This book offers an alternative to the view that Renaissance art struggled to break away from the confines and superstitions of medieval religion, but at the same time it ranges itself against the more recent tendency to let the art fall back into a long Middle Ages of ongoing religious devotion, civic ritual, and institutionally driven art. Many characteristics that we now recognize as typical of a modern conception of art–the taste for aesthetic refinement beyond the value of the materials or even the degree of technical master; the ability to see and choose from an array of styles, and the interest in correlating styles to geographical areas and historical eras; an art modeled on literature not only in the sense that it takes literary material as its content but also in the sense that it demands to be “read” using the interpretative faculties traditionally demanded by literature–seemed to many like excellent tools with which to reform religious art … For several decades, the most experimental strains in art-making joined forces with the most advanced religious thought …

Nagel’s book is ambitious. His synoptic treatment of historical and theological contexts proves forbidding for this non-specialist. But his close-up descriptions of individual works are often accessible and sometimes stunning, reminiscent of Michael Fried at his best. For example, Here is Nagel on Jan van Eyck’s “Stigmatization of Saint Francis“:

We do have the powerful sense that the sun-flushed figure of Francis is a portrait of an actual person. The effect is strange, and not simple. On the one hand, the portrait quality is of a piece with the carefully observed rocks and cityscape, or details such as the furrowing skin on Brother Leo’s temple, pushed up by his hand as his head becomes heavier with sleep. These descriptive effects offer a kind of visual traction, insisting that we have broken through any iconographic convention of the “story” of the Stigmatization, that we have somehow been transported to the actual place and are eyewitness to the event. At the same time, there is something unsettling about all this description. The figure’s head, with those full cheeks and that incipient double chin, attracts inordinate attention. It is not just a recognizably human face, someone we could know, an effect made more pointed by the fact that his hair, mussed as it is, is cut in a style fashionable in the Netherlands in the 1430s. All of this produces an effect of doubleness and dislocation, the sense that someone is “playing” Saint Francis.

(We’ll continue our reviews of the nominees shortly.)

Early writers make it clear that sculptors and their partisans mocked one another’s shortcomings, publicly … [M]ost vicious of all was the sculptor Michelangelo Naccherino’s denunciation of Giambologna, his former teacher, to the Inquisition in 1589 … We can only assume that artists so intent on undermining one another would also have paid close attention to the work their rivals produced.

Cole also puts the sculptors’ efforts into a larger context, in a belated attempt to bring T.J. Clark’s methods to the study of early modern Italian art, “to see the politics in pictures,” and specifically to ask how “shared ambitions led sculptors to become political actors”:

The sculptors worked primarily for a single individual, but the things they made addressed a broader public … The indifference they could show to any kind of market must have seemed a liberation as much as a limitation. This is not to say, however, that the Medici dukes deserve the adulation some recent fans of their collections have offered them. These were men who crushed the residual early republics of Europe, who unhesitatingly jailed enemies or disposessed them of home and property, and who invaded and colonized foreign territories, strategically using sculpture along the way. Exhibitions celebrating the dukes’ “treasures” and their “magnificence” have sometimes helped to render invisible these rulers’ brutality …

Cole evokes a time in which artists and patrons were outwardly pious but often much more interested in fame and power than the saints they were bronzing: “Giambologna, who may never have gone to mass or said confession … devoted much of his late career to the design and execution of chapels.” Those chapels bore witness not just to Giambologna’s genius but also to the godless score-settling of his patrons and their families. Cosimo de Medici (and his uncle, the Cardinal Giovanni Salviati) expelled the Dominicans from their own church, San Marco, flatly stating “San Marco was founded and built by my house and was mine, and I could dispose of it as my own possession and without license from His Holiness or any other person.”

Cole sees parallels between the late Cinquecento and today:

The artists this book concerns were working at the moment that the gallery was just beginning to take shape, the moment when it was just beginning to be possible for an artist to think of his or her paintings and sculptures as autonomous things. Not accidentally, it was also the moment when “Italian” art was becoming truly European, as the impact of travelers from abroad became unavoidable and as Italy’s products began in numbers to find homes well beyond the peninsula’s shores. It is a moment that suits our own, our identification of the modern with the cosmopolitan. Yet what we lose with our comparative, microscopic gaze is the experience of a place.

(Read our coverage of the other CAA Barr Award finalists: Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance and Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500.)

• Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance; the Complete Works (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010)

• Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley G. Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2010)

• Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010)

First up: Imagining the Past in France. If you are feeling sentimental about the fate of the book, in this age of bookstore bankruptcies, digital competition, and limited attention-spans, then take heart. This catalogue will whisk you to an era when the book mattered greatly to its public and received the attentions of top artists. In her introductory essay, Morrison paints a touching portrait of those craftsmen, who struggled to adapt the religious illuminated manuscript to the secular topics increasingly prized by their customers. At first, they amusingly tried to cram complex narratives into drop-caps (“historiated initials”). This had worked with well-known Bible scenes, which can indicated synecdochally, but good luck with the War between Antiochus and Ptolemy.

Four excellent thematic essays follow Morrison’s, then a long series of detailed object entries. I most enjoyed Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s essay, which asks why the aristocratic public demanded secular histories in this moment. She identifies various ideological ends to which history was put, but also finds ways in which books slipped out from underneath and even subverted those ends:

The French aristocracy, no longer able to impose its needs and concerns in the governance of the realm, contributed to the dominant ideology itw own defeated discourse, achieving on a literary level the success that eluded it on the political … It is, perhaps, one of the finer ironies in the history of medieval historiography that the original quest involved in the French aristocracy’s romancing of the past should issue, ultimately, not in an idyll of a lost age but in a new vision of the French nation.

The catalogue is copiously illustrated in color, but the image quality being only average, its greatest strength is its prose, which breaks scholarly ground and addresses the general reader. It is particularly strong on the issue of word-image interaction, which seems increasingly relevant in our age that mixes the two so promiscuously, on- and offline.

[See also this review (pdf) by Mark Cruse, and critic Christopher Knight's review of the exhibition.]

[Poet Su Hui's huiwen] express genuine, heartfelt emotions, but as they are embedded in an endless puzzle of characters, they ostensibly exist in a space of intense privacy. Readers of the poems become voyeurs. We pry, configure, and unlock the secrets of the palindrome, ultimately becoming furtive admirers of both Su Hui’s private feelings and her exceptional talent. This secrecy is a by-product of an intuitively accepted principle in Chine: self-expression is an extension of the body, and a woman’s revelation of inner thoughts and feelings consequently is like a public disrobing. Su Hui’s silk-woven palindrome describes a world of private interiors. In Empress Yang’s world feminine expression was also conceived in terms of interiors, of private thoughts and feelings. Exposure does not happen of its own accord but rather takes a particular effort, such as that of Wu Zetian, who brings Su Hui’s creativity to public notice.

These are surface thoughts that the story of Su Hui’s silk-woven palindrome elicits, but a closer look reveals something different: Su Hui’s interior world was never intended to be truly private … Empress Yang also took pride in her talent and accomplishments, and her practice of art similarly operated within well-defined boundaries. Moreover, Empress Yang recognized that the interiority of her world was part of a necessary illusion. As I demonstrate later, her effectiveness as a ruler from behind the screen depended on her willingness to obey the same rules of agency, even though the nature of those rules was such that her talent and creativity, even her very person, would become misconstrued and lost.

Empress Yang, Hui-shu Lee writes, “was arguably the most important female art patron of the Song dynasty” besides being “a major player in court politics” — “she worked closely with favored court painters (Ma Yuan and Ma Lin) to help produce paintings with poetic inscriptions that are both exquisite works of art and meaningful modes of expression.” And yet, she has “remained an obscure and little understood figure.” This book should change that.

In her introduction, Koss professes a desire to rescue the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk from the ill repute it has acquired among art historians:

The term is used with regard to such disparate environments as the cinema palaces of Berlin in the 1920s and Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in New York in the 1960s, operating as shorthand to describe a seamless melding of a variety of art forms that overwhelms spectators’ emotions, impedes the possibility of critical thought, and molds a group of individuals into a powerless mass … [S]cholars regularly invoke the Gesamtkunstwerk as a countermodel for the “advanced art” of European modernism … [opposing it] to such basic modernist principles as artistic purity, autonomy, and medium specificity … “Gesamtkunstwerk” often stands for an artistic environment or performance in which spectators are expertly maneuvered into dumbfounded passivity by a sinister and powerful creative force [that is considered] implicitly or explicitly, as fascist, protofascist, or neo-fascist.

To demonstrate the unfairness of this characterization, Koss notes that “notions of artistic purity, autonomy and medium specificity were central to Wagner’s initial formulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in 1849. In uniting the arts, Wagner argued, the Gesamtkunstwerk would allow each to achieve its full potential, to grow stronger in the struggle to define itself against the others.”

