Reviews of books

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One major issue to be faced with a female queen was the question of her marriage.As Walton points out, even those who justified female rule accepted the patriarchalidea that a wife was subject to her husband’s authority. But how could a queenregnant be subject to someone else’s power? Attempts to answer this question fed thedevelopment of ideas of public and private life and of the queen’s two bodies, whereshe was subject to her husband in private life but not in public. However, the limitationson the new king’s public power were unclear. The potential of a foreign marriage alsoraised issues of national identity: if a queen was to marry an equal he would have tobe a foreign prince, thus raising the potential of a foreigner ruling the kingdom. Onthe other hand, marriage was necessary in order to produce an heir, and many sawthis advantage as outweighing any disadvantages. By demonstrating the centrality ofthe issue of marriage to much of the debate about female rulers, Walton reminds usof one of the major differences faced by queens and kings. Her analysis also helps toexplain why Mary’s marriage to Bothwell, a much more forceful figure than Darnley,resulted in the opposition leading to her deposition.

The portrayal of Mary herself in this book is likely to provoke the greatestcontroversy. Walton depicts an essentially passive Mary ‘with a willingness (anddesire) to operate largely within the traditional boundaries of being female, despiteher royal status’ (96). She sought male guidance in ruling her country and only reallyasserted herself when it came to the question of her marriage, which itself wouldgive her another male figure on whom she could depend. Here it might have beenuseful to look at further sources about and by Mary herself, and at recent work onsixteenth-century Scottish women and their roles in public life. However, perhapsbecause the book’s main focus is on attitudes to Mary rather than on the queenherself, the picture of Mary’s own motives and actions is necessarily less completelydrawn.

University of Guelph

Elizabeth

Ewan

Michael Cole (ed.),

The Early Modern Painter-Etcher

. University Park, Pennsylvania:Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 208pp. 148 black and white illustrations.$50.00. ISBN: 0-271-02905-6

.

Patricia Emison,

The Simple Art: Printed Images in an Age of Magnificence

. Durham,New Hampshire: The Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire, 2006. vi +94pp. 74 black and white illustrations. $25.00. ISBN: 0-9648953-5-8

.

In the early nineteenth century, Adam von Bartsch created a large catalogue of prints,arguing that if prints were essentially reproductions, then the best reproductionswould be those where the printmaker had entered fully into the mind of the originalartist. The best person to do that would be the artist himself, and the finest printswould be those demonstrating the expressive power of a single artistic personality(the

peintre-graveur

), rather than those requiring translation or collaboration. The twobooks considered here, both exhibition catalogues, revisit Bartsch’s concept of the

peintre-graveur

, but do so in quite different ways.

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Reviews of books

The Early Modern Painter-Etcher

, edited by Michael Cole, takes up Bartsch’s endorse-ment of etching as the print medium that best preserves the spontaneity of artisticcreation, because it allows an artist to draw directly on the plate. Painters in thesixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when choosing to make prints, focused almostexclusively on etching. The book includes catalogue entries for individual prints, andfour essays, which together examine the accessibility of etching technique to painters,and the ways in which painters experimented with the medium – whether technically,in pursuit of novel effects, or artistically, in pursuit of novel subject matter.

The opening essay, by Michael Cole and Larry Silver, argues that etching was seenprimarily as an invitation to try something new. Painter-etchers often approached themedium experimentally, seeking colouristic effects or unusual subjects they could noteasily explore as painters. They also tended to produce etchings for only a restrictedperiod during their careers. Occasionally, artists were not pleased with etching’stechnical shortcomings. This is the reason usually proposed for Dürer’s short-livedexperimentation with the medium. Susan Dackerman, in her essay on Dürer’setchings, argues instead that etchings too closely approximated pen-and-ink drawings,which were not highly valued by the art market, and that Dürer chose to create moreprofitable products. However, in his catalogue entries on Dürer’s

Landscape with Cannon

and Burgkmair’s

Mercury and Venus

, Silver disagrees, concluding, as many scholars do,that both painters were displeased with problems caused by the rusting of the ironplates. Madeleine Viljoen’s essay also questions the apparently obvious association ofetching with the act of drawing. She examines the qualities painters sought to capturein prints, concluding that the drawings of painter-etchers are often quite differentfrom their etchings, and that etchings were not meant to be taken for drawings: ‘Ifetchings are like drawings on copper, it is in their effort to use the medium to createrepresentations of a range of drawing styles and media’ (71–2). In an essay focusingon the end of the period covered by the exhibition, Graham Larkin investigates whymost eighteenth-century painter-etchers avoided using experimental techniques thattheir professional counterparts, reproductive engravers, employed to imitate paintingsand drawings.

Overall, the essays in the

Early Modern Painter-Etcher

provide more food for thoughtthan do the catalogue entries, which, though useful, contain little that is new. Theessays compensate for a potential shortcoming in the exhibition itself – the decisionto exhibit only one etching per artist – by presenting further illustrations of etchingsby more influential exemplars, such as Parmigianino, whose importance for subsequentpractitioners is, as Cole says, ‘difficult to exaggerate’ (30). The book on the whole isan important contribution to the burgeoning field of studies in Renaissance andBaroque prints, making available (with excellent illustrations) a wide-rangingcatalogue of etchings made by painters, for a variety of reasons and in a variety ofstyles.

Patricia Emison’s

The Simple Art: Printed Images in an Age of Magnificence focuses morenarrowly on sixteenth-century Italian prints, but the catalogue includes engravings,etchings and woodcuts, and does not neglect broadsheets and book illustrations. Herintroductory essay argues that by concerning ourselves solely with the authenticity ofan image made by a peintre-graveur, or conversely with the print only as a conveyor ofinformation, we ‘mistake the place of prints in the history of art, for our best guess

Reviews of books 601

must be that early print collectors didn’t much care about the difference between artand material culture, or between original and reproductive prints’ (3). Prints enableda middle class largely excluded from art patronage to become knowledgeable aboutart, and thereby also changed the history of art. She further argues that all printmakingmedia, not just etching, provided artists for the first time with a forum for experimentationin technique and subject matter: ‘Artists were given a venue in which they could dowhatever they wanted, just as they began to discover for themselves how much theyactually wanted to do’ (10).

While her essay will engage the general reader as well as the expert, Emison’s catalogueentries, which are arranged according to subject, provide a mine of information forart historians in particular. Emison does not shrink from presenting unconventionalattributions – such as assigning the engraving of Dido, cat. 17, to Agostino Venezianoand Sodoma, rather than the usual attribution to Marcantonio Raimondi andRaphael. Sometimes the attributions are a bit perplexing, as when she tentativelycredits the etching of a design after Vasari (cat. 15) to Pellegrino Tibaldi, who (as shecomments) is not known to have etched at all, although his brother Domenico wasan engraver. On the other hand, she provides some attributions that are novel andcompletely convincing, such as assigning the design of cat. 48, the only known engravingby Master ZBM, to Giorgio Vasari. She also presents some daring interpretations ofprinted images – for example, her fascinating but probably unprovable suggestionthat the Giorgio Ghisi engraving anachronistically known as the Dream of Raphael(cat. 46) documents the patron Filippo Dati’s love for Ippolita Gonzaga.

The book has a few unfortunate errors, some typographical and some factual. Forexample, the writer and print collector Anton Francesco Doni is identified in oneinstance by his correct name (36), but elsewhere as Giovanni Antonio Doni (13) andagain as Giovanni Francesco Doni (35). Michelangelo’s drawing of the Putto Bacchanal,the basis for Beatrizet’s engraving (cat. 24) is said to be in black chalk, leadingEmison to speculate on Michelangelo’s decision to compete, using only shades ofgrey, with a famous painting of a similar subject by Titian. One wonders if she wouldhave made the same argument if the drawing had been correctly described as beingin red chalk. But these are mainly small matters.

As Emison states, ‘If there were any “Renaissance men” during the Renaissance,they were lovers of prints’ (18). The Simple Art is a significant contribution to ourunderstanding of the Renaissance print, and successfully persuades us that, likeRenaissance men, we can better understand that culture by paying closer attentionto its printed images.

St Francis Xavier University Sharon Gregory

Sally Harper, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources.Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 462pp. 61 black and white illustrations. £60.ISBN 978-0-7546-5263-2 (hb).

Harper’s valuable book fills a large gap in the historiography of British music, sinceno survey of early Welsh music making has previously been published. Harper’s