REVIEWS Michel Jeanneret, — Parpetual ~— Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance fiom da Vinci to Montaigns, translated by Nidra Poller (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 320). 53 illustrations, bibliography, index). ‘What docs not change,’ wrote the poct Charles Olsen, the will to change.” According to Michel Jeanneret’s ground- breaking, learned, and eminently readable book, such a restless dynamic of mutability pulses through much sixteenth-century thought and artistic production. First pub- lished in French in 1997 under the title Perpetuum mobile, Jeanneret’s study sets out to revise the idea—exemplified by writers like the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin—of the sixteenth century as an age dominated by a frozen classical perfection, and to explore the period’s fascination with the fluid, the poly- morphic, the open-ended, the unfinished and the unfinishable. In its expansively revisionist stance, Jeanneret’s characterization of the Renaissance as a period permeated by a ‘transformist’ element in thought and artistic practice recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s no less sweeping study of the ‘carnivalesque’ strain (heterogeneous, vulgar, earthy, body-centered and irrational) in medieval and Renaissance culture. But there the resemblance between these two seminal studies ends. Jeanneret’s book is carefully focused on individual works of literature and art and less diffuse and impressionistic than Rabelais. This is partly because Jeanneret’s inquiry, unlike Bakhtin’s, is based on activities—the making of art and composition of texts—that were appreciated by the contemporary establishment as elite cultural phenomena, and whose written or visual artifacts were therefore preserved and miade the object of theoretical discourse. Like sixteenth-century writers, who often explored the theme of mutability within stable literary structures like the sonnet, or the treatise, Jeanneret’s book is remarkable for the Apollonian balance of the structure within which it frames: its lubricious subject. Five sections, of two or three chapters each, explore the problem of transformation and change from a diverse array of viewpoints. The first section, entitled “Universal Sway,’ sets the stage for the later discussion by illustrating a heterogeneous collection of examples of Renaissance fascination with the changing forms of matter—ranging from Guillaume Du Bartas’s poctic paraphrase of the Creation to Leonardo da Vinci’s fascina- tion with images of the earth cataclysmically transformed by floodwaters. Jeannerct eluci- dates the context of these ideas by unraveling the strands of ‘transformism’ that sixteenth- century natural philosophy inherited and evolved, using the authority of ancient thinkers from Heraclitus to Ovid. Vitalism and animism (a view of the universe as something instilled with life or spirit) were pervasive in Renaissance thought about nature, and provided a rational basis for a vast range of natural phenomena from the mundane to the miraculous. Chaos, the formlessness from which all forms evolve, is the starting point of the second section, ‘Primeval Movement.’ Here again Jeanneret creatively juxtaposes see- mingly incompatible dlustrations in compel- ling ways—for instance, he links Du Bellay’s meditation on the births and deaths of cities out of the formless abyss to Montaigne’s discovery of the distracted, wandering habits of his own mind. The vagaries of the imagination, in turn, lead us to the their counterparts in the real world: monsters and grotesque creatures. Sixteenth-century gar- dens became the focus elassicus of the mon- strous; worlds in miniature, occupying a liminal space between the wild and the civilized, their employment of monstrous images could function as a metaphor for the dynamic processes and forces of primal nature. The sense of nature’s chaos as a hotbed of monstrosities relates the decorative genre of grotteschi (playful, composite images of fabulous creatures framed by fantastic archi- tecture), which became popular after ¢. 140, with the discovery of the painted ‘grottocs’ of the Golden House of Nero. Many artists and patrons embraced the genre of grotteschi; others were more circumspect, like Vasari (because they were unchecked by rules), or overtly hostile, like the reformist Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (because of their associa- tions with pagan culture). The Renaissance vogue for grotteschi contains the germs of a remarkably persistent theme in Early Modern culture: in the words of Francisco Goya, ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Part Three, ‘Culture and Its Flow,’ turns from the ontology of the created world to that of the creative artist and his medium, WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 22, NO. 1, JANUARY-MARCH 2006 Word & Image ISSN 0266-6286 © 2008 Taylor & Francis