by Jon Lackman | 27 May 2009 | Books, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Susan Donahue Kuretsky considers Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art:
Wood’s study attempts in part to redress limitations in traditional formulations of the Renaissance (familiarly defined in relationship to Italy) as a myth of rebirth, repetition, and revival of classical antiquity in art following a dark period of disintegration … He argues that Germans did not conceive of Antiquity as distantly separated from their own present by a dark Middle Age, since they saw themselves as the direct imperial continuation, through the Holy Roman Empire, of both the grandeur and technical ingenuity of Rome … Wood’s larger project continues and expands his hypothesis [that] pre-modern productions of all kinds of artifacts, including architecture, were not considered in terms of individual authorship, or the circumstances or historical moment of their actual production, but rather as they related typologically to—and could substitute for—links in a chain of earlier artifacts of a similar sort …
Wood’s study ranges widely over sculpture, architecture, prints, paintings, and various other forms of visual expression, both documentary and aesthetic. His erudition is extraordinary, as is his command of language, though it must be said that he regularly casts the reader into some heavy seas of abstruse and convoluted terminology. (“The possibility of escape from the secularization model is the hypothesis that images and artifacts, to the extent that they made referential claims, worked not by semiosis but by the mechanisms of labeling and through the myth of a replica chain structured on type-token ratios” (83).) This is a study that requires as much re-rereading as reading, but the rewards are many … Wood’s selections of examples often act as springboards for consideration of larger categories of images or artifacts, giving his text application well beyond its focus on a particular place and period. His extensive discussion of the evolution of alphabets and the complex, shifting relationships between the new print typography and earlier calligraphy is in itself worth the price of the book. Interspersed throughout this long, densely written study are startling shafts of verbal elegance and wit that light up the page and carry the reader on, such as: “This sense of woundedness was the precondition for the Italian sense of historical distance from antiquity”
