Book Review: Astrology in the Renaissance: Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance. Mary QuinlanMcGrath (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013). Pp. xii + 284. $35. ISBN 978-0-226-92284-3.What is transmitted to the viewer looking up at monumental vault paintings in Renaissance Italy? More than one can see, the art historian May Quinlan-McGrath argues in Influences - at least according to the makers, patrons, and viewers of these paintings. Visual communication was not even the primary purpose of these images. Transmitting the celestial rays trapped in the images, the vault paintings were thought to have quasi-magical qualities. Even for those viewers insufficiently equipped intellectually to be aware of the meanings of the astronomical images, the vault paintings had a restorative, even an apotropaic function. In short, by harnessing celestial influences, the images held power over their viewers. This is the book's central argument.The book draws upon scholarship in two disciplines, the history of science and the history of art. In the past two decades historians of science have re-habilitated the history of astrology. Among many other scholars, Robert Westman, Darrel Rutkin, and most recently, Monica Azzolini (in a book on political uses of astrology at the court in Milan, a context directly relevant to Quinlan-McGrath's Influences) have shown and illustrated the ubiquity and centrality of astrological practice in early modem science and society. Quinlan-McGrath is clearly familiar with this scholarship and uses it to her benefit in the opening chapters of the book. A second body of scholarship on which Quinlan-McGrath builds broadens the scope of art history to include the study of all images, 'high art' or not. Bildwissenschaft comes in many guises, and as a consequence, images and image theories are now studied in multiple ways, disciplines and contexts. One defining moment in the history of Bildwissenschaft has been David Freedberg's study of the history and theory of response to images: The power of images (1989). Quinlan-MacGrath's book proposes a marriage between these two bodies of scholarship. One of its central tenets is that the power of images had a physical basis, and that we need to turn to the history of astrology and the way in which it connects to optics to understand the physics of rays.Within this wide field the book has a clear focus. Its protagonist is the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Quinlan-McGrath links Ficino's image theory to three monumental vault paintings commissioned by patrons who knew Ficino personally or shared his circle of friends. The first vault was in the villa of Agostino Chigi, the papal banker close to Leo X, the Medici pope who was a pupil of Ficino. Leo X commissioned the second astrological vault under discussion in the Sala dei Pontifici in the Vatican. The third case is the vault of the Sala della Cosmografia in the Famese family's villa at Caprarola. Having previously published articles on these vaults in journals such as Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and Isis, QuinlanMcGrath only touches on them direcdy in the eighth and final chapter. …