Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650

404 Pages·1995·58.129 MB·English

by  Claire Farago (editor)

REFRAMING
THE RENAISSANCE
Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1430-1630
Edited with an Introduction by
CLAIRE FARAGO
Yale University Press
V Haven and London
f
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments Vll
Notes on the Contributors IX
Editor’s Introduction
Refraining the Renaissance Claire Farago
PART ONE
New Problems, New Paradigms: Revising the Humanist Model 21
The Pathos of Distance: Byzantium in the Gaze of Renaissance Europe
and Modern Scholarship Anthony Cutler 23
Italian Sculptors and Sculpture Outside of Italy (Chiefly in Central Europe)
Problems of Approach, Possibilities of Reception
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann 47
“Vision Itself Has Its History”: “Race,” Nation, and Renaissance Art
History Claire Farago 67
PART TWO
Renaissance Theories of the Image
89
Re-visioning Raphael as a “Scientific Painter” Janis Bell 9T
“Popular” Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain
at Varallo Alessandro Noua IT3
Art Theory as Ideology: Gabriele Paleotti’s Hierarchical Notion of
Painting’s Universality and Reception Pamela M. Jones 127
Languages of Gesture in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: Some Antecedents
and Transmutations Pauline Moffitt Watts 140
From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act of Crosscultural
Translation Thomas Cummins 152
VI CONTENTS
PART TH REE
Early Collecting Practices
175
9 “Wrought by No Artist’s Hand”: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic,
and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance
Martin Kemp *77
10 Animals as CAiltural Signs: A Medici Menagerie in the Grotto at Castello
Claudia Lazzaro 197
11 Collecting Cultures: A Mexican Manuscript in the Vatican Library
Eloise Quinones Keber 229
PART FOUR
Mediating Images: Developing an Intercultural Perspective 243
12 Wild Woman in Colonial Mexico: An Encounter of European and Aztec
Concepts of the Other Cecilia F. Klein 245
13 Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of
New Spain Dana Leibsohn 265
14 Luca Signorelli’s Rule of Antichrist and the Christian Encounter with
the Infidel Jonathan B. Riess 283
Epilogue
Iconology, Ideology, and Cultural Encounter: Panofsky, Althusser,
and the Scene of Recognition IVJ. T. Mitchell 292
Notes 30T
Consolidated Bibliography 345
Historiography and Criticism 345
Theories of Images 35^
Early Collecting Practices 367
Mediating Images 373
Photographic Credits 381
Index 382
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project germinated in a conference session, entitled “Reevaluating the Eurocentrism
of Italian Renaissance Art History,” that Gail Geiger and I organized for the College Art
Association Annual Conference in Chicago in February 1992. Eloise Quinones Keber
and Cecelia Klein, who encouraged this project since its conception, generously contrib­
uted their papers from that session in revised and expanded form. Thomas Cummins,
who acted as discussant for the CAA session, has contributed his own paper here. I
would like to take note of another conference, entitled “Cross-Cultural Encounters,” co­
sponsored by the National Renaissance Society of America and the Northern California
Renaissance Society at Stanford University in March 1992, which has been a stimulating
'Ource of ideas for this volume. Claudia Lazzaro and Jonathan Riess contributed articles
based on papers presented at Stanford. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Alessandro Nova
participated in this volume on the basis of conversations we began at the same event.
My contribution to the volume has been enriched by ongoing conversations with all
my contributors, whose collaboration on the Introduction made a world of difference (in
all senses). I owe them individual thanks for their devotion to this project, and I am also
grateful to other friends and colleagues who acted as valuable sounding boards at various
points along the way: Janis Bell, Christopher Braider, Aline Brandauer, Tom Cummins,
Anthony Cutler, Steven Epstein, Margaret Ferguson, Werner Gundersheimer, Ken
Iw -amasa, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Martin Kemp, Cecelia Klein, Pamela Jones,
Claudia Lazzaro, Dana Leibsohn, Keith Moxey, Alessandro Nova, Eloise Quinones
Keber, Donald Preziosi, Yvonne Reineke, Jonathan Riess, Joyce Robinson, Antonette
Rosato, Pauline Watts, and Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt all read earlier drafts at crucial
unctures. Melanie McHugh and Shanna Waddell contributed in many essential ways as
my research assistants. Randi Jenne prepared the manuscript for press.
I am also pleased to record accumulated debts to institutions that have encouraged this
work. My initial interest in exchanges between Europe and the Americas was supported
:y a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at The John Carter Brown
L.brary in 1991—92. Generous support from the Graduate Committee on the Arts and
Humanities at the University of Colorado supported the expense of illustrations. Of
: >urse, in every institution, real people give it life. At the JCB, Norman Fiering and his
staff made their exceptional resources exceptionally available. At CU, the Steering
Committee for Critical Studies of the Americas gave this project a home in its formative
uges: I am particularly grateful to Manning Marable, William Wei, and Raymond L.
Williams for their encouragement and excellent advice. Thanks to my editors at Yale
University Press, Gillian Malpass and Miranda Harrison, for expertly shepherding the
-manuscript through press with great alacrity.
