Volume 49, Number 19 · December 5, 2002
Mind Your Maniera
By Charles Hope
Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500–1550
by David Franklin
Yale University Press, 273 pp., $55.00
Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art
by Elizabeth Pilliod
Yale University Press, 289 pp., $55.00
Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy
by Luke Syson and Dora Thornton
J. Paul Getty Museum, 272 pp., $50.00
Living in an age of museums and exhibitions, and when interest in the history of art is widespread, one easily forgets that until a couple of centuries ago what mattered to critics and the wider public, as well as to artists, was contemporary art. The art of earlier periods that retained its prestige was usually regarded as directly relevant to current artistic practice and taste. This was most obviously the case with classical sculpture, which was eagerly collected and extravagantly admired from the latter part of the fifteenth century, and which, at least until the nineteenth century, was considered as embodying an unchallengeable standard of excellence. But relatively little post-classical art was accorded this kind of respect.
Review, 4895 words
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