Hospitals and Urbanism in Rome, 1200–1500. Carla Keyvanian. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 251; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History 12. Leiden: Brill, 2015. xvi + 448 pp. $194.
O’Malley on the business of art or Megan Holmes on miraculous images. This book is ostensibly aimed at students and course programmers, despite the dense presentation. The author privileges translated sources published in accessible formats with regular recourse to the original language, in footnotes or main text. It is a welcome approach, though I do wonder about the impact of such extractions that escape from the diplomatics of documents. More pointedly, this book encourages noncomplex thinking about subject matter on the basis that nothing is written down despite artists and theorists having ample opportunity to demonstrate their own pictorial erudition.Wemight well be surprised at a priest’s limited ability or desire to identify biblical figures beyond categories of big man, bowed man, old man, or giant one (2–3), but what about alternative patterns of description, or colloquial expressions from community men that are similar in formulation? Texts are “meaning-constitutive” and not just “containers,” to quote Jerome McGann. The book is illustrated with twenty-two black-and-white images that serve to illustrate the notional divide between the “modern scholars or iconographers” who argue for complexity and the historical written record. Manca treads quietly along the formation lines of the discipline of art history but one cannot escape the positivist implications. Enlightened, analytical thinking about works of art is a modern trait with the Renaissance left in a materialist world; one absorbed in names, style, mimesis, costs, and displays of magnificence. No one is excused: Panofsky, Gombrich, Chambers, Gilbert, Steinberg; even Manca confesses complicity in the industry of overinterpretation of early modern pictures as puzzles, which is a curious strategy. The book’s argument rests on a nonsymbolic understanding of visual experience. Renaissance viewers liked vivid descriptions, lively narratives, but not analytical detail. Manca is right to call attention to consistency and convention in writings about the creation and replication of subject matter but where does it leave us “modern scholars” now? As Joe Friday didn’t quite say, “Just the facts, ma’am.”