Painting in Renaissance Florence 1500-1550 by David FranklinReview by: Piers Dominic BrittonThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 1234-1235Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4144227 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 20:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:24:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1234 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXIII/4 (2002)

in maintaining libraries. His interest in the material world renders the book a useful intro- duction to the archaeological remains of ancient libraries in, for example, Pergamum, Ephe- sus, or Rome.This is a book that teaches us important questions to ask about libraries in any age. In this context of rich inquiry, however, I yearned for a discussion of the religious status of libraries. Certainly Casson discusses the role of libraries as resources for religious knowl-

edge and cites examples of divine sanctions of those who stole or defaced books, but there is little consideration of libraries as cultic sites and as institutions that played a role in the con- struction of religious authority in antiquity. We are left wondering, for example, why there was a sarcophagus in the middle of the second-century CE Celsus library in Ephesus and what this may suggest about the relation between hero cult and the civic repositories of

learning. Similarly, there is no mention of the tomb ofAlexander the Great within the library complex in Alexandria. Discussion of their sacral function, I would suggest, is vital for understanding the authority of libraries in city life, as well as their later development in eccle- siastic and monastic contexts.

I would commend this volume as a pleasurable and informative read for anyone inter- ested in the social history of libraries and knowledge. The references Casson provides will

guide the reader to the ancient sources. For a fuller consideration of books and libraries in the first centuries CIE, this book should be supplemented by Harry Y. Gamble's excellent Books and Readers in the Early Church:A History of Early Christian Texts (1995), especially the detailed chapter on early Christian libraries. Ellen Bradshaw Aitken ................ . . . . . . . Harvard Divinity School

Painting in Renaissance Florence 1500-1550. David Franklin. New Haven:Yale Uni-

versity lPress, 2001. 273 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0300083998. David Franklin's account of Florentine painting in the first half of the Cinquecento is a

welcome, and in certain respects radical, reappraisal of a well-trodden field of study. By virtue of clarity, intelligent synthesis of recent research in the area, and the author's commitment to a rich and complex rather than schematically reductive argument, this is one of the most

important survey volumes on sixteenth-century Italian art to be produced in a generation. Franklin's history is divided into a series of twelve discursive, thematically linked biog-

raphies. Since the shadow of Giorgio Vasari is avowedly "cast across the full length" of Paint-

ing in Renaissance Florence, it is presumably not fortuitous that Franklin's volume echoes Vasari's Lives of the Artists in formal terms, even to the inclusion of subsidiary "Lives" within each biography.What is not immediately clear from Franklin's title is that his study is exclu-

sively concerned with painters who were Florentine by birth (with the exception of

Perugino, whose work serves purely as a point of entry to the book's main theses). Foreign artists active during the period in Florence, such as Raphael, make only cameo appearances in Franklin's narrative, or else hover in the wings and are significant as "absent presences." This narrow focus sheds new light on the city's chauvinism, highlighting the ways in which Florence was parochial rather than universalizing in aesthetic matters.

Among the dozen main protagonists of Franklin's study, there are some surprising omis- sions, such as Bronzino, and some superficially surprising inclusions, such as Ridolfo da Ghirlandaio. This reflects the book's greatest strength: through the device of multiple biog- raphies, Franklin goes a long way to eliminating the critical disparity between "major" and

"minor" artists, so painfully apparent in survey works such as S.J. Freedberg's Painting in Italy, 1500-1600. The importance of Franklin's integration of Ridolfo, in particular, cannot be overstated. The account of Ridolfo's "high quality conservatism" provides a context for

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:24:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 1235

evaluating the more adventurous activities of idiosyncratic artists such as Rosso and Pon- tormo. Moreover, Ridolfo's work represents a useful correlative to the relatively stable, for- mulaic output of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolommeo. This in turn helps germanely in the process of demystifying the so-called High Renaissance. Fra Bartolommeo, for example, emerges from Franklin's discussion as an efficient but relatively unadventurous practitioner, catering to a niche market, rather than the proponent of nobly restrained gravitas mythicized by Heinrich Wl1fflin in Classic Art.

Franklin's study is also laudable for the way in which it teases out the often-complex strands of taste and critical prejudice in Cinquecento Florence. He acknowledges, for exam-

ple, that Michelangelo and Leonardo both enjoyed considerable prestige in their native city around 1505. However, it is the piecemeal, serendipitous nature of their influence on later Florentine painting that Franklin stresses, and he notes that their celebrity was quite dispro- portionate to the minuscule number of publicly visible, completed works which they left in Florence. In other ways, too, Franklin significantly recasts the received image of artists from the period. For example, he presents the single-mindedness of Michelangelo, Pontormo, and Rosso, not as heroic rebellion against tradition and philistinism, but rather as an expression of

congenital Florentine stubbornness, bordering in some cases on self-destructive monomania.

Notwithstanding the great value of his synthetic analysis, however, there are certain dif- ficulties with Franklin's approach. All of these in effect emanate from the still potent art his- torical myths of the Renaissance, from which the author does not sufficiently distance himself.

In his introduction, Franklin is slightly defensive about his decision to concentrate on

painting, and more specifically Florentine painting. However, the validity of this choice seems to me much less problematic than his adherence to a model of art history that assumes

priority for stylistic matters. This is exacerbated by the fact that he occasionally has recourse to gratuitous, ex cathedra value judgments. For example, he dismisses Giuliano Bugiardini out of hand as a "perpetually uninspired artist," and reflects harshly on the "unctuous senti- ment" and "almost repulsive" surface gloss of an easel painting by Salviati. These subjective interpolations are regrettable, for they slightly undermine Franklin's overall attentiveness to

Cinquecento sensibilities rather than modern ones, and compromise his careful reevaluation of marginalized artists such as Franciabigio and Vasari.

A more tangible problem is presented by Franklin's handling of the contentious issue of

style labels. His reevaluation of the entrenched notions of the High Renaissance and Man- nerism actually does little to disturb the stagnant waters of style taxonomy. Moreover, he

actually muddies the issue further by offering yet another tendentious definition of Manner- ism, based this time exclusively on Vasari's derogatory use of the term maniera to denote

repetitiveness, in his Life of Perugino. Franklin's definition of mannerism (he self-consciously uses a lower-case "mn") does not resolve the tangled critical debate surrounding this term, but

simply displaces the argument. It is hard to see why he did not jettison or, better, expressly disavow these confusing style labels, for in accommodating them he adds nothing to the

cogency of his overall discussion. In the final analysis, however, these minor shortcomings are merely the shadow side of

Franklin's sensitivity to nuance. His book is a model of subtlety of exposition, and his com-

pelling portrait of Florentine art in the earlier Cinquecento represents a major consolidation of our understanding of the aspirations and pragmatism of painters in the period. Piers Dominic Britton ..................... . Llandovery, Carmarthenshire

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:24:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions