by Jon Lackman | 11 November 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the Summer 2010 Representations Christopher Pye writes:
In their introduction to the recent volume Renaissance Florence: A Social History, the editors offer a reflection on their own methodological moment …
We are poised at an exciting moment in the history of our disciplines when we can with profit consider the ways in which the two heretofore distinct academic fields [of history and art history] have learned from one another and whether we should be moving toward a single academic enterprise …
Although they pose this as a question, there is little doubt about where the authors’ investments lie … [W]hat strikes one most about the passage is how unproblematic such a prospective mingling of the disciplines feels, as if disciplinary knowledge were purely accretive and thus available to being pooled when the time is ripe … What vanishes in such an account—and vanishes as if it had never been there—is the entire problem of the aesthetic, the aesthetic as a problem.
Pye interprets this as a lamentable sign of “the contemporary ascendancy of the instrumentalist account of the work as a function of material culture” in Renaissance studies:
Indeed, the claim that the early modern artwork is not yet conceived as an autonomous formation amounts to a critical doxa … [Yet] recent critical literature has recognized in the era [an] increased self-reflexiveness of the image and an increased consciousness of its status as representation.