Anyone who studies human activities considered liminal by the dominant culture is
: ntributing to the reformation of the canon. Before this project took shape as an
:hology, I developed the main outlines for a critical study of Italian Renaissance art
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
viewed in terms of cultural exchange by taking my research into the classroom.1 It is
almost needless to say that this experience made an important difference to the critical
framing of these collected essays. As this book is going to press, I have become aware of
an insightful and forthright contribution to the embattled topic of canon reform, John
Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), to which this
volume is a readymade response. Like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Guillory observes that the
relationship between our critical postures and the social struggles they reflect is highly
mediated. If I had known of Guillory’s argument for considering the history of asethetic
judgment as “a privileged site for re-imagining the relation between the cultural and the
economic in social life,” I would have discussed it in the Introduction. At this point I
would just like to note that Guillory’s concern with the need to historicize the concept
of value should encompass the fifteen and sixteenth centuries. What Guillory and others
(Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, for two) describe as the eighteenth-century
struggle to distinguish works of art from commodities is, undeniably, significant. But this
explanatory model does not acknowledge that the concept of a work of art as an object
intended for individual aesthetic contemplation is also a historical, culturally specific
formation. A responsible account of the history of canon formation cannot neglect this
significant aspect of its own development.
That is what much of this book is about - crossing and recrossing the boundaries of
the concept that a work of art is an object intended for individual aesthetic contem­
plation. There are no timeless categories and there is no knowledge that is not a product
of its own time. For this reason, and to honor the significant contributions that research
and dialogue in the classroom made to revisioning the Renaissance for me, I dedicate this
volume to all students, past, present, and future, of Renaissance art “out of the canon.”
C.F.
Boulder, Colorado
April 18, 1995
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Janis Bell is an associate professor of art history at Kenyon College. She has published on
Raphael’s coloring and its reception, on Caravaggio’s coloring, and on the color theories of
Leonardo da Vinci and Matteo Zaccolini in the Art Bulletin, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, Achademia Leonardi Vinci, and elsewhere. She is currently preparing an edition of
Zaccolini’s Prospettiva del Colore.
Tom Cummins is an assistant professor in the Art Department at the University of Chicago. He
works in Latin American art and has published articles on Pre-Columbian Ecuadorian ceramics
and colonial Peruvian painting. He is co-editor with Elizabeth Boone of Native Traditions in the
Postcolonial World (forthcoming).
Anthony Cutler is Research Professor of Art History at Pennsylvania State University. His most
recent publications are The Hand of the Master. Craftsmanship, Ivory and Society in Byzantium (1994),
and articles in the Art Bulletin, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Burlington Magazine,
and Dumbarton Oaks Papers.
Claire Farago is an associate professor of art history at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
She is the author of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’ (1992) and articles on Renaissance art theory
published in the Art Bulletin and elsewhere. She is currently completing a book, Art as Institution,
on the history of the category “visual art,” and writing on the ethnic complexity of devotional
images produced in colonial New Mexico.
Pamela Jones is an associate professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston
and a specialist in Italian Baroque art and religious thought. She is the author of Federico Borromeo
and the Ambrosiana. Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (1993) and articles
appearing in the Art Bulletin, Studies in the History of Art, the Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, and
elsewhere. She is currently writing 011 Caravaggio, and researching genre, audience, and display
in Italian religious art from 1550 to 1650.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann is Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology,
Princeton University. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, his books include The
Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science and Humanism in the Renaissance (1993); Central European
Drawings 1680-1800 (1989), and The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (1988), which
won the Mitchell Prize for art history. His Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central
Europe, 1450-1800, is being published in 1995.
Eloise Quiñones Keber is Professor of Art History at Baruch College and The Graduate Center
of the City University of New York, where she teaches pre-columbian art and the art of colonial
and modern Mexico. Her most recent book, Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and
History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript, 1995, is a facsimile edition and commentary. She has
published and lectured extensively on ancient Mexican manuscripts, Aztec art before and after the
Spanish conquest, and on issues surrounding the encounter between indigenous and European
traditions in sixteenth-century Mexico.
X NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Martin Kemp is British Academy Wolfson Research Professor at the University of St Andrews,
Scotland. In October 1995 he takes up the Professorship in the History of Art at the University
of Oxford. He studied Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge, and at the Courtauld
Institute of Art, London. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci, The Marvellous. Works of Nature and
Man (1981, winner of the Mitchell Prize), and The Science of Art, Optical Themes in Western Art from
Brunelleschi to Seurat (1990). He is currently researching issues in scientific representation and
writing a book on anatomical, physiognomic, and natural themes in art from the Renaissance to
the nineteenth century.
Cecelia F. Klein is Professor of Pre-Columbian/Colonial Art History at UCLA where she is
currently writing a book on Mesoamerican art as seen through the lens of colonial writers and
artists. She is the author of numerous articles on Aztec art and religion, including several on Aztec
women and female deities.
Claudia Lazzaro, Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Cornell
University, is the author of The Italian Renaissance Garden (1990) and several articles on villas and
gardens. She is currently working on two projects involving visual representations of cultural
identity - that of Italy in the three centuries of the Italian garden tradition and that of Florence
under the sixteenth-century Medici.
