Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture ed. by Andrea Bacchi, Catherine Hess, Jennifer Montagu (review)

REVIEWS 267 terpretations of events in no way displaced the possibility of a supernatural interpretation of matters. Indeed in the case of Macrobius’s inhabitable lands, the failure of the world to obey accepted natural theories lent credibility to the belief of God’s divine intervention in the universe. Thus naturalized readings of the physical world could at times overlap with, or become displaced by, supernatural ones. Bartlett next considers two creatures believed to have existed in the Middle Ages, but whose reality would likely be questioned by modern men and women (108). The first is the Dog-head, a fanciful being composed of a man’s body and a dog’s head. The second is the Stringae, or nocturnal, blood-sucking women who lived unnoticed among human communities. Bartlett presents this chapter as a perplexing lesson of the compelling, but uneven role of natural reasoning among European communities. For as belief in the dog-heads gave way to skepticism when travelers, such as John de Marignollis, found no trace such beings in the East, belief in the stringae continued, likely laying the foundation for the great witch-hunts of the Early Modern Period. Few embodied these same ironies and tensions more that the career and thought of the famous thirteenth-century English Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon (111). Although a theologian, Bacon wrote widely on natural subjects. At times he seemed to view the world in strictly naturalistic terms. He was an early proponent of the view that all things in the universe emitted radiation, which largely determined the course of daily life. For example, he believed that human psychological behavior was to some extent bound up with the emission of these rays by stars and their effects upon the bodies of men and women (120). He also signaled the importance of scientific instruments and experimentation, which he believed could benefit the Christian commonwealth. However, Bacon requested financial backing for his scientific labors in order to equip Christians to fight the Antichrist, who Bacon portrayed as also employing the “potency of science” (129). Indeed some of Bacon beliefs, suggests Bartlett, strike the reader as magical. This collection of lectures does not present any easy answers or algorithms for discerning why medieval people at times employed a natural interpretive framework and at others a supernatural one for their lives. Bartlett is content to merely present these contradictory examples as a way of sketching out the complexly of the premodern world. One thing is certain though, simple assumptions that medieval Christians were necessarily threatened or anxious about the natural world will no longer do. The reality is something much more complicated and messy. The lack of a tidy conclusion as to why medieval people did what they did or thought what they thought is in no way a weakness in this book. Indeed, we might, in the spirit of Kuhn, say that discomfort over the open-endedness of the natural and supernatural in the Middle Ages itself signals a modern intellectual shift in the making. ANDREW FOGLEMAN, History, University of Southern California Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, ed. Andrea Bacchi, Catherine Hess, and Jennifer Montagu (Los Angeles: Getty Publications 2008) 336 pages, 155 color and 114 b/w ill. The landmark exhibition Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, REVIEWS 268 organized by and exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa in 2008–2009, was not only the first significant exhibition of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's work in North America, but was also the first ever to display his sculptural portraits in a comprehensive manner. With painstaking attention to detail, and in no small part thanks to the significant number of works loaned for this exhibition—including over thirty sculptures in various media, as well as paintings and drawings—the exhibition revealed the indelible mark that the prolific sculptor made on Baroque portrait sculpture in seventeenth-century Rome, while providing an illuminating look at the development of his personal style in that genre. The catalogue of the same name, edited by Andrea Bacchi, Catherine Hess, and Jennifer Montagu, is an equally significant achievement in Bernini studies as the first...

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