Book Review. The book also offers an important resource as a collection of illustrations, which although not

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1 Book Review Edward Burne-Jones s Mythical Paintings Liana De Girolami Cheney New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2014 Pp. xxxvii + 271, 111 black and white illustrations. ISBN Dr. Liana De Girolami Cheney has become a prodigious author of scholarship in two areas including Italian Mannerism and the Pre-Raphaelites, especially with regards to the work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Her work has covered significant cycles in the artist s œuvre that have been thus far addressed in a limited capacity in art historical scholarship, including the Pygmalion and the Image cycle, as well as the Perseus and Andromeda series. A specialist in emblems, Mannerism, and second-generation Pre-Raphaelites, Cheney s work follows a socio-historical model, considering biographical and philosophical methodologies where appropriate. The penchant for some nineteenth-century artists to approach traditions and iconography from a synæsthetic perspective makes the author s familiarity with the emblematic tradition of considerable use to a Burne-Jones topic. An iconographic and thematic analysis here provides consistency and coherence to a text that covers a wide span of the artist s work and life. The purpose of Edward Burne-Jones s Mythical Paintings, is as the title suggests, to evaluate the portrayal of myth in the artist s painted works. While the framework of analysis fits perhaps the scholar s focus more obviously than the artist s, the book is successful in providing a well-needed study that links the narratives of greatest importance in Burne-Jones s work into a cohesive whole. For an artist who is associated with Symbolism and the highly complex and syncretistic iconography of the late nineteenth century, this is an important contribution. Like his contemporary Gustave Moreau in France (who was a fellow exhibitor at the Grosvenor Gallery in London), Burne-Jones was a learned artist who employed mythological subjects not merely to recount the glories of a classical past, but rather to relate age-old themes to modern concerns. Cheney s approach, which ties these mythological subjects also to the artist s own life experiences, offers a greater depth of contextualisation to a body of work that could too easily be dismissed as literary traditionalism or too akin to academism. Indeed, Cheney s focus upon unraveling the interconnectedness of these narratives assists art historians in emerging from an era of academic and literary bashing methodologies and scholarly biases. The book also offers an important resource as a collection of illustrations, which although not

2 a catalogue raisonné, allows the reader to observe the iconographic and stylistic correlations between motifs, many of which Burne-Jones revisited over the course of his career. Although colour images are not provided, the extensive number of images (111) certainly makes up for this; Peter Lang was certainly a well-chosen publisher for this king of illustrative burden. The book s structure is divided thematically by life or artistic concerns that impacted Burne- Jones throughout his life. Again, in this context the themes seem to best fit the scholar s focus, but at this point in her productivity it does seem appropriate. Cheney s output of work on Burne- Jones has made her a leading scholar of his work, and as such the opportunity to build a manuscript based on her studies of his themes is of considerable value to fellow Burne-Jones and/or Pre-Raphaelite scholars. In this well organized study the author offers twelve chapters in three parts. The first, titled Paragone: Edward Burne-Jones and Italian Renaissance Artists, establishes the historical justification for one of the project s key methodologies: artistic rivalry. It is also here that the author acknowledges the important intersections of this tradition with Giorgio Vasari, who so significantly impacted the competitive humanistic model that shaped the paragone in the Renaissance, as well as the importance of concepts of genius or furor poeticus in Vasari s time. As one of the preeminent scholars of Vasari s work, these intersections may play to the author s strengths, but the logic seems sound. The second chapter Edward Burne-Jones Interpretation of Botticelli s Female Imagery: Paragone and Rinascita elucidates why the book starts with the paragone of the Renaissance, which is because Burne-Jones s artistic agenda built upon that of Sandro Botticelli, primarily through their shared interest in Neoplatonism. Historiographic investigation of Burne-Jones s familiarity with Botticelli, including the popularity of Botticelli in nineteenth-century England, provides the jumping-off point for the consideration of this Renaissance master in shaping Burne-Jones s artistic style, but also his theory of art. Cheney includes here a valuable summary of major acquisitions and exhibitions of Botticelli s works in nineteenth-century England, which is of use to historians of art. 105 Of note regarding Cheney's investigation is the balance of her methodological approach. The foundation of the book is placed upon iconographic studies, through which Cheney demonstrates her superior grasp of the field. Detailed and fastidious, Cheney synthesises the wealth of visual information in Burne-Jones s work in a manner that demonstrates an expansive expertise in western iconography. Such a methodological approach is particularly important in Burne-Jones s paintings, because he was borrowing from other artistic traditions from across the ages. Although somewhat less interested in international and non-western traditions than contemporaries like

