequently used and justly praised in Barkan's book. He describes the Census as follows:

The plan was to make as complete a record as possible, principally photographic and to a lesser extent textual, of the pieces of ancient sculpture known in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and equally to document the drawings and imitations of these works which proved their familiarity in this period. What is perhaps most notable is that Professor Bober was by training a classical archaeologist and not (to begin with, at least) a Renaissance scholar at all. Thus the twentieth-century act of recuperation was a kind of archaeology--a careful mapping of material artifacts on a grid of time and space--which was itself being applied to a rather different sort of Renaissance archaeology, a recovery of the past that was as unsystematic as it was passionate (p. xxii).

Two passages attract one's attention. First, that it was notable to Barkan that the director of the Census, the remarkable Phyllis Bober, should have been, to begin with, a classical archaeologist. Second, the phrase "a kind of archaeology" used to describe the methodology of the Census as a means of differentiating it from an "unsystematic" and "passionate" Renaissance "archaeology." Most of the pre-Census publications on works of art discovered in the Renaissance and their survival in Renaissance sketchbooks were written by classical archaeologists, and not by "professional" Renaissance scholars. What is "notable" here is rather Barkan's minimizing of classical archaeology's contribution to the foundations of the Census project and to the recent study of Renaissance sketchbooks. These foundations were laid between ca. 1870 and 1920 in the work of identification, description, and correlation of such archaeologists as Otto Jahn, Friedrich Matz the Elder, Hermann Dessau, Adolf Michaelis, Christian Hulsen, Carl Robert, and Thomas Ashby. Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Erwin Panofsky (among others) mediated art history's acquisition of this material. In the 1930s many Americans had welcomed Panofsky's iconology as an antidote to a "dry" archaeological approach to art history, generated by the linking of departments of art history and archaeology. Yet the archaeological underpinnings of Panofsky's research were patent in his sure handling of classical sculptural prototypes on almost every page of his work.