review freedman olympian gods in renaissance art

7/27/2019 Review FREEDMAN Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.05.15

Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 301; b/w ills. 78.

ISBN 0-521-81576-2. $85.00.

Reviewed by William Stenhouse, Yeshiva University ([email protected])Word count: 2166 words

In this volume, Freedman examines one aspect of sixteenth-century Italians' encounter with the

classical world: their representations of the Olympian deities in drawings, prints, paintings, and

especially statues. She focuses on what she describes as the "autonomous representation" of thesegods. This is the portrayal of a single figure, or one in a group in which it "is seen as if either

actually alone or seemingly detached from all the other figures and objects visible in the same

space" (20). Freedman argues that this mode of representation was problematic for a Christian

society but flourished in the sixteenth century, and not before or afterwards. She considers the

sources available to sixteenth-century scholars and artists who wanted to imitate their classical

predecessors, and the ways in which sculptors like Jacopo Sansovino and Giambologna, or painters

like Giulio Romano and Raphael imitated and differentiated their work from that of their

predecessors in antiquity.

The book is divided into three parts. The first introduces the terms of discussion, and the patrons

and artists who created representations of the deities. The second, which will probably be of most

interest to readers of this review, aims to provide an overview of the statues, gems, coins thatsignified gods, and the classical texts discussing the representation of gods, that were available to

artists of the time. It then begins to consider the way in which those artists combined the different

forms of evidence to identify classical iconographies and create their own. In the third part,

Freedman has two long chapters detailing sixteenth-century representations of each Olympian

figure, the first considering classical elements in those representations and the second non-classical

elements. She ends with a chapter examining Renaissance responses to the images. Freedman's

basic argument is that sixteenth-century artists interwove classical with non-classical elements

when they depicted the Olympian gods because of their concerns about the Olympians' status as

false deities. Neither her main hypothesis, nor the route she takes to her conclusion, is convincing,

however, and this book should be read with caution by anyone new to this field.

As the premise of the work suggests, Freedman deliberately harks back and responds to previous

generations of scholars. She frames her work in the long shadows cast by the tutelary deities of Saxl

and Panofsky. By her title she refers to Jean Seznec's 1940La Survivance des dieux antiques,

although she distinguishes her interest in a revival of a specific mode of representation from

Seznec's assertion of survival. She even enlists the shade of Burckhardt when defining her use of

"Cinquecento," which, on her terms, "appears to be the brightest manifestation of the Burckhardtian

idea of the Renaissance as a phenomenon in world history" (5). This Cinquecento (or

"Renaissance") is regularly compared with an equally monolithic "Antiquity" (always capitalized,

and usually unqualified). In the former, for example, "the Olympian gods and goddesses... were

shown as deprived of the sanctity and majesty that they unequivocally conveyed" in the latter (118).

Freedman engages neither with applications of response theory in classical scholarship, nor withrecent work on the early modern period that has probed the range of artists' attitudes to antiquity.

There is little trace here of the agonistic relationship of sixteenth-century sculptors like Baccio


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Bandinelli towards their ancient predecessors that Leonard Barkan has so elegantly explored or of

the wide variety of responses to the material and textual remains of antiquity exemplified in the

collection of essays,Antiquity and its Interpreters.1

Freedman is on surest ground when she considers concrete examples of the phenomena of

appropriation and imitation. She illuminates how, for example, the motif of crossed legs in both a

statue of Mercury by Zanobi Lastricati and a fresco of the god by Giorgio Vasari derives from a

Roman statue documented to have been in the Medici collection in the sixteenth century. Similarly,

Renaissance illustrations and copies of classical deities reveal which details of the classical versions

were thought to be important: in an early print of the Apollo Belvedere, Nicoletto da Modena took

no notice of the god's tresses and fillet, whereas subsequent copies and adaptations recognized the

distinctive historicity of the hairstyle. More speculatively, she persuasively suggests that the

sixteenth-century tendency to represent classical male and female deities naked, without any strong

ancient precedent, was due to the persistence of medieval beliefs that pagan gods were demonic,

lascivious, and hence to be depicted without any clothes.

