Vernacular, literature, art history, art theory, poetry, Renaissance, early modern, Europe, translation, Pieter Bruegel

Introduction The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern ArtsJoost Keizer and Todd RichardsonThe Place of the Vernacular in Early Modern CulturePainting, Leonardo da Vinci says, #145;needs no interpreters of different languages as letters do#146;. It is therefore more universal, #145;communicable to all generations of the universe#146;. Grounded in nature rather than in culture, it is less dependent on the geographical and temporal boundaries of different languages spoken at different times and in different places. Painting easily travels across time and space. Wherever it touches ground--now, then, here or there--it is received directly and spontaneously, without the intervention of translators and commentators. Whoever trusts her or his eye, Leonardo theorizes, can rely on the truth in painting. Pace Leonardo, pictorial realism was not some universal language, understandable for people across space and time. Much like the spoken and written languages to which Leonardo denies universal accessibility, the reality effect of early modern art, too, is a cultural system whose understanding is bound to geography and history. Take, for example, the words of one of the members of the Greek delegation to the Council of Ferrara (1439), Gregory Melissenus, who complained to his master, the Patriarch of Constantinople, that: When I enter a Latin church I do not revere any of the [images of] the saints that are there because I do not recognize any of them. At most, I may recognize Christ, but I do not revere him either, since I do not know in what terms he is described. So I make the sign of the cross and I revere this sign that I have made myself, not anything I have seen there. Gregory understands naturalism as a form of visual communication, like language made up of culturally specific signs. For this visitor from Constantinople, naturalism looked like a language that cast the familiar--in this case Christ--in strange terms, as if Christ stood described to him in a language he did not master. What looked #145;natural#146; to some looked disfigured to others. There is a great paradox in Leonardo#146;s words, for he, too, knew that the visual arts are culturally specific--like language. In another note, also dating to the early 1490s, the artist recounts the history of art. In a few paragraphs, he explains that the universality he could attribute to naturalistic art was in fact bound to a specific time and place. It was a #145;style#146;, he says, practiced by the Romans (i romani); yet in post-Roman Europe that #145;style#146; fell into decline--apparently because it was not that universal after all--only to be revived again by the Florentine painter Giotto. Leonardo#146;s association of mimetic art with Roman antiquity is a familiar one. Michael Baxandall catalogued a whole array of texts from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that also speak of Renaissance naturalism as a culturally specific mode of art-making that writers associated with antique culture; most Renaissance artists were compared to ancient artists, whose names survived in the pages of Pliny#146;s Natural History and other antique texts known to the period. And for Baxandall the reality effect of such painting was only understandable to the select few: to those who could appreciate Ciceronian Latin, not to the crowds Leonardo imagined attending to the lessons of mimetic art. In fact, Petrarch had already claimed that the artistic achievements of Giotto--whom Leonardo counted among the champions of accessible naturalism--were only understood by a very limited number of art lovers. Claims like Petrarch#146;s aligned words with pictures, artistic styles with language. Giotto#146;s art, Petrarch implies, is entirely like the Ciceronian Latin in which he wrote--a cultural system, a language, only accessible to himself and some of his peers. The Latinized culture of literature and the visual arts epitomized by Petrarch and later European humanists stood in a dialectical relationship with other languages--the vernacular languages spoken by everyone else, such as Tuscan and other regional dialects. For some, those languages were crude and uncultivated: the language of the masses, not the literary few. The English term vernacular is derived from the Latin vernaculus. The word verna was originally used to distinguish the home-born, house-bred slave from the more common servus, a slave who could, and often did, originate from faraway lands at the fringe of the Roman Empire. Vernacular was the language of those slaves. The term connotes a rootedness in a tradition and implies a resistance to universals and international currents, which, in the early modern world, basically meant a resistance to Latin language and culture. The vernacular is often cast as an alternative to the official language of the Church and authoritative, classical authors. In response to the dominance of Latin as the language of literary sophistication, Italian authors began to offer a strong vernacular alternative claiming equal literary sophistication. A tradition of vernacular writing was in place by the early fourteenth century. Dante wrote his Divina Comedia entirely in the vernacular--allowing even Vergil to speak Tuscan. And Petrarch, even if he felt a certain disdain for writing in a language accessible to the masses, also believed that the language of love needed the kind of corporeal presence and nearness of lived experience that only the native tongue could offer. Remarkably enough, the vernacular works of both poets--and of Boccaccio, too--mention artists. The Comedia includes a well-known reference to Giotto, whose fame is used as an example of vainglory, and Petrarch#146;s Canzoniere boast two poems in which the art of the Sienese painter Simone Martini is mentioned.The term vernacular has also recently been adopted by art historians to describe native artistic practices. For Charles Dempsey, Petrarch#146;s love poetry, with its references to Martini, offered a way out of Baxandall#146;s exclusive insistence on the Latinized culture of Renaissance art. For Dempsey, early Renaissance art was never as exclusively #145;classical#146; as a long and venerable tradition of art historians had suggested--the tradition of idealist interpretations offered by, among others, Erwin Panofsky, André Chastel, and E.H. Gombrich. Panofsky et alia argued that Renaissance artists were interested in a revival of the classical past per se, an interest informed by a clear historical perspective through which classical culture was retrieved. We might do better, Dempsey submits, to revisit a famous phrase by Aby Warburg, who wrote in 1898: #145;In the fifteenth century the antique as a source of poised and measured beauty--the hallmark of its influence as we have known it since Winckelmann--still counted for comparatively little#146;. Warburg displaced artists#146; imitation of the classical past as a purely aesthetic interest in classical forms, and instead connected it to an interest in liveliness and animation; artists from Simone Martini to Sandro Botticelli saw ancient forms as personifications of a vivid society less dead, buried, and the object of archaeological and antiquarian inquiry than present in Renaissance life as if the Roman past was happening now. #145;The figures of ancient myth#146;, Warburg wrote, #145;appeared before Italian society, not as plaster casts, but in person, as figures full of life and color, in the festival pageants through which pagan joie de vivre had kept its foothold in popular culture#146;. Dempsey argued for the vernacular roots of Simone Martini#146;s--and Sandro Botticelli#146;s--art. Simone#146;s concept of beauty is less marked by #145;poised and measured#146; beauty of antique art than it is informed by the vernacular poetry of Petrarch. A