Book reviews: A New History Of Renaissance Art | Young John McGahern
A New History of Renaissance Art
by Stephen Campbell and Michael Cole
(Thames & Hudson, £45)
Rating: *****
Church politics, commercial development, civic pride … all these things came together in medieval Italy – an irresistible engine of social and cultural change. More important than social forces, though, were the intellectual ferments that by the 15th century had given rise not just to a new aesthetic but a new aesthetic sense. Painters and sculptors saw themselves as artists – and had a high estimation of what that meant: they took it as read that they were working miracles. If they were, it was in part because they were so superbly equipped – the sheer technical mastery that the apprenticeship system ensured in even the journeyman artist was taken to transcendent extremes by Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Correggio and all the others whose works are presented – and illuminatingly discussed – in their hundreds here. Big, compendious and colourful, this survey moves a decade at a time, taking the reader through from the Renaissance’s 14th-century origins to its (for want of a better word) completion at the end of the 16th. Its breadth is admirable, extending across the entire range of art and architecture, from frescos to fountains, from tapestries to triumphal arches. Its depth is deeply impressive too, with detailed discussion of individual artworks and developments in media and technique. If a central conflict can be identified, the authors suggest, it’s that between the Renaissance’s desire to do reverence to the classical inheritance and its frantic eagerness to modernise, to make new.
Young John McGahern
by Denis Sampson
(OUP, £25)
Rating:****
The Irish novelist left his own memoir, All Will be Well; his fictions were famously – not to say notoriously – autobiographical: so shouldn’t a biographical study like this one be redundant? But as Sampson reveals in this sensitive and subtle exploration of McGahern’s upbringing, education and emergence as a writer, the relation between “life” and “work” was never quite that clear. This, after all, was the artist who, while so often taking himself for his subject, always admired Joyce’s Dubliners precisely because “its classical balance allows no room for self-expression”. Writing became religious for McGahern: if he rebelled against the Church’s stranglehold on Irish life and gradually came to reject its observances, his approach to his art remained sacramental, writing a transubstantiation of the self.