The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (review)
the study of art-historical periods, statements that typically are countered with literal readings of Manetti, Vasari, and the fifteenth-century humanists. Perhaps a more appropriate subtitle for the book would have been In Defense of Periodization. In each chapter the author reiterates and supports the statement he makes in the introduction that “unity is the hallmark of the Renaissance, and our perception of the period should be guided by seeing the age with a sweeping gesture” (3). Professor Mack previously explored the idea that uniformity is the quality that best characterizes Renaissance art and architecture in his 1987 book Pienza: The Creation of a Renaissance City. In chapter 3 of the text presently under review he does acknowledge Christine Smith’s important and very different reading of Pienza as the architectural and urban embodiment of the principal of varietas, rather than of all’antica regularity (Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 1400–1470 [1992]), but in later chapters he continues to hold up Pienza as a paradigm of Renaissance formal consistency. Looking at the Renaissance is aimed at scholars and students alike. The latter will come away from reading this book with the understanding that Italian Renaissance art has a clearly defined visual vocabulary, style, and meaning. What then, would they make of a gilded polyptych by one of the Vivarini, a painted terracotta group by Guido Mazzoni, or Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s silver processional reliquary cross for the Florentine Baptistery? Works such as these have no place in Professor Mack’s definition of Renaissance art, a definition in which very few of the exceptions that challenge his rule are considered. As far as scholars of Italian Renaissance art and history are concerned, I should think that a number of them, like this reviewer, will question the wisdom of assigning to the period a single, focused meaning. Domestic art, works in media such as metalwork and ceramics, religious ritual, gender, and, most importantly, regional diversity are all aspects of a rich and multifaceted history of Renaissance artistic production that have led many to revise and expand upon the Burckhardt-inspired understanding of the Renaissance as period whose artistic development was defined by a this-worldly interest in classicism, Neoplatonic humanistic thought, and, above all, uniformity — a traditional interpretation of the period that is defended with passion in this collection of essays. SALLY J. CORNELISON University of Kansas