James Elkins Robert Williams

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2 Renaissance Theory Volume 5 in The Art Seminar series, Renaissance Theory presents an animated conversation among art historians about the optimal ways of conceptualizing Renaissance art, and the links between Renaissance art and contemporary art and theory. This is the first discussion of its kind, involving not only questions within Renaissance scholarship, but issues of concern to art historians and critics in all fields. Organized as a virtual roundtable discussion, the contributors discuss rifts and disagreements about how to understand the Renaissance and debate the principal texts and authors of the last 30 years who have sought to reconceptualize the period. They then turn to the issue of the relation between modern art and the Renaissance: why do modern art historians and critics so seldom refer to the Renaissance? Is the Renaissance our indispensable heritage, or are we cut off from it by the revolution of modernism? The volume includes an introduction by Rebecca Zorach and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on Renaissance art, including Stephen J. Campbell, Michael Cole, Fredrika Jacobs, Claire Farago, and Ethan Matt Kavaler. James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Head of History of Art at the University College Cork, Ireland. His many books include Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, all published by Routledge. Robert Williams is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His fields of specialty are Italian Renaissance art and the history of art theory. He is the author of Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 1997) and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2004).

3 The Art Seminar Volume 1 Art History Versus Aesthetics Volume 2 Photography Theory Volume 3 Is Art History Global? Volume 4 The State of Art Criticism Volume 5 Renaissance Theory Volume 6 Landscape Theory Volume 7 Re-Enchantment Sponsored by the University College Cork, Ireland; the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland; and the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

4 Renaissance Theory EDITED BY J A M E S E L K I N S and R O B E R T W I L L I A M S

5 First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 2008 Taylor and Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-library, To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge s collection of thousands of ebooks please go to All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Renaissance theory / edited by James Elkins and Robert Williams. 1st ed. p. cm. (The art seminar; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Art, Renaissance. 2. Art Philosophy. I. Elkins, James, II. Williams, Robert, 1955 N6370.R dc ISBN10: (hbk) ISBN10: (pbk) ISBN10: (ebk) ISBN13: (hbk) ISBN13: (pbk) ISBN10: (ebk) ISBN Master e-book ISBN

6 Table of Contents Series Preface James Elkins Section 1 Introduction 1 Renaissance Theory: A Selective Introduction 3 Rebecca Zorach Section 2 Starting Points 37 Introduction to an Abandoned Book 39 James Elkins Vasari s Renaissance and its Renaissance Alternatives 47 Stephen J. Campbell The Concept of the Renaissance Today: What is at Stake? 69 Claire Farago Rethinking the Divide: Cult Images and the Cult of Images 95 Fredrika Jacobs Gothic as Renaissance: Ornament, Excess, and Identity, Circa Ethan Matt Kavaler Italian Renaissance Art and the Systematicity of Representation 159 Robert Williams Section 3 The Art Seminar 185 Participants: Stephen J. Campbell, Michael V vii

7 VI Renaissance Theory Cole, James Elkins, Claire Farago, Fredrika Jacobs, Ethan Matt Kavaler, Robert Williams Section 4 Assessments 277 Jan von Bonsdorff 278 Una Roman D Elia 286 Lisa Pon 290 Charlotte M. Houghton 295 Lubomír Konečný 304 Ingrid Ciulisová 309 Frédéric Elsig 313 Jeanette Favrot Peterson 321 Thomas Puttfarken 333 Patricia Emison 342 Joanna Woods-Marsden 360 Maria Ruvoldt 366 Marzia Faietti 376 Caroline van Eck 385 Robert Zwijnenberg 394 Elizabeth Alice Honig 410 Alice Jarrard 423 Pamela H. Smith 427 Adrian W. B. Randolph 446 Section 5 Afterwords 487 Renaissance Theory? 489 Alessandro Nova Hugging the Shore 501 James Elkins and Robert Williams Notes on Contributors 521 Index 531

8 Series Preface James Elkins It has been said and said that there is too much theorizing in the visual arts. Contemporary writing seems like a trackless thicket, tangled with unanswered questions. Yet it is not a wilderness; in fact it is well-posted with signs and directions. Want to find Lacan? Read him through Macey, Silverman, Borch-Jakobsen, Žižek, Nancy, Leclaire, Derrida, Laplanche, Lecercle, or even Klossowski, but not so it might be said through Abraham, Miller, Pontalis, Rosaloto, Safouan, Roudinesco, Schneiderman, or Mounin, and of course never through Dalí. People who would rather avoid problems of interpretation, at least in their more difficult forms, have sometimes hoped that theory would prove to be a passing fad. A simple test shows that is not the case. The table, below, shows the number of art historical essays that have terms like psychoanalysis as keywords, according to the Bibliography of the History of Art. The increase is steep after 1980, and in three cases the gaze, psychoanalysis, and feminism the rise is exponential. Another sampling shows that citations of some of the more influential art historians of the mid-twentieth century, writers who came before the current proliferation of theories, are waning: In this second graph there is a slight rise in the number of VII

9 VIII Renaissance Theory Figure 1 Theory in art history, references to Warburg and Riegl, reflecting the interest they have had for the current generation of art historians: but the graph s surprise is the precipitous decline in citations of Panofsky and Gombrich. Most of art history is not driven by named theories or individual historians, and these graphs are also limited by the terms that can be meaningfully searched in the Bibliography of the History of Art. Even so, the graphs suggest that the landscape of interpretive strategies is changing rapidly. Many subjects crucial to the interpretation of art are too new, ill-theorized, or unfocused to be addressed in monographs or textbooks. The purpose of The Art Seminar is to address some of the most challenging subjects in current writing on art: those that are not unencompassably large (such as the state of painting), or not yet adequately posed (such as the space between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic), or so well known that they can be written up in critical dictionaries (the theory of deconstruction). The subjects

10 Series Preface IX Figure 2 Rise and fall of an older art history, : citations of selected writers. chosen for The Art Seminar are poised, ready to be articulated and argued. Each volume in the series began as a roundtable conversation, held in front of an audience at one of the three sponsoring institutions the University College Cork, the Burren College of Art (both in Ireland), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The conversations were then transcribed, and edited by the participants. The idea was to edit in such a way as to minimize the correctable faults of grammar, repetitions, and lapses that mark any conversation, while preserving the momentary disagreements, confusions, and dead-ends that could be attributed to the articulation of the subject itself. In each volume of The Art Seminar, the conversation itself is