Volume 40, Number 6 · March 25, 1993
Wall Power
By Charles Hope
Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600
by Randolph Starn, by Loren Partridge
University of California Press, 374 pp., $65.00
Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy
by Bram Kempers, translated by Beverly Jackson
Allen Lane/Penguin, 401 pp., $40.00
In Italy panel paintings and frescoes were first used to decorate churches, then town halls and the palaces of rulers, only later becoming commonplace in the houses of private families, especially the well-to-do. Painting was therefore an art directed at a wide public, an instrument of power. Yet from its ancient origins in Pliny and its Renaissance revival in Vasari, the history of art has usually been treated as a history of style, a record of the achievements of individual artists who created a stock of technical discoveries, formal devices, and iconographic formulas to be exploited by their successors. Vasari, of course, had a good deal to say about patrons, but he saw them as enabling rather than determining the activity of artists, who remained for him the principal initiators of change.
Review, 5263 words
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