Dana Leibsohn is an assistant professor at Smith College where she teaches art history. She has
written articles on literacy, colonial studies in Latin America, and indigenous maps and manuscript
paintings from New Spain. Her current research focuses on Pueblo and Spanish histories from
seventeenth-century New Mexico, and on Nahua books and images created in Mexico.
W. J. T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of Art and English at
the University of Chicago, and editor of Critical Inquiry. His recent books include Iconology: Image,
Text, Ideology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), and he has edited two recent collections of essays,
Art and the Public Sphere (1993) and Landscape and Power (1994).
Alessandro Nova is Professor of Art History at the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut of
J. W. Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. His most recent book is a monograph on Girolamo
Romanino (1995), and he has published widely on art and patronge in Rome, Florence, and
Northern Italy. Editor of a forthcoming volume of essays on Velasquez’s Las Meninas, he is
currently writing a book on the Franciscan Osservanta movement in fifteenth-century Italy.
Jonathan B. Riess, Professor of Art History at the University of Cincinnati, is, most recently,
author of The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescoes (1995). He publishes on
political aspects of medieval and Renaissance art in Central Italy.
Pauline Moffitt Watts is a member of the European history faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.
She is the author and editor of books and articles in medieval and early modern religious and
intellectual history, including several studies dealing with cross-cultural contacts in sixteenth-
century Mexico. Her publications include Nicolas Cusanus (1982), and she is currently writing a
book 011 the evangelization of Mexico, entitled From the Desert to the New World: Monasticism,
Resistance, and Reform in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.
Modem scholarship has been far too much influenced by all kinds of
prejudices, against the use of Latin, against the medieval church, and also
by the unwarranted effort to read later developments, such as the German
Reformation, or French libertinism, or nineteenth-century liberalism or
nationalism, back into the Renaissance. The only way to understand the
Renaissance is a direct and, possibly, an objective study of the original
sources. We have no real justification to take sides in the controversies
of the Renaissance, and to play up humanism against scholasticism, or
scholasticism against humanism, or modern science against both of them.
Instead of trying to reduce everything to one or two issues, which is the
privilege and curse of political controversy, we should try to develop a
kind of historical pluralism.
Paul Oskar Kristeller,
“Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” 1945
Our intelligent and conscientious moderator seemed constantly to
summarize me out of the group. After hearing us make our preliminary
statements, he said that we were all interested in culture as process rather
than object of study. No, I would not privilege process. After the next
batch of short speeches, he said that it was evident that we wanted to
formulate a coherent notion of explanation and culture that would
accommodate all of us. No, I would not find unity in diversity; sometimes
confrontation rather than integration seemed preferable.
Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak,
“Explanation and Culture: Marginalia,” 1979
Jan van den Velde, Instruction in the writing of the Italic Hand. Engraved by Simon Frysius, from Spieghel der
Schriifkonste, Rotterdam, 1605. London, Victoria & Albert Museum. (Photo: Martin Kemp.) See Chapter 9 for
full discussion.
INTRODUCTION
Reframing the Renaissance
CLAIRE FARAGO
The initial idea for this collection of essays arose out of my own interest in the sixteenth-
century change in status of the visual arts in Italy. I wanted to learn whether and how
extensive global commerce affected sixteenth-century Italian discussions of art. I soon
realized that existing accounts of the history of western aesthetic theory do not consider
contact with non-European societies to have been a contributing factor before the
nineteenth century, so I began to wonder how complete our historical understanding
really was. It never occurred to academicians discussing the problem of the arts at the
seventeenth-century Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, or to writers who
popularized systematic classifications of the beaux arts in the eighteenth century, to
include nonwestern styles of artistic production.1 Yet the history of the classification of
the arts and categories forjudging artistic excellence deserves to be studied from a point
of view broad enough to take into account the extensive migration of visual culture long
before global contact was initiated at the end of the fifteenth century, and even more so
during the era we still call the Renaissance.2 Non-European art and artifacts were present
in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and, after the Ottoman Turks captured Constan­
tinople in 1453, great quantities of new material began arriving from the eastern
Mediterranean basin, then Africa, the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere. During this period,
the appreciation of art increased dramatically in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. A few
extraordinary records - such as Albrecht Diirer’s frequently cited admiration for Aztec
gold- and silvervvork — even attest to the appreciation of non-European objects as
products of extraordinary artistic ingenuity.3 At the same time, the value of certain kinds
of artifice became the subject of violent controversy. What did new awareness of other
cultures contribute to European conceptions of the arts during this initial period of global
contact? And how did the exportation of Renaissance ideals and material culture, from
Italy to other parts of Europe and worldwide, fare in this environment of intensified
cultural interaction?
I also had to ask why the contribution of non-European cultures to western aesthetics
and to the theoretical literature on art that preceded it was not widely acknowledged
when the discipline of art history was professionalized in the nineteenth century. The
hierarchy of the fine arts, of course, but also the organization of the discipline in terms
of national cultures suggest some preliminary answers. It is a complex matter, however,
to examine the history of our modern categories of artistic production and aesthetic