3 Moreau, Burne-Jones s education at Oxford University served him well in his mastery of Early Modern literature and other periods. Cheney, however, offers something unique for the Pre-Raphaelite scholar, which is that her background in psychology lays down a concomitant thread to her interpretive methods. With a degree in psychology, it is clear that Cheney managed to develop this expertise into a balanced, and not sensationalised, biographical analysis of the artist under consideration. This is particularly evident in her interpretation of Burne-Jones s relationship with Maria Zambaco, with whom he had a long-term affair. Not enough scholarly effort has been otherwise expended, outside of Cheney s work, to understand this relationship as an important phenomenon in the artist s career; few have considered the specific impact on how to interpret his narrative portrayals in the context of this love affair. One of the most beneficial contributions that Dr. Cheney makes is the effort to contextualise the work of Burne-Jones as a nineteenth-century artist within the paragone tradition, which means competition (or comparison) between the arts. Opening in her first chapter Paragone: Edward Burne-Jones and Renaissance Artists, Cheney frames Burne-Jones as an artist who is deeply invested in mastering his art, and in conveying complex philosophical concepts through elaborate iconographical material. Cheney briefly summarises the Renaissance paragone borne in theoretical tradition under Benedetto Varchi (p. 2) and Leonardo da Vinci, establishing how Burne- Jones carried out an artistic relationship with his Renaissance predecessors throughout his career. Multiple types of paragone exist within the work of Burne-Jones s body of work, including his rivalry with himself to surpass his own ideas and plans in material form; his interest in illustrating literary works, which engenders a text-image rivalry; and finally, his obsession with music and its lyrical properties, as they relate to techniques and ideas that may be iterated in a visual form. As a methodology, viewing artistic production through the lens of rivalry, in its historical and future forms, is an important and often not very well articulated approach to nineteenth-century art history; although, the body of work is growing, including efforts by Alexandra Wettlaufer, George Mras, Linda Goddard, and others. Indeed, text-image and inter-arts relationships have been a central focus of historians of nineteenth-century art; however, it has not often been properly contextualised. Cheney s approach is both appropriate and highly sensitive the diversity of issues in paragone studies. Indeed, her study on Burne-Jones takes the reader through a variety of paragone forms, which she clearly labels and substantiates in each instance. For instance, in the fifth chapter Cheney illustrates how the artist's series Pygmalion and the Image evoked a paragone between the image and the real (p. 29). A similar approach is offered in the tenth chapter regarding the analysis of Burne-Jones s Le Chant D Amour, which was completed in two versions,

4 to convey a Neoplatonic understanding of the power of music with the power of love (p. 115). This example shows how Cheney s study is more broadly relevant than merely with regards to the work of Burne-Jones; for instance, the study tied this artist s concerns to expansive trends in the hierarchy of the arts in the nineteenth-century. The eleventh chapter similarly expands the variety of paragone types represented in the book by considering how the works of Dante Gabriel Rosetti (who was Burne-Jones s mentor) operated with respect to poetry in a classic text-versus-image paragone. While capably covering the specific in Burne-Jones s work, Cheney also delves into the general socio-historical context. In chapter eleven s consideration of the ways in which the artist s work intersected with Victorian conceptions of womanhood, Cheney compares Burne-Jones s female figures to portrayals of the fallen woman that were so popular in the Victorian era. To conclude, Cheney s in-depth study of Burne-Jones s work offers a significant contribution to scholarship on this artist. The book does not attempt a summary of the artist s life, and nor is it a superficial overview of his œuvre. It is, instead, well-researched, providing provocative and sophisticated explorations of Burne-Jones s creative, philosophical, iconological, and personal artistic motives. Works Cited Leonardo on Painting. Trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker. Intro. and Ed. Martin Kemp. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, Goddard, Linda. Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, Mendelsohn, Leatrice. Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, Mras, George P. Ut Pictura Musica: A Study of Delacroix s Paragone. Art Bulletin 45 (Sept. 1963): Wettlaufer, Alexandra. Pen versus Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion in Postrevolutionary France. New York: Palgrave,

5 Reviewed by Sarah Lippert Associate Professor of Art History University of Michigan-Flint Director of the Society for Paragone Studies Dr. Lippert is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan-Flint. She is a specialist in the history of artistic competition (the paragone) in the long nineteenth century, including the work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, as well as Italian and French Mannerism; this work has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr. Lippert s publications have appeared with Peter Lang, MacFarland Publishing, I.B. Tauris, and in the journals Dix-Neuf and Artibus et Historiae, while upcoming projects include a manuscript on the paragone in the nineteenth century with Routledge.