I most enjoyed chapter 7, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” which includes a striking observation by Rilke about dolls and childhood:

At a time when everyone still tried hard to answer us quickly and soothingly, it, the dool, was the first to inflict on us that larger-than-life silence that later wafted over us again and again from space when somewhere we approached the frontiers of our existence. Across from it, while it stared at us, we first experienced (or am I mistaken?) that hollowness of feeling, that heart pause, in which one would perish if the whole of gently persistent nature did not lift one, like a lifeless thing, over abysses.

Koss paraphrases and extends Rilke’s observation:

Owing to its extraordinary capacity to absorb empathy … the doll is the first figure to impose on a child the experience of estrangement. Staring blankly, it offers a comforting presence while cruelly inflicting a silence both uncomprehending and incomprehensible. A pivotal figure in human development, the doll prefigures relationship with others, and subsequently and metaphorically, with the spaces of architecture and the world. Its Bauhaus incarnation were similarly passive but capable of provoking intense emotional responses.

This seems like a particularly fascinating and relevant topic today. Over the weekend, I happened to read Jeffrey R. Young’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Programmed for Love: In a skeptical turn, the MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warns of the dangers of social technology.” As Young writes, “She’s concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.” Who better than artists to help mediate our upcoming, sure-to-be-uncanny relationships with our new robot overlords?

The shortlist:

Molly Emma Aitken, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)

Çi?dem Kafescio?lu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

Hui-shu Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010)

First up: Aitken. Molly Emma Aitken’s hefty and beautifully illustrated book, which won the award, concerns Rajput painting, which “flourished between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in the kingdoms that ruled what is now the Indian state of Rajasthan.” They “depicted the nobility and court spectacle as well as scenes from Krishna’s life, the Hindu epics, and court poetry.” (Oddly the book’s press release says “between the 16th and 19th centuries.”)

In her introduction, Aitken writes:

Studies of Indian painting have long shied from questions of why to pursue ever more refined questions of what, when, and who … Descriptions of meaning in Indian painting have typically ended … with narrative and iconography … [Q]uestions of choice and motivation have been elided by a notion of tradition, which has presupposed that Rajasthani court painters painted the way they did because they belonged to a culture that deeply valued the past … Sustained traditions resist interpretation because they are, by definition, repetitions of what has come before … However, traditions are valued only if they answer certain exigencies in the present … This book unpacks tradition incrementally, in a series of concrete, empirical case studies of the formal content of Rajasthani court paintings … In the absence of period texts on art, formal analysis is one of the only and also one of the best means we have to guide interpretations … Here is a rich opportunity to plumb a sustained aesthetic tradition for its operative intelligence.

Aitken, who earned her PhD from Columbia in 2001 under Vidya Dehejia, is an assistant professor at The City College of New York, though not for long, I suspect! Tenure seems inevitable for winners of such an award, not to mention better book sales. Stratospheric sales, probably not. You would think that, at the very least, every university library on the planet would collect a book given the profession’s top honor, but WorldCat shows recent Morey winners in as few as 300 libraries — 700 at most.

These painters are unjustly ignored in the West, Yeng writes:

The tradition of studying and collecting historical Chinese art is well established, and during the last several decades, scholars and collectors have taken up the cause of contemporary Chinese avant-garde and experimental art in earnest. An extraordinarily rich category of Chinese art, however … has gone largely unremarked in the West … These four artists, in ways unique to each, understood and absorbed the essence of centuries of Chinese painting and aesthetics … they successfully met the challenges associated with the advent of China’s “discovery” of Western art, and overcame the suspicion–sometimes outright rejection–of the Chinese tradition that it provoked … and they consistently maintained artistic integrity in spite of an increasingly commercialized and politicized art market.

Yeng argues also that the Chinese contemporary artists who are today so popular among Western elites owe a debt to their countrymen of a century ago:

Even though some established contemporary diaspora artists are not actively ink painters, their successes were built upon the integration of Chinese cultural elements and Western avant-garde idioms … Chinese ink painting in the twentieth century has given rise to a new generation of artists who critically absorb their cultural and artistic heritage and innovatively reinterpret rather than mimic the past, who understand the trajectories of artistic progress, and who have the ability to “draw” the future. Qi Baishi once said, “Who imitates me, his art dies.”