famp://Avww.candco.uk/journals/1f/¢2666286 him DOE: 10.1080/0266628042000316428fanguage. The careers of humanists such as Petrarch and Erasmus, periparetically wan- dering from place to place and from genre to genre, exemplify a notion of themselves as ‘ravelers, seckers, and investigators, less concerned about constructing an identity or coherent works than pursuing the adventure of relentless search’ (p. 152). The valorization of a mutable, disunitary existence finds parallels in the contemporary fascination with the mythic figure of Proteus, whose endless transformations came to emblematize the freedom of man to forge his own destiny—a freedom that Pico della Mirandola had defined as an essential key to the dignity of man. The mutability of language, on the other hand, was both embraced and feared by sixteenth-century writers. To make this point, Jeanneret focuses on the evolution of French during this period. Many authors favored expanding and modifying the lan- guage to express the realities of a changing world, though many divergent views arose about how best to transform it; behind all these debates lay the nagging concern that unchecked metamorphosis would eventually render their own writings incomprehensible to future generations. With the cosmos, the individual, and language all in a state of flux, not even the advent of printing can be seen as a uniformly stabilizing influence. In the fourth part, aptly titled ‘Works in Progress,’ Jeanneret opposes the notion that Gutenberg’s replaced the textual mobility of the medieval manuscript with an immobile fixity. For writers such as Erasmus and Montaigne, the appearance of a book in print meant one invention more opportunity to polish, revise, and expand what he had produced; revision ends only with death, the limits of the text and the author’s life become coterminous, and the spectacle of the demiurge at work is ineluc- tably inscribed in the transformations of the work itself In the world of art, Jeanneret illustrates this process with Leonardo’s work- ing drawings, whose multiple, superimposed outlines were first analyzed by Gombrich as traces of a fluid and open-ended mots mentale. Michelangelo’s unfinished Accademia, though left incomplete due to circumstances largely beyond the artist’s control, reveal the movements of the artist’s hand in ways that his finished works do not, and, later in the century, when the sculptures were installed in Buontalenti’s grotto emer- slaves in the ging from globs of spongy rock, they acquired a new accretion of meaning—as emblems of the transformation of chaos into form. A more intentional and conscious example of the ‘indexical’ presence of the artist in the work was Montaigne’s project, in the Essays, of charting the flaw of his whims and wandering thoughts. This is not to imply that Michclangelo’s chisel marks and Montaigne’s sentences are commensurate structures but such striking juxtapositions are an important part of Jeamneret’s practice. As he develops his theme through connections among such disparate artists, his work itself takes on something of a metamorphic character. The well-documented final ‘Creative Reading, presents the argument section, that texts demanding active involvement on the part of the reader were prevalent in the sixteenth century. Contemporary treatises discuss writing as a process of thoughtful imitation: fragments are culled, assimilated, and thoughtfully recombined by an author whose manipulation of his own sources provides a model for his readers’ use of him asa source. As in Walter Benjamin’s image of scholarship as a constant flux from note-card to book and back to note-card,* Renaissance authors envisioned their enterprise as a form of creative and open-ended appropriation. Jeanneret devotes some compelling pages to classifying the varieties of imitation, the attitudes that informed them, and the expe- dients that were devised to stimulate the on familiar themes. A writer like Montaigne, who meditated much on the mechanics of literary borrowing, would surely have agreed with Poe that ‘There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere invention of new variations matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.” Since the author is a scholar of French literature, it is not surprising that he devotes the lion's share of his analysis to French authors. Only a relatively small part of the book is devoted to humanists in other countries (Erasmus being the one notable exception), and with the exception of the long discussion of Leonardo’s flood drawings, relatively litde is said about the visual arts. The supporting part played by art is explained by Jeanneret’s view that, in contrast to their prolific development in literature, ‘the attraction of mobile structures limited in the visual arts’ (p. 4) The view that artists were only marginally interested in transformation already seems to . was quite hold less water than it did a few years ago. Barolsky’s study of the prevalence of trans- formarive themes in Italian Renaissance art (published the same year as Jeanneret’s initial edition in French) suggests that a ‘transfor- mist’ ontology fascinated artists just as much as writers during the sixteenth century.