Dempsey, Charles. The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture.

Quinn, John F.

DEMPSEY, Charles. The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. xii + 384 pp. Cloth, $39.95--In this learned and dense work, Charles Dempsey, an art history professor at John Hopkins University, challenges many conventional assumptions about the Renaissance. He rejects the notion that the Renaissance was an effort to recover a lost classical past and replicate it. Instead, he argues persuasively that while the artists of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy were quite interested in the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome, they were determined to adapt them into the culture of their own era.

To make his point, Dempsey chooses several important Renaissance works and examines them closely. For example, he focuses on Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (1486). This painting was clearly inspired by the Roman goddess of love, Venus, and appears to be based upon a statue of the Greek goddess Aphrodite dating from the first century B.C. While acknowledging these influences on Botticelli, Dempsey points out that Venus tilts to the left in the painting, a stance not in keeping with the classical world's concern for symmetry and balance. Furthermore, the other figure in the painting, Flora, is not dressed in ancient attire but in a Florentine festival garment of that era. Dempsey concludes that Botticelli's intellectual inspiration for this and his other mythological works came not from a classical source, but from one of his contemporaries, the Florentine humanist Poliziano.

Dempsey also looks at the paintings of the sibyls commissioned by Cardinal Giordano Orsini in the early fifteenth century. Dempsey's task with these paintings is made more difficult because the Orsini Palace which held the paintings was destroyed in battle in the late fifteenth century. Still, Dempsey has read enough descriptions of the paintings that he is able to make intelligent claims about them. In the classical world there were thought to be ten sibyls: they were prophetesses associated with Delphi and other ancient shrines. Early Christians, including St. Augustine, saw the sibyls as paralleling the Old Testament prophets and predicting the birth of Christ. Dempsey notes that when Orsini commissioned his paintings he called for twelve sibyls to complement the twelve Old Testament patriarchs that he had also ordered. To do this, two new sibyls--Europa and Agrippa--had to be added to the classical list. Once again, Dempsey is demonstrating that a classical source is being reworked to suit the interests of the Renaissance artists.

Dempsey demonstrates that the sibyls were an abiding interest in northern Italy in the early stages of the Renaissance. He notes that they were often represented in the liturgical plays which were popular at this time. Companies would stage plays about the Annunciation or the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and would typically include a sibyl who could prophesy about a virgin giving birth to a king. With the sibyls and the theatrical productions, Dempsey sees evidence of a more Incarnationalist theological emphasis, a move away from the medieval focus on the passion and death of Jesus and the Last Judgment. Thus, while the sibyls were figures from the classical world, Dempsey shows how the Renaissance artists appropriated them for their own purposes.

In his discussion of Botticelli, Dempsey offers an apt summary of his overall thesis: "In Botticelli ... we are witness to the transformation into the highest art of a distinctly contemporary Florentine culture that had been measured and tested against the supreme achievements of antiquity in art and literature and thereby perfected as an expression of present-day experience. This was not undertaken as a rebirth, or renaissance, of the lost classical past but instead as a renovatio of the living present measured against that past." This is certainly a more complex and nuanced vision of the Renaissance than the one most students encounter in their Western Civilization or Art History classes.

Dempsey does not devote much attention to philosophy in this study. He briefly discusses the question of whether Neoplatonist influences helped shape some of the era's classic works such as Botticelli's Birth of Venus. He does not, however, examine any of the philosophers of the early Renaissance. Still, scholars interested in late medieval or early modern thinkers could learn much from this art historian's work. By showing the continuities between the late middle ages and the early Renaissance, Dempsey may encourage readers to rethink their assumptions about the Renaissance and its alleged secularity and emphasis on individual rights.

Readers should be warned that this is a work geared for Renaissance art specialists. Each of Dempsey's four chapters was a lecture delivered at Harvard University's Renaissance library in Florence. Clearly, the audience for these lectures was extremely familiar with the art and culture of the early Renaissance. In each of these talks, Dempsey makes repeated reference to the work of other scholars without clearly identifying them and he uses many Italian terms without translating them. If the lectures had been revised before publication, the book could have been made accessible to a wider audience.--John F. Quinn, Salve Regina University.