The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (review)

Abstract

140 Reviews The chaUenges issued to musciologists in recent years are clearly being met by the kind of work represented in this issue of Early music history. The seeds sown by these articles can be expected to bear fruit in future work by these and other scholars. Richard Peter Maddox Department of Music University of N e w England Fraser, Hilary, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, Oxford and Cambridge Mass., 1992; cloth; pp. xii, 308; 25 plates; R.R.P. AUSS69.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. This hugely stimulating volume of interdisciplinary richness is concerned to take the reader through the complex tale of how the Victorians, notably historians and artists of various media, endeavoured to 'reinvent' the Italian Renaissance. Beginning with the seminal notions of the earlier cultural dawn/Renaissance by Jules Michelet in 1855 and Jacob Burckhardt in I860, Dr. Fraser argues most persuasively that the named continental writers, to w h o m the work of making the particular grand images is customarily ascribed, were to some extent preceded in Britain by many writers, artists, critics, and historians who had already begun the task influenced by 'specifically British cultural values and conditions'. Of enormous importance here was the massive growth of interest in Italian Renaissance history and art, due in particular to the increase in gallery exhibitions from mid-century and to the positive contribution from 1849 of the publications of the London-based Arundel Society or 'Society for promoting the knowledge of Art'. As she also make abundantly clear, 'as the century progressed, artists, critics, poets, novelists and historians all had a hand in contrasting the concept of the Renaissance which was bequeathed to our own century' (p. 2). Her prime concern is to do justice to the complexity of problems associated with reconstructing the social history of both periods by investigating 'the deeper systems of belief embodied in the history, literature and visual arts of the [Victorian] period' (p. 10). The large thematic blocks of her text are concerned seriatim with: the way in which funerary monuments and memorials were transformed into cultural metaphors, wherein Robert Browning plays a part; the Vasarian view of art history and the plethora of High Renaissance paintings; the following counter-tradition which preferred Reviews 141 the so-caUed 'primitive' art of the painters before Raphael, with a particular concern by the present writer to interpret the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and then ambiguous notions of realism; the Victorian debt to the Italian sonnet and the impulse of many poets to find analogies between then own age and that of Renaissance Italy; and the Italian content in so many uneven Victorian novels, with their often fictional sources and very dubious historiography. This general practice elicits Fraser's wry comment: 'A little history makes for improving reading, and elevates the novel above the base level of popular entertainment' (p. 183). Thus her last, and major, chapter is concerned to explore the already implicit greater questions concerning the conventions/representations of Renaissance realism and then complex and deeply-layered reasons for the appeal of the Renaissance, not the least of which was the political rebirth of Italy, resuscitated by such heroes as Vittorio Emmanuele, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour. Clearly Dr. Fraser is interpreting two major cultural periods, Victorian England no less than Renaissance Italy, and, as becomes very clear towards the end, using both to make ironic comments on the West's later twentiethcentury historicism and its own proximity to various forms of more popular prose fiction. Yet emphasis must be put on the text's ability to mell art, creative writing, and the idea of the Renaissance. Particularly helpful are the authoritative references to works such as Anna Jameson's The poetry of sound and legendary art, Ruskin's Modern painters, and Lord Lindsay's popular Sketches of the history of Christian art (1847). Equally important are the insights into the way in which Victorian painting commented on, or respondedto,the Italian, as with: 'Rossetti had most obviously drawn upon Florentine and Science quattrocento models in his early work' (p. 123). The conclusion to be reached is that this is a most judicious exploration of cultural and intellectual history illustrating the...