Featured White Papers
- The secret to effective, no-hassle performance reviews (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
- Enterprise PBX buyer's guide (VoIP-News)
- 9 critical reasons to automate performance management (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
Content provided in partnership with
Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1995 by Celeste Brusati
Various problems arise as a consequence of this selective mixing and matching of secondary sources. For one thing, when they serve the general argument, facts and interpretations which are open to debate tend to be authorized rather than acknowledged as problematic. Thus, the suggestion of some scholars that Vermeer's Art of Painting and Allegory of Faith may have been commissioned works becomes a direct assertion that they were indeed produced on commission. Historical inaccuracies of this sort are minor distractions which nonetheless illustrate how misconceptions can masquerade as facts when interpretations are treated as the equivalent of primary evidence.
There are also larger disputed issues that Braider's argument glosses over, which have more serious consequences for his analyses. The problem is particularly evident in his discussions of pictorial perspective. From these it is clear that his understanding of perspective derives in large measure from Panofsky. Braider's use of "modern" in the sense of "postmedieval" will be familiar to readers of Early Netherlandish Painting.(3) In the introductory essay to that book Panofsky draws his influential but problematic distinction between medieval and modern notions of picture, treating modern painting and Albertian perspective pictures as virtually synonymous. Dismantling this linkage and calling attention to competing non-Albertian paradigms of both picture and perspective in early modern European art was one of the most salient features of Alpers's argument in The Art of Describing, a text to which Braider is indebted for aspects of his own argument and his focus on Netherlandish art. Without acknowledging the mutual incompatability of these two accounts of picturing, Braider opts for Panofsky's teleology and its attendant assumptions over Alpers's more pluralistic analysis. This helps explain why Braider continues to see Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus as lacking Albertian coherence and "spatial realism," shortcomings which correspond to its transitional position in the development away from medieval allegory toward modern descriptiveness. Under Alpers's influence he might have framed his consideration of the picture differently. Rather than explaining its place in a teleology of modernism, he might have discussed it as exemplary of one of several pictorial modes available to, and deployed by, 16th-century painters. The ag-gregative habits of pictorial organization that characterize Bruegel's picture might then emerge more clearly as evidence of a specific kind of pictorial intelligence in operation, rather than a necessary stage in the march toward modernity.
