Alos Riegl, ed. The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome Author(s): Itay Sapir Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol.

64, No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 915-916 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662876 . Accessed: 07/10/2011 07:15
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REVIEWS

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s Riegl. The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Alo

Texts and Documents. Eds. and trans. Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010. x + 280 pp. index. illus. gloss. bibl. $50. ISBN: 9781 606060414.

Probably the most surprising thing about this useful edition of Riegls seminal work on the emergence of Roman Baroque is that this is not just a new translation accompanied by three important essays; in fact, a century after the books publication in Vienna, the new volume in the Gettys Texts and Documents series is the very first English translation of this text. lfflin), this For contemporary Baroque scholars who do not know Riegl (or Wo books chronological range might be puzzling: Riegl discusses the sixteenth century more than the seventeenth, and his two protagonists are Michelangelo (Buonarrotti rather than Caravaggio) and Correggio. What is more, architecture is much more prominent here than the other arts, which can be explained by the unfinished state of the text, but also betrays Riegls belief that Baroque genius was indeed more suitable for architectural ventures than for painting and sculpture. The three essays, written especially for this volume, offer precious help in understanding these idiosyncrasies. Alina Payne, in particular, puts Riegl in context, in the strongest possible sense: Payne demonstrates that Riegl was indeed representative of his intellectual environment, and that his interests and claims were not as marginal as is sometimes assumed. She also shows how he managed to balance specific analyses of artistic objects and even small details with the more general philosophical aspects some of his contemporaries indulged in. Perhaps the most important and innovative of Paynes insights repeated also by the two editors of the volume is the claim that the importance of the concept of Kunstwollen, the catchword forever associated with Riegls name, has been in fact overestimated in scholarship for decades. While it is hardly ever mentioned in this book anyway, Payne shows more generally that Kunstwollen is far from being Riegls most important contribution to art history. Arnold Wittes reconstruction of this structure-less text lecture notes edited after Riegls death is a useful antidote for readers who would like to extract from the book a conclusive, definitive idea of Riegls Baroque. He shows us how much Riegls own ideas fluctuated with time, and how the text reached the book form we read today. Curiously, Witte mentions notes whose publication would have changed Riegls reception, but that were finally kept out of this edition. And indeed, while the book is extremely important and the critical additions more than welcome, it sometimes seems that more could have been done to help the reader find his or her way through this sometimes enigmatic and chaotic text. Extensive editorial notes to the text itself, explaining what seem to be contradictory affirmations, or just some of Riegls more complex abstract ideas, could have made the volume even more complete. More images would have also facilitated the reading, as even many of the works Riegl analyzes in great detail are not reproduced (and color reproductions are missing altogether). Given the editors emphasis on

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Riegls concrete visual insights, it is a shame, even if nowadays images can be easily found elsewhere. Andrew Hopkinss essay is a survey of reception, and it is fascinating in that it locates interest in Riegl in two periods, with half a century of relative neglect lfflin, between them. Hopkins discusses the inevitable issue of Riegls relation to Wo his interpretation by Panofsky and Sedlmeyr, and his political rehabilitation due precisely to his disassociation with the latters dubious inclinations. A lacuna in the narrative is that only German and Anglo-Saxon receptions are taken into account; there is no trace of the impact on French or Italian art history in Hopkinss essay, in spite of the fact that a French translation of the work preceded the English one by almost two decades. All in all, reading Riegl in 2011 turns out to be a refreshing experience. If one is ready to forgive some outdated tics (such as the repeated We, northerners), one discovers a complex viewpoint on continuity and rupture in art that has been rarely matched. Seen from today, Riegl can be considered a sort of visual Foucault: he shows us what were the conditions of possibility that allowed the emergence of a wholly new way of making art. And one only wishes that the brief last chapter on Caravaggist naturalism, where the often ignored tension between realism and subjectivity is addressed from the very beginning, could have been completed.

ITAY SAPIR
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz