The Renaissance but not at they knew it

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Louis Byrne reads a new book on Renaissance art but is left sceptical, to say the least...

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 (Italian Renaissance Art: Understanding its Meaning, Wiley Blackwell 2013) 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....To read on, subscribers click here

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