Malcolm Bull's survey of the role of classical mythology in renaissance art is a tour-de-force in every way, writes Michael Hall, and it will be discussed and debated for years to come.
If the crowds are anything to judge by, The Birth of Venus and Primavera are without question the most popular paintings in the Uffizi: today, subjects from classical mythology seem central to what we understand that elusive concept 'the renaissance' to mean. Yet in the period usually taken to be defined by the concept of the renaissance, 1400-1530, classical subjects are represented in only a tiny fraction of artistic output, in Italy as well as the rest of Europe. Art was overwhelmingly devoted to the Christian story; as Malcolm Bull reminds us in this remarkable book, the great flowering of classical subjects in art took place in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The hesitancy with which the pagan gods stepped back into the western imagination, and the way that patrons and artists kept them firmly in the margins rather than at the centre of their concerns, are among the over-arching arguments in an astonishingly ambitious survey, which ranges across all Europe over 250 years.
This is a very unusual book. It is lightly but well illustrated, and lightly but well annotated. It would be easy to pick it up and think that here is an introduction to classical mythology for history of art undergraduates, especially as the core of the book is a sequence of chapters on the key figures--Hercules, Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus, Diana and Apollo. Although it may therefore look like a book to be dipped into when one needs to mug up on the Labours of Hercules or the Choice of Paris, for example, it needs to be read to be appreciated. After only a couple of chapters it is clear that Malcolm Bull--who is head of art history at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford--has pulled off an astonishing feat. The range, the curiosity and the originality of his approach is deeply impressive, but what makes the book live in the memory is the dazzling energy and lucidity of its writing: Mr Bull never flags, never bores, and constantly provokes, illuminates and amuses.
Any lazy idea that the renaissance somehow equates with a revival of classical civilisation is held up to question as Mr Bull imagines what an ancient Roman artist would have made of the renaissance, once he had got over the shock that an obscure Jewish sect had managed to oust all its rivals. The obvious point that classical personifications appealed to rulers would not have come as a surprise, although the centrality of triumphs and triumphal entries to the way renaissance monarchs used mythological figures would have seemed odd, since triumphs held republican overtones for Romans. The divorce of images of deities from any practice or indeed real understanding of Roman religion would have been baffling, yet there was never the slightest likelihood in the renaissance that anyone was going to start worshipping Apollo or Jupiter. The almost total lack of interest in the renaissance in the body beautiful would also have been puzzling: statues of Hercules, for example, were usually adornments of gymnasia and stadia, building types that were unknown to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In addition, the media had changed--where were the mosaics, and what were all these tapestries? And why had astrology become so prominent in the way classical deities were portrayed?
Mr Bull opens with two wide-ranging chapters, one on the sources for artistic representations of the gods, literary as well as artistic, and one on the places where it was felt appropriate to use such depictions. In terms of sources, what mattered overwelmingly were gems and the late Roman Hellenistic revival as embodied in sarcophagus reliefs. In literary terms, Ovid was crucial, but he was not otherwise central to late medieval and renaissance culture, and certainly formed no part of academic curricula, for example--The Metamorphoses was the sort of book people read solely for pleasure. That lack of centrality is evident also in the way that pagan subjects are found above all in the decorative arts--on maiolica, furniture (especially cassoni) and pastiglia boxes, the white-lead casket made for jewellery in the Veneto. The associations were virtually always with the pleasures of nature and erotic love.
As Mr Bull argues, this is hardly surprising, since mythology was used to supplement Christian imagery in areas where Christianity was indifferent or hostile. As he comments, in Christian art 'there are significant numbers of older men--patriarchs, prophets, church fathers, hermit saints and the like. In contrast, mythologies show very few old people, almost no all-male situations and a disproportionate number of nude, or partially dressed young women'. Mythological art in the renaissance almost never competes with imagery that Christianity does well--the mother and child, for example, or Hades. In addition, mythology celebrates, far more than Christian tradition ever did, the joys of nature and the countryside--notably hunting--and of parties; more, perhaps, could be said about the way that mythological subjects encouraged the depictions of landscapes. Individual classical prototypes could be used in a Christian context, but compositions were virtually never transposed from pagan to Christian subjects, or vice-versa--the example of Philemon and Baucis and the Supper at Emmaus is perhaps the only serious exception.
Some rulers had an interest in individual deities, perhaps because of a coincidence in name, or a desire to use them for propaganda. Mr Bull shows how local and individual such uses of mythology are: the loves of Jupiter, for example, may seem a quintessential renaissance theme, but, he argues, one can identify only two main audiences--'anonymous consumers of pornography and the Holy Roman Emperor'.
This reductiveness offers many provocative insights--for example, Minerva is a fairly rare figure in renaissance art, simply because as an armoured warrior she was not very sexy. Again and again, Mr Bull produces interesting insights for others to follow up--why, for example, in the sixteenth century do scenes of Venus and Mars largely give way to depictions of Venus and Adonis? 'Does the displacement of Mars reflect changing ideas of masculinity, a more romantic conception of love, the pressure of Christian morality?'
The book impressively builds up towards a considered argument that for the renaissance mythology meant 'fantasia' or the liberating power of the imagination, and that realism--which is after all supposed to be the defining quality of renaissance art, was reserved for sacred subjects; perspective, as he observes, was developed in part as a way of eliding the space in which the worshipper stood with the imagined space in which a sacred drama is enacted. Such invitations almost never happen in mythological art: Mr Bull compares, for example, the shallow space of Parnassus in the Vatican stanze with the deep perspective of the sacred and historical scenes. This is perhaps only partly convincing: the difference in the way the heavenly and earthly realms are depicted in the Disputa perhaps suggests that the contrast in Raphael's mind was heavenly/earthly as much as Christian/pagan. There is much in this book to argue about, and its observations and ideas will be discussed for a long time to come. Mr Bull has drawn from the Hippocrene spring to refresh a subject than seemed stale, and his book is as witty, sexy and absorbing as his subject.
HIGHLIGHTS OF 2005
From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting 1400-1500
Paula Nuttall Yale University Press 40 [pounds sterling]/$60 ISBN 0 300 10244 5
Reviewed in February
The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France 1889-1900
Richard Thomson Yale University Press 40 [pound sterling]/$60 ISBN 0 300 10465 0
Reviewed in October
The British Stable: An architectural and social history Giles Worsley, with photographs by William Curtis Rolf Yale University Press 45 [pounds sterling]/$75
ISBN 0 300 0708 01
Reviewed in June
In the Gardens of Impressionism
Clare A.P. Willsdon Thames & Hudson 29.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 500 51147 0
Reviewed in April
Walter Sickert: A Life
Matthew Sturgis Harper Collins Publishers 30 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 00 257083 1
Reviewed in July
Matisse the Master A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954
Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton, 25 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 214 13339 4
Reviewed in July
COPYRIGHT 2005 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group