* The role of fux and non-fixity in the process of creation has been emphasized in recent studies of two younger Florentine arusts who were influenced by Leonardo: Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560) and Jacopo da Pontormo (1493-1557)2 And the matrix of vitalist notions surrounding the transforma tion of bronze from liquid to solid in the casting of stares has been acutely analyzed by Michael Cole.° It would be fascinating to explore how the passion for flux Jeanneret explores in sixteenth-century art relates to. the emergence, in contemporary sculpture, of works whose appearance is transformed by the changing position of the spectator.’ One noteworthy omission from Jeanneret’s discussions gf the ‘non-finito’ in art is a discussion of the verb ‘faciebat’ (‘was mak- ing’). According to Pliny, the great ancient artists Apelles and Polyclitus signed their works with this imperfective form, rather than the perfective ‘fecit’ (‘made’), in order to imply that their works were ‘always a thing in process and not completed, so that when faced by the vagaries of criticism the artist might have left hira[self] a line of retreat ... as though they had been snatched away from cach of them by fate.® Well-read contempor- aries would have recognized this idea behind Michelangelo’s signature on the St Peter’s Peta (1498-1500). where for the first time since antiquity Michelangelo signed his work with the imperfect case. As pointed out by the late Rona Goffen, the imperfective signature resonates with another influential Plinian theme: unlike Protogenes, who never knew ‘when to take his hand from the panel, a good master knows how to bring an end to the flux of artistic creation. ‘There is certainly nothing of Protogenes in Jeanneret, and much of spontaneous jaciebat of Apelles and Polyclitus; as the author pointedly observes in his introduction, a study of the theme of mutability can never pretend to be definitive. It seems quite appropriate, indeed, that he ends with a discussion of two sixteenth-century books, Henri Estienne’s Parodiae morales and the Nuremberg Chronicle, which were printed with blank pages bound in, so that the reader could continue to “write” the book after it left the presses (pp. 262-3). A book that stimulates on as many levels as 99this one research, and its undoubtedly be transformed into many new is bound to inspire further wealth of ideas will guises by readers in a wide variety of disciplines. LOUISAWALDMAN University of Texas at Austin NOTES 1 ~ Charles Olsen, “I'he Kingfishers’ (first published 1959), in The Collected Poms of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (Berkeley, 1987), p-86. 2— Walter Benjamin, ‘Attested Auditor of Books’, in his Reflections: Essays, Aphorioms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York and London, 1978) p-78: ‘Today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.’ 3 — Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Magazine-Writing—Peter Snook’, in The Complete Poems and Tales of Edgaa Allan. Poe (New York, 1938), p.564- 4.~ Paul Barolsky, ‘As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art’, Renaissance Quarterdy, L1/2 (Gummer 1998), pp. 451-74 5 — Louis A. Waldman, ‘Bandinelli and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore: Privilege, Patronage and Pedagogy’, in Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral and les Sculpture, ed. Margaret Haines, (Fiesole, 2001), pp. 217-52; David Franklin, Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500-1550 (New Haven and London, 2001), ch. 10 6 — Michael W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, 2002), esp. ch. 2 (‘Casting, Blood, and Bronze’). 7 ~ Sce Lars Olof Larsson, Von allen Seiten gleich sciin. Stadion zum Beorif der Vielansichtigheit in der earoptischen Plastik von der Renaissance bis zum Rlassizismus (Stockholm, 1974); and Von allen Seiten schin, Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barack Wilhelm von Bode zum 150. Geburtstag, ed. Volkez Krahn (Heidelberg, 1995). 8 — Pliny, Natural History, trans, H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA and London, 1997), pp. 16-19 (Preface, p. 26). g — For Renaissance artists’ use of the imperfective of the Latin facio, see Viadimir Juven, Fecit faciebat’, Rewue de UAri, XXVI (1974), pp. 27-30; Rona Coffen, ‘Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Renaissance Ast, Vislor, XXXII (e001), pp. 303-70; eadem, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rothasl, Titian (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 114-16, 297-92, 950, 366, 383. 10 ~ Golfen, Renaissance Rivals (note 9), png.