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PACKAGING THE
RENAISSANCE:
September, 2001 REVIEWER: David Mayernik
he word, and the idea of, "Renaissance" has always evoked positive cultural connotations (John Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites notwithstanding). Where the period stops and starts has been a point of contention among polemicists for years, and whether it marks the beginning of the modern world is an oft-discussed corollary to thinking of the medieval world (which it theoretically overturned) as somehow innately other than modern. A show like this can't possibly address the finer points of these debates, nor should it; it is, in fact, a packaging of the broad currents of the Renaissance ostensibly for a non-Western culture, but in the choices it makes about what it does want to focus on it says just as much about our contemporary Western culture as it does about the 15th and 16th centuries. It must be said that the very scope and name of a show like this is wholly at odds with the trend in temporary exhibits, especially in Italy, where the tendency has been to focus in on narrower themes and sometimes marginally obscure artists. By covering the Renaissance as a whole, and trying where possible to include famous names[1] (if not the most famous works), it seeks recognizability and punch; it also, inevitably, is fragmentary, more interested in conveying the flavor of the epoch than thoroughly tracing themes. The expansive view taken by the organizers—including armour, decorative arts, etc.,—is effectively suggestive both of the range of artists' skills and the penetration of high art themes into every aspect of civilized life. The organizers have also been expansive in their definition of the era, starting predictably enough with Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, et al (but also reaching back for Lorenzo Monaco), but choosing to define the end of the period in the late 16th century, the period often known as Mannerisim. There is current scholarship that supports this (after all, Vasari referred to Raphael's maniera, and so the art-historical label Mannerism only acknowledges what for the 16th century was an intrinsic component of the whole rebirth of good classical style), but it is polemical in its own way, and suggests, to my mind at least, the possible extension of the term into the 18th century as well (at least in Italy). Which leads to a conclusion: perhaps, apart from style, the most defining characteristic of the "Renaissance" is the rebirth of the humanist culture of the ancient world, and this is what supplied the period its artistic content. For Alberti, it was the learned artist, not necessarily literate in Latin but steeped in Latin culture, who could best articulate the rhetorical themes of frescoes, sculptures, tapestries, etc., and in walking through this impressive exhibit it is important to acknowledge the thematic continuity that unites as disparate maniere as Botticelli's and Veronese's: perhaps it was Hercules and Venus, not Michelangelo and Raphael, who were the heroes of the Rinascimento. [1] of famous names, the show includes most of the famous 15th century Tuscans, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti (with perhaps the most significant work in the show, one of “Gates of Paradise” panels for the Florentine Baptistry, on loan from the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo), Lippi, Botticelli (in an impressive detached fresco of the Annunciation), and Ghirlandaio among them; also, of necessity, Raphael (one portrait), Michelangelo (his Brutus bust), and Leonardo (in drawing); ending with Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Bronzino, Cellini, and Giambologna
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