Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. . - book review

JOANNA WOODS-MARSDEN

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 295 pp.; 57 color ills., 110 b/w. $60.00

One's first reaction to this book's title is likely to be "Of course!" and to wonder why it was not written fifty or a hundred years ago. Ever since Jakob Burckhardt, the Renaissance has been virtually synonymous with a discovery of the self that looks forward to modern individualism. And from some perspectives Renaissance self-portraits, though relatively scarce, appear to be woven into the very fabric of the period's art. Independent, formal self-portraits are only part of the evidence. Time and again, portraitlike faces look out at us from altarpieces and frescoes, raising the suspicion that this is the artist and that his presence somehow makes narrative and the experience of the holy more direct, more personal, even more "modern." Sometimes, with the help of Giorgio Vasari, we can identify these faces. But can we trust Vasari, writing in the mid-16th century, sometimes several lifetimes removed from the works in question? More important, perhaps, can we trust ourselves not to read too much into a face or even into the notion of selfhood itself? Nowadays we have to contend with an increasingly lively, ongoing debate across the disciplines over just where to draw the lines between Renaissance and modern consciousness, not to mention arguments and counterarguments about whether the very concept of the self is a relatively recent period construct. Especially in light of art history's growing dread of anachronism, a subject like Renaissance self-portraiture inevitably seems trickier and more difficult than ever.

Faced with all the complexities and pitfalls her subject poses, Joanna Woods-Marsden has opted for a cautious approach. She tries not to stray too far from well-established facts, and from the first page she carefully narrows the scope of her inquiry so as to avoid questions of selfhood that might seem overly subjective or suspiciously modern. With few exceptions the book deals only with independent and mainly painted self-portraits from 15th- and 16th-century Italy, works "specifically created to mediate between the artistic self...and its Renaissance audience" (p. 1). For the most part, the audience in question is the Italian Renaissance court, and the pictures portray the artist as courtier, performing, or "fashioning," his or her self in this social theater. In other words, Woods-Marsden defines selfhood in social terms, as opposed to the Romantic view of an autonomous self, which has become such a deep-seated modern bias. Recent scholarship repeatedly has emphasized how communal, how public was Renaissan ce life, and this was especially true of the princely courts, competitive, status-conscious societies where an individual was literally always on view. Given the widespread belief in Renaissance Italy that aristocrats were not born but made, the courts offered considerable social mobility to artists, who often ranked no higher than lower-middleclass craftsmen in their native towns. To succeed at court, however, the aspiring artist had to create for himself a suitably persuasive persona, or social mask, and act it out with grace and panache. Plausibly enough, Woods-Marsden sees Renaissance self-portraits as extensions of this rhetoric. Most often, the persona involved is that of the artist as genius, a considerable step up from the status of mere artisan. In fact, the theme of the transformation of medieval craftsman into Renaissance genius provides the book's main subplot

This line of thought reflects contemporary scholarship's increasing attention to social context as the key to understanding Renaissance art in its own terms. Her excellent bibliography shows that Woods-Marsden has given almost as much attention to social and intellectual history as to the history of art, maybe more. And throughout the book she touches on a wide variety of subjects, from classical philosophy to the history of mirrors. Promising as her approach appears to be, however, it does not work as well as one might have hoped. Part of the problem is that the number of works is so limited. Woods-Marsden counts just twenty-five artists engaged in self-portraiture as she defines it, and she illustrates only about twice that number of the images themselves, few indeed for so long a stretch of time. Such thin evidence makes it harder to write a history of the subject in the usual sense: that is, to trace trends and influences, to establish traditions and conventions, and, in general, to show the circulation a nd transformation of ideas, Because there are relatively few overarching themes and patterns of development, the chapters remain relatively disconnected, at rest in themselves. In this respect Renaissance Self -Portraiture tends to be a slow read.

The book's organization has only compounded these problems. Much of the discussion of general questions of society, selfhood, and portrayal in the Renaissance takes place in the first four chapters. Basically, they represent a survey of the extensive scholarly literature on these issues and, insofar as Woods-Marsden smooths over most of the sharp disagreements and vigorous debates, a survey somewhat wider than it is deep. More important, though, all but one of these introductory chapters are almost entirely unillustrated. In effect, the ideas take shape in a vacuum, without the tangible interplay with the portraits themselves that might have strengthened our understanding of both.