Printing Colour 1400–1700: History, Techniques, Functions and Receptions. Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage, eds. Library of the Written Word 41; The Handpress World 32. Leiden: Brill, 2015. xxx + 248 pp. €159.
and collectors. Some images and art forms are spread across several sections: Mexican featherwork features in the chapters on both Spanish America and collecting, while Islamic and Asian ceramics appear briefly in three chapters. The editors’ introduction asserts that their global approach is a necessary corrective to older, blinkered notions of the Renaissance as a uniquely European phenomenon demonstrating Western superiority; the essays somewhat repetitively detail those traditional arguments in order to debunk them. For the most part, however, the book navigates with balance and tact through the ideological minefield between the Scylla of triumphalistEurocentric historiography and the Charybdis of polemical or moralizing revisionism. Only occasionally does it risk overreaching, speculating about an unproven Islamic influence that “may not be entirely fanciful” (85) or lamenting (with an intimation of bias?) that the arts of Spain and Spanish America are “still relatively little studied” (64)—which would surprise the seventy-some authors listed in that chapter’s bibliography. While this book would be a salutary addition to many a Renaissance syllabus, it cannot stand alone as art history. Approaching art through the wider but less focused lens of material culture, it provides considerable historical and social-science background but no explicit chronology of stylistic developments, rather little formal analysis of most works, and just enough iconography to identify subjects and foreign motifs. It would work best as a secondary reading alongside a more traditional survey text.