Art and Society in the Gifts of Montaigne

Abstract

I SUSPECT THAT ON THIS PANEL I am emblematic of Society, and I feel as uneasy about that as an honest woman in her best pearls mistaken for a courtesan. I am not the Wicked World come to taint History, but just a particular historian working on sixteenth-century processes of and cultural exchange. You will notice that I say social and for it is hard for me to distinguish absolutely between parlements, plows, mortality rates, and the sexual division of labor on the one hand, and understandings and ideas on the other, whether they be found in royal decrees, woodcuts, or poems. The sixteenth century writes after all of the art of agriculture, the art of metallurgy, the art of war, and the art of the prince. Thus to our question Art or society: must we choose? I'd answer in a double way, no then yes, each answer referring to a different stage in the trajectory of our research and writing. It seems to me that while we are at the figuring-out stage we should reach for whatever evidence is relevant to our task: the art historian might find it quite far from the workshop, the book of myths, and the patron, while the historian might find it by looking at pictures rather than by confining herself to the usual contracts of sale, parish records, and popular tracts. But then finally we do choose in the sense that we each want to explain something different: the art historian, a picture or sculpture, an artist's oeuvre, a visual genre or its impact; the historian, a set of events, cultural, economic, or political connections, a genre or an actor in one of these settings. If an art historian and I are talking about gifts, he will want to end up interpreting Correggio's Three Graces and Jean Mignon's Judgment of Paris, and I sixteenthcentury rules for reciprocity and quarrels about the king's favor.' I may see these artistic and events as more firmly part of the same universe of discourse than does Michael Baxandall (as you will shortly read), but I agree with him that we start and end in different places. Along the way there can be much crossover, however, and the critical issue is that it be done in a way that advances understanding. The hard choice is not between and Society, but between the different modes for relating them. The art historian can move through the narrow channel of the patron's wishes or can open out to the wider range of concerns condensed in a picture. One can conceive of a body of painting as the passive reflection of the values and moods of, say, an urban oligarchy or an Italianizing court, or as an active engagement between them and the perception and images of artists. Rather than just talking about