Volume 29, Number 13 · August 12, 1982
From Alberti to Zoppo
By Hugh Honour
Italy: A Cultural Guide
by Ernest O. Hauser
Atheneum, 276 pp., $14.95; $8.95 (paper)
A Concise Encyclopedia of the Italian Renaissance
edited by J.R. Hale
Oxford University Press, 360 pp., $19.95
In his Cultural Guide to Italy, Ernest O. Hauser writes of the Renaissance: 'While it has long been understood as a spontaneous upswelling of the Italian genius, scholars now view it as a more complex phenomenon, the coming-to-a-head of a slow evolutionary process. However that may be, something new did happen after 1400, and whether it was an explosion or a mere culmination, it is the Renaissance, with its abundance of masterpieces, that first comes to our mind when we think of Italian art.' A leading scholar of the Renaissance, John Hale, Professor of Italian at London University, is more circumspect—no 'explosion' for him. 'Though there is something inherently ridiculous about describing a period of 250 years as one of rebirth, there is some justification for seeing a unity within it, if only in terms of the chronological self-awareness of contemporaries,' he writes in the Concise Encyclopedia of the Italian Renaissance, of which he is editor. Conceding that the term 'Renaissance,' first used in its modern sense in the nineteenth century, 'retains most of its glamour and much of its usefulness,' he sternly warns us that it is a word 'to be used with caution.'
Review, 2433 words
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