Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Beverley Jackson

The art of Renaissance Italy remains arguably the touchstone of Western art. It has produced many of the icons by which we define European culture, and our subsequent view of the role of art and of the artist in society has been profoundly influenced and shaped by the ideas of the period. In this stimulating and controversial book, a bestseller in the author's native Holland, Bram Kempers shows the period as a process of the developing 'professionalization' of the artist.
Tracing the history of patronage - successively of the mendicant orders and city-states, the merchant families, the princely and ducal rulers and, finally, the great papal patrons, Julius II, Pius II and Sixtus IV - Kempers follows the story from Sienna to Florence, then to the court of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino and, ultimately, to the heyday of the papal courts in Rome and the ducal court of Cosimo de Medici in Florence, which witnessed the supremacy of Michelangelo and the birth of the great Florentine Academy.
A painter and sociologist at the University of Amsterdam, Dr Kempers shows how the unprecedented - and perhaps unsurpassed - creativity of Renaissance art was born of the dynamics of patronage and professional competition. This bred a fruitful balance between individual originality and social control, and out of a creative alliance of art and power a crowning period in the history of art flourished.
With over seventy illustrations, including works from Duccio, Lorenzetti and Simone Martini through to Fra Angelico and Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Raphael, the book is a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between art and society. It demonstrates, to scholars and laymen alike, the profound influence of the Renaissance on Western ideas of art over five hundred years.

Although it is hardly a new idea that the development of Italian painting in the period between 1200 and 1600 was shaped by the shifting requirements of its patrons, Kempers has articulated a useful schema for analyzing the interaction of this professionalization of painting and the artistic needs of evolving urban societies. Thus, the patronage of painting is set into social frameworks dominated sequentially by mendicant orders, civic authorities, merchant families, and papal and aristocratic courts. The impact of these societal forces manifested themselves in terms of the placement, format, and content of the works while encouraging artistic competition, innovation, and "improvement." This historical sociological lens provides a sometimes useful and sometimes crudely schematic tool for scrutinizing individual paintings. Also questionable is this very informative volume's attempt to contextualize artistic change in terms of the amorphous notions of "civilizational ideals" and state formation. For specialized collections.
- Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.