Anne Dunlop is Associate Professor of History of Art at Yale University, and currently a fellow at Villa I Tatti, Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies. She is the co-editor of Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy (2007). Her current work is on exotic pigments in early European art in the wake of the Mongol conquests.
A reader might be surprised to find a full-page picture of a mechanical rooster toward the beginning of Painted Palaces. The bird is more than three feet tall, and it was made about 1352 as part of the clock of Strasbourg Cathedral. A few pages later there's a folio from a treatise on military engineering, showing how to make skeletons “rise” from a coffin using a clockwork mechanism. Both are examples of the range of materials used to explore the aesthetics of the period.There is not much dedicated writing on specific artworks before the mid-fifteenth century, and so alongside the painting cycles, the book examines such things as costume history and tournament trophies, manuscripts and fountains for what they reveal about ideas of art before the age of Leon Battista Alberti.The rooster and rising dead men are part of the extensive discussion of imitation as an artistic goal. Automata and moving images developed in the same period and in the same elite court circles as early secular cycles. Not much survives, but there are well-documented cases. In the palace and gardens of Hesdin, begun in 1288, there were gesticulating monkeys, windows that shut themselves, and a mechanical tree with birds that spouted water.Automata are probably the clearest case of the blurring of art and life in the period, and further proof that pleasure was already central to visual culture at the beginning of the Renaissance. Like the painted rooms that surrounded them, they suggest how far the drive to imitation could be taken.Painted Palaces is intended to spur a new, hard look at the early Renaissance, stripped of all the truisms about the period. It's a challenge to both Renaissance historians and modernists, a call to recast the prehistory of the modern artwork. If the book also encourages more work on secular materials, or on out-of-the way centers of production, so much the better.This is a first step in a far-reaching rewriting in the History of Art: the idea of the secular artwork has a very long history, and the long triumph of mimesis in the West is still very much to be explored.
Anne Dunlop Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy Pennsylvania State University Press328 pages, 10 x 9 inches ISBN 978 0271034089
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