Charles Hope

As visitors to the recent exhibition of Dutch art at the Royal Academy will know, emblems, once the province of antiquarians, are now of great interest to historians of art. For more than a decade scholars have argued that these combinations of a motto, a picture and an explanatory poem, pointing a simple moral lesson, provide a key to the understanding of Dutch painting of the 17th century. This is not just because in many cases emblems include imagery drawn from everyday life which is strikingly similar to that employed by the painters, but also because they supposedly indicate that the public of the period was accustomed to looking for moral meanings in such imagery, wherever it might appear. In much the same way it is now often believed that the Italian counterpart of the emblem, the impresa, provides evidence about the ways in which Italian art was interpreted, especially in the later 15th and the 16th century. Unlike emblems, imprese consisted only of an image and a motto, and by convention the image was non-human. Their function, too, was rather different. Instead of providing moral instruction, they were personal devices, akin to coats-of-arms, illustrating, in a veiled manner, the aspirations or character of their owner. In Renaissance Italy the ability to interpret an impresa was an essential courtly skill, requiring something of the gifts needed for a Times crossword – a wide knowledge of out-of-the-way literary texts and a taste for the playful association of ideas.

The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in representations of Christ, both as an infant and as an adult, the genitals had a particular theological significance to which we are now oblivious because of the modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity’. This may sound like the wilder theories about the Holy Grail or Atlantis, but Professor Steinberg is a serious scholar, and his thesis is buttressed with dozens of visual examples and with a formidable array of learned references. Whether he is right, of course, is another matter: but at least one distinguished historian of Renaissance theology, the Jesuit John O’Malley, who contributes a postscript to the book, seems to find his conclusions broadly convincing, so they deserve to be examined closely.

In the last forty years Kenneth Clark did more than anyone else to create an interest in the art of Renaissance Italy, but Edgar Wind had a much greater influence on the way in which this art has been studied. Both men were outstanding lecturers and gifted writers, and both, in very different ways, were influenced by the work of Aby Warburg. Both, too, were particularly drawn to the early Renaissance in Florence and to the High Renaissance in Rome, to those masterpieces, in fact, which occupy the central place in the English and American canon of great art. But there the resemblance ends. Whereas Clark was a populariser who wore his learning lightly, Wind was exactly the opposite. His best-known work, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, was an attempt to relate the ideas of Neoplatonism to Renaissance paintings and sculptures; and his main contention was that such works could only be fully appreciated by someone deeply versed in this unusually abstruse and now unfamiliar philosophical system. Clark appeals to those who like their art easy, Wind to those who want it difficult.