Art and Deluge
WITH the Arno's muddy overspill, as with the red-hot rake of liberation twenty-two years ago, we have been reminded that to be an Italian is to live, and die, in an art museum. Yet it is to the art-historians, whose own losses in the way of Florentine research material can never be wholly made good, that the rest of us must turn for the reassurance that one Cimabue more or less is not the final measure of civilisation. John White's subject in the Pelican History of Art, which is Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250-1400 (Penguin Books, £6 6s.), is a wide one, though it centres naturally upon Tuscany. Its 400 pages and 300 plates certainly achieve a lucid survey, but with no claim to be exhaustive and with generous space for familiar greatness in the buildings of Florence and Siena and the legacies of the major artists—Giotto, Duccio, Cimabue, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti and the Pisani. But the sense of creativeness is general and prodigal, expressed in the almost constant environment of civil war, declining only with the Black Death and the confused tensions of the Great Schism, and with the splendours of Medicean Florence not yet within hail.
For the succeeding century the august Pelican series offers us, at the moment, Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain (Penguin Books, 15 5s.), by Theodore Muller, who indeed casts his net farther into Central Europe and Scandinavia—though not over Britain, which is treated in a different volume. What he comes up with is a Late Gothic flower- ing carefully distinguished in modes of expres- sion, but presented as cohesive in spirit. For once we have a theme—and a rich one—in which relations with Italy can be set forth by way of contrast rather than of influence. This would have been less possible, of course, if Professor Muller had had painting within his brief. A division that slices through painted altarpieces is awkward, but it had to be made somewhere. And the lines which Professor White can draw between cinquecento painting in Italy and the powerful innovations of the Van Eycks and the Master of Flemalle cannot in any case prepare us for the most fascinating interloper in all European art, sumptuously re-offered now in Charles de Tolnay's Hieronymus Bosch (Methuen, £15 15s.). The reproductions are new and copious, and the catalogue raisonne and supplementary materials take note of the revival of scholarly and speculative interest over recent decades.
The authority of M de Tolnay is also impli- cated in the joint production by a dozen scholars of The Complete Work of Michelangelo (two volumes, Macdonald, £15 15s.). The sheer bulk of this tribute suggests a surrender to the titan image which one of the contributors depre- cates; and those who want something cheaper and more portable will find that the enlarged and improved new version of Ludwig Gold- scheider's Michelangelo Drawings (Phaidon, £2 17s. 6d.), with 242 plates, sheds illumination beyond the limits of its theme. But the two- volume jumbo Michelangelo is worth the money, I would say, for its photographic coverage alone. If the presentation of architecture and sculpture (including much new angling, suggestive details and comparisons, and full treatment for the recently recovered early crucifix from Santo Spirito) is more satisfactory than that of the paintings, the distinction would not, after all, have displeased the artist—whose famous verdict in favour of sculpture must have seemed newly justified as eighteen feet of water receded from the Casa Buor -trotti. It is the paintings, on the other hand, that have produced the most in- teresting essay (by Roberto Salvini), in a collec- tion which demonstrates too often how poor translation can reduce the merely obfusc to the virtually unreadable.
Like us, Rembrandt could own a book 'full of the work of Michelangelo Buonarotti.' But the evidence of its impact on his own art, as Sir Kenneth Clark observes in his new book, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (John Murray, £3 3s.), is curiously minimal—curiously, I mean, in view of the status of both masters as prophets of Subjectivismus. Raphael, repre- sented among Rembrandt's improvident accumu- lations by two paintings and three large volumes of fine prints after his work, was another matter; and on the whole subject of the Dutchman's debt to Renaissance Italy Sir Kenneth has fresh and stimulating things to say. That he chooses to display his erudition in a book designed for wide appeal, sympathetically written and ex- cellently illustrated, is everybody's gain. He has the reader on his side as much in the elaborate pursuit of sources as in the conclusion that 'the creative processes will always remain mys- terious.' Indeed, it is only the close examination of the channels of visual transmission long before we had coffee-table books (or even coffee- tables) that can allow 'inspiration' as the solution for analogies from which rational ex- planation has been eliminated. It is a fact that the influence of Hieronymus Bosch spread through Europe in the sixteenth century by the engravings—inadequate to our camera-glutted eyes—of Cock of Antwerp. It is also a fact that Rembrandt never went to Italy. Now read on.
Van Dyck, however, did go to Italy. The book that he filled there with sketches and copies— one of the Chatsworth treasures transferred to the British Museum by the legal penalties of death—is a key-document of connoisseurship; and its chequered history is shadowed by that of another, still at Chatsworth and at last iden- tified, annotated and magnificently reproduced as Van Dyck's Antwerp Sketchbook, by Michael Jaffd (two volumes, Macdonald, £31 10s.). The general interest, apart from the beauty and pre- cocious ability of a good many of the drawings, is in the evidence for Van Dyck's_early search for style and direction in the studio of Rubens, and in diary jottings, technical notes, medical recipes and accounts affording glimpses of the life of Antwerp for his time and class. But this is a collector's piece, for the bibliographer as well as the art-historian, worthily printed and produced, and priced accordingly.
Finally, and for the rather less ambitious
shopper, here are two for the post-industrial shelf, united by nothing except some share of that alienation which is alternately described as the mark of a collapsing or a reborn civilisation. In James McNeill Whistler (Phaidon, £3 10s.), Denys Sutton follows up his popular study of Rodin with a slighter essay on a now rela- tively neglected artist whose personality seems never to have fully emerged from the crepuscular delicacies which made his name and lost his case with Ruskin. J. P. Hodin's large, long- considered and passionately committed book on Oskar Kokoschka : The Artist and his Time (Cory, Adams and Mackay, £3 15s.) gets right inside his subject as man and artist. For the Kokoschkasludien which will continue to be written from the outside it will be a source of warmth as well as of biographical detail.
FRANCIS WATSON
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