by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical
In caa.reviews, David Wilkins considers Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni, by Pamela M. Jones:
Who wouldn’t want to be an art historian? We spend our days looking at and thinking about beautiful and interesting things, confronting the past and present through works made by individuals, groups, tribes, nations. In museums, libraries, and on the internet, we encounter images from humanity’s earliest history and works that were made yesterday. In everyday life, we are barraged with the visual evidence of human creativity, from vernacular architecture to the arts of fashion and merchandising. We want to probe the motivations of those who created each work and understand the impact each had at the time of its creation and in history. These are big goals, of course, and—as with any such endeavor—there are frustrations. Many of the objects that at first seem to speak the loudest begin to whisper when we start researching or set out to communicate our ideas through teaching and writing. We want evidence to support or challenge our response to and our understanding of each work. What constellation of factors and personalities explain the creation of a work, and how was each work received and interpreted? History can be reticent and, at times, unyielding.
Not, however, for Pamela M. Jones in her brave new book on five Roman altarpieces from the period around 1600. Her goal was to understand how these works were part of “the lived experience of early modern Catholicism” (5; emphasis in original), a promise she fulfills in a most impressive fashion. Rather than exploring the intentionality that has been the focus of most art-historical effort in the early modern period, she shifts her attention to the now-popular question of reception.
