Customer Reviews

Italian Painters of the Renaissance: Venetian and North Italian Schools v. 1 (Phaidon paperback)

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Berenson's classic study of Italian Renaissance painters is well worth seeking in used bookstores or through book-finding services. This collection of essays separately published between 1894 and 1907 focuses on the painters of Venice, Florence, central Italy, and north Italy. In intelligent, lively prose, the author not only analyzes the merit of scores of individual painters from Giotto to Correggio but also traces the development of Italian painting and constantly reiterates his theory that the "life enhancement" qualities of of high art are found in the areas of tactile values, movement, and spatial composition, all of which he explains in articulate detail. Movement and energy, for example, can be expressed in an arm leaning on a pillow. He correctly identifies the partnership in Florence between an intense desire for knowledge that helps to explain and control the world and the "discovery" of classical forms from ancient Rome. In painting, this led above all to a focus on the human figure (which Berenson claims as the ultimate subject of art) and a preeminent dedication to line. The intellectual rigor of Florence contrasted with Venice, the voluptuous capital of a wealthy mercantile empire distinguished by public rituals, where spectacle and color were the chief aims of art. Berenson's authority ranges through landscape, the uses of antiquity, Illustration and Decoration, prettiness versus beauty, and archaic art, whose appeal lies in its search for form and movement. The book is sparsely illustrated, so you will have to supplement it with your own visual sources, but it's a goldmine of information, useful perspectives, and thought-provoking opinions.

I don't suppose you can expect anything else from a book by an art critic, but the prose in "Italian Painters" was at times childish and sneering and at others the most insufferable fustian. Here's an example of BB getting off before one of Raphael's paintings: "In presence of young Sanzio's picture you feel a poignant thrill of transfiguring sensation, as if, on a morning early, the air cool and dustless, you suddenly found yourself in presence of a fairer world, where lovely people were taking part in a gracious ceremony, while beyond them stretched harmonious distances line on line to the horizon's edge." The scary thing is I simply had to open the book at random to find such a quote. This alone makes it not worth reading, but the most frustratingly awful part is that the book is NOT AT ALL INFORMATIVE. It is simply too short to give adequate treatment to the painters involved. Leonardo and Michelangelo get about 3 pages each, less than half of which devoted to their actual works, while lesser artists like Fra Bartolomeo and Domenico Venziano get about a paragraph. He also frequently interrupts his sometimes singing praise, sometimes shrill disdain to hastily expound fragments of an at times crack-philosophy. His reasoning for why "Space-Composition" inspires the highest religious sentiments is truly laughable. But even still: instead of getting a feel and grasp for each painter we are more familiarized with BB's unarticulated judgements. We know that Luca Signorelli's colors are "sometimes not what they should be" but we are provided no example even in the paltry appendix. It is clear that BB feels and looks very deeply into his paintings, but this is about the only clarification this book provides.