When she starts to draw other, wider conclusions from these observations, however, difficultiesemerge. Some contradictions and mistakes are striking, but not of central importance to the

argument of the book. We learn, for example, that "[t]he earliest collection of antiquities that

definitely included statues of the Olympian deities was that of Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini," in 1500

(83), but then seven pages later that Giovanni da Tolentino, writing in 1490, recorded two statues of

the Olympian gods in the Della Valle family palace. Classicists will be surprised to discover that

J.G. Frazer is supposed to have translated "enim lacrimare deorum est" (Ovid, Fasti iv.521,

preceded there by "neque") as "gods can never weep" (181), but they will be happier that Freedman

notes Pliny's and Lucian's anecdote about the fervid, besotted response of one observer to

Praxiteles' Cnidian Venus, even if that story would seem to modify her earlier statement about the

unequivocal majesty communicated by statues in antiquity.

More problematic for Freedman's argument is her treatment of the relationship in this period among

artists, collectors of antiquities, and printers. The structure of her book suggests that artists in the

Cinquecento were in a position to respond to a wide variety of source material about ancient

representations of gods, including the coins, gems, statues and classical texts that are mentioned in

the second part of the book. But the situation was far more complex than she allows. Coins, for

example, certainly excited widespread interest. Freedman examines the phenomenon primarily

through lovingly illustrated numismatic books, which began to include engravings or woodcuts of

coin reverses from the middle of the sixteenth century. There are two difficulties with this method.

First, many of the works of art discussed in this book were completed before the middle of the

century and before the appearance of the numismatic treatises. Second, these books are themselves

the products of appropriation and interpretation, and should not be regarded anachronistically asarchaeological records. The woodcutters and engravers who worked on these books were certainly

influenced by contemporary representations of Olympian deities and other classical subjects -- Enea

Vico, the author of several numismatic books, also engraved reconstructions involving classical

gods -- as is clear to numismatists today who examine the illustrations. To discuss an engraving of

Jupiter by Caraglio (the results of a collaboration with Rosso Fiorentino, and from 1526, although

not dated here) by referring to the reverse of a coin of Marcus Aurelius that features a figure carried

by an eagle is illuminating. But to do so by including an illustration of Guillaume Du Choul's 1556

woodcut of the coin, and by mentioning Du Choul's discussion of the object, is potentially

misleading to an unwary reader. By consistently using illustrations from these books, rather than of

the coins themselves, Freedman blurs the difference between source and representation, and

suggests that the artists she discusses would have had the books at hand.

Although incautious, this approach does not have major implications for the book's central thesis,
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that artists deliberately added non-classical elements to their representations of Olympian deities.

More troubling is a later comment about sixteenth-century artists' adaptation of their classical

sources. Freedman argues that in order to deprive the Olympians of their classical sanctity,

sixteenth-century artists transformed "conventionally apathetic gods into ... dynamic figures" (183);

humanized and naturalized deities were less threatening than the idealized, static, representations ofantiquity. She later points out, however, that Roman imperial coins -- which were the coins most

readily available to the artists -- did in fact represent Mars, Neptune and others in action (211-12).

This concession raises two crucial questions that the book does not answer satisfactorily. On the

basis of this case, given that coins were so strong an influence on artistic production, can we be sure

that artists deliberately adapted their sources? And more generally, is there really in fact so

pronounced a difference between sixteenth-century representations and those of antiquity,

particularly when, as Freedman acknowledges, contemporary audiences interpreted some sixteenth-

century representations as genuine antiques?

