The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-90-04-21204-6
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 19, 404 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 839 g

Reihe: Intersections

In response to the dominance of Latin as the language of intellectual debate in early modern Europe, regional centers started to develop a new emphasis on vernacular languages and forms of cultural expression. This book shows that the local acts as a mark of distinction in the early modern cultural context. Interdisciplinary in scope, essays examine vernacular strands in the visual arts, architecture and literature from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Contributions focus on change, rather than consistencies, by highlighting the transformative force of the vernacular over time and over different regions, as well as the way the concept of the vernacular itself shifts depending on the historical context.

Contributors include James J. Bloom, Jessica E. Buskirk, C. Jean Campbell, Lex Hermans, Sun Jing, Trudy Ko, David A. Levine, Eelco Nagelsmit, Alexandra Onuf, Bart Ramakers and Jamie L. Smith.

Zielgruppe

All those interested in the history early modern art, architecture and literature, the vernacular, as well as historians of English, Flemish, Dutch, and Italian language and culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Keizer, Joost

Richardson, Todd

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Barock, Klassizismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Renaissance, Manierismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Geschichte der Architektur, Baugeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: The Place of the Vernacular in Early Modern Culture
JOOST KEIZER and TODD M. RICHARDSON

I. INTERSECTIONS

Petrarch’s Italy, Sovereign Poetry and the Hand of Simone Martini
C. JEAN CAMPBELL

‘Salve Maria Gods Moeder Ghepresen.’ The Salve Regina and the Vernacular in the Art of Hans Memling, Anthonis de Roovere, and Jacab Obrecht
JESSEICA E. BUSKIRK

Going Local: Three Sixteenth-Century Florentine Views on Donatello’s St. George
LEX HERMANS

As Many Lands, As Many Customs: Vernacular Self-Awareness Among the Netherlandish Rhetoricians
BART RAMAKERS

Frans Hals and the Vernacular
DAVID A. LEVINE

II. METHOD

The Hybrid Text: Transformation of the Vernacular in Beware the Cat
TRUDY KO

Local Terrains: Imaging the Vernacular Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp
ALEXANDRA ONUF

III. IDENTITIES

Als ich can: How Jan van Eyck Extended the Vernacular from Dutch Poetry to Oil Painting
JAMIE L. SMITH

Pictorial Babel: Inventing the Flemish Visual Vernacular
JAMES J. BLOOM

Visualizing Vitruvius: Stylistic Pluralism in Serlio’s Sixth Book on Architecture?
EELCO NAGELSMIT

Exotic Imitation and Local Cultivation: A Study on the Art Form of Dutch Delftware Between 1640 and 1720
JING SUN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX NOMINUM

Leseproben

Introduction
The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts

Joost Keizer and Todd Richardson

The Place of the Vernacular in Early Modern Culture
Painting, Leonardo da Vinci says, ‘needs no interpreters of different languages as letters do’. It is therefore more universal, ‘communicable to all generations of the universe’. Grounded in nature rather than in culture, it is less dependent on the geographical and temporal boundaries of different languages spoken at different times and in different places. Painting easily travels across time and space. Wherever it touches ground—now, then, here or there—it is received directly and spontaneously, without the intervention of translators and commentators. Whoever trusts her or his eye, Leonardo theorizes, can rely on the truth in painting.
Pace Leonardo, pictorial realism was not some universal language, understandable for people across space and time. Much like the spoken and written languages to which Leonardo denies universal accessibility, the reality effect of early modern art, too, is a cultural system whose understanding is bound to geography and history. Take, for example, the words of one of the members of the Greek delegation to the Council of Ferrara (1439), Gregory Melissenus, who complained to his master, the Patriarch of Constantinople, that:

When I enter a Latin church I do not revere any of the [images of] the saints that are there because I do not recognize any of them. At most, I may recognize Christ, but I do not revere him either, since I do not know in what terms he is described. So I make the sign of the cross and I revere this sign that I have made myself, not anything I have seen there.

Gregory understands naturalism as a form of visual communication, like language made up of culturally specific signs. For this visitor from Constantinople, naturalism looked like a language that cast the familiar—in this case Christ—in strange terms, as if Christ stood described to him in a language he did not master. What looked ‘natural’ to some looked disfigured to others.
There is a great paradox in Leonardo’s words, for he, too, knew that the visual arts are culturally specific—like language. In another note, also dating to the early 1490s, the artist recounts the history of art. In a few paragraphs, he explains that the universality he could attribute to naturalistic art was in fact bound to a specific time and place. It was a ‘style’, he says, practiced by the Romans (i romani); yet in post-Roman Europe that ‘style’ fell into decline—apparently because it was not that universal after all—only to be revived again by the Florentine painter Giotto. Leonardo’s association of mimetic art with Roman antiquity is a familiar one. Michael Baxandall catalogued a whole array of texts from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that also speak of Renaissance naturalism as a culturally specific mode of art-making that writers associated with antique culture; most Renaissance artists were compared to ancient artists, whose names survived in the pages of Pliny’s Natural History and other antique texts known to the period. And for Baxandall the reality effect of such painting was only understandable to the select few: to those who could appreciate Ciceronian Latin, not to the crowds Leonardo imagined attending to the lessons of mimetic art. In fact, Petrarch had already claimed that the artistic achievements of Giotto—whom Leonardo counted among the champions of accessible naturalism—were only understood by a very limited number of art lovers. Claims like Petrarch’s aligned words with pictures, artistic styles with language. Giotto’s art, Petrarch implies, is entirely like the Ciceronian Latin in which he wrote—a cultural system, a language, only accessible to himself and some of his peers.
The Latinized culture of literature and the visual arts epitomized by Petrarch and later European humanists stood in a dialectical relationship with ot

Über Autor(innen)

Joost Keizer, Ph.D. (2008) in Art History, Universiteit Leiden, is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale University. Before going to Yale, he was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University, 2008-2010. His research focuses on Italian Renaissance Art, from 1300 to 1550. He recently completed his first book, Michelangelo and the Politics of History (forthcoming).

Todd M. Richardson, Ph.D. (2007) in Art History, Universiteit Leiden, is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands (2011) and co-editor of Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medievel and Early Modern Europe (2008).