These questions cut to the heart of Freedman's argument. She asserts that it is "amazing" (3) that

Olympians could be represented as autonomous in this period, particularly when this type ofrepresentation had previously been used for Christian subjects. This statement offers a provocative

and useful reminder that sixteenth-century concerns towards the collecting and display of non-

Christian material could be very different from those of today, particularly as scholarship now

assigns to the Renaissance the origins of museums. The evidence that all sixteenth-century

audiences shared these concerns is not clear-cut, however. Why did church figures feel able both to

display classical statues of pagan deities, and even to commission imitations of, or replacements for

them? How could ecclesiastical patrons support artists supposed to be able to pass off their work as

antique, or at least able convincingly to restore classical fragments? Despite the thrust of the book,

Freedman ultimately recognizes these difficulties. It is hard to square, for example, the comment

that "[a]s the discerning reader observes, not always were sixteenth-century audiences conscious of

the pagan character of antiquity" (251 n.38) with a later claim that "sixteenth-century audienceswere aware of [figures of Olympian deities] as cult images of the pagans." (186)

At the end of the book, the discussion of concerns about and responses to sixteenth-century

renditions -- which it would have been helpful to have at the beginning of the work -- is revealing.

There it becomes clear that it is very difficult to generalize about audience responses. Freedman

proposes that "[t]he sixteenth-century viewer that I have in mind was a relatively pious and

intelligent person," but then promptly muddies the water by adding that "[d]epending on the aspect,

religious or 'antiquarian,' of this urbane viewer's outlook, the figure of the Olympian deity was

perceived either with alienation, as pagan in identity, or with neutrality or perhaps even

aesthetically, as a relic of the venerated past." (218). The use of "venerated" here is telling, and

perhaps offers one answer to Freedman's problems, although she does not follow up on the word's

implications for her pious spectator.

Freedman divides her evidence of audience responses into three: comments that praise the beauty of

artists' renditions; attacks on the paganism of those renditions; and Vasari's comments about artists'

approaches to the representation of the Olympian deities. It is striking, though Freedman does not

make the point, that the material from the first group is nearly all from the first half of the sixteenth

century, and that the majority of the attacks in the second group come from the second half of the

century. The usual way of explaining this discrepancy is to point to Protestant attacks on

ecclesiastical artistic patronage, particularly in Italy, and discussions about the role of art in the

Council of Trent. After the middle of the century, the argument goes, Catholic patrons and artists

became much more sensitive to the religious aspects of cultural production, and in particular to the

display of nude figures. One of the texts discussed here, Gabriele Paleotti's influential Discorsointorno alle imagini sacre e profane of 1582, was written in response to Tridentine discussions.

Because of her anxiety to see the Cinquecento as a whole, Freedman does not allude to this


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distinction or directly examine changes in representation or display over the course of the sixteenth

century. It may be that the conventional view requires modification, but not to confront it explicitly

seems irresponsible.

Ultimately Freedman aims to resolve the tension between two lines of inquiry: the first, the

conventional view of scholars and artists laboring teleologically to recover ancient iconographies

and to create works that accorded with those iconographies; and the second, the underlying

sixteenth-century disquiet about the idolatrous display and imitation of classical pagan remains. In

her discussion, she alludes to some very interesting issues, about the importance of the site where

representations of the gods were shown, for example, or the difference to a cardinal between simply

displaying ancient material and commissioning a contemporary artist actually to create an idol. Yet

her main argument, that artists introduced non-classical motifs into their renditions deliberately, is

not wholly credible, and certainly does not apply to all sixteenth-century renditions. It is certainly

true that classicists will find many anachronisms in sixteenth-century representations of

autonomous Olympian deities, but to attribute those primarily to religious concerns is to blur and

simplify a complex picture of reception and transmission. Furthermore, Freedman's lack of attentionto chronology threatens to undermine some of her arguments. This book may well serve as a

springboard to further research, but it raises many more questions than it convincingly answers.

Notes:

1. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in Renaissance Culture,

New Haven/London, 1999; Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner and Rebekah Smick (eds),Antiquity and its

Interpreters, Cambridge, 2000. There are references to both works in the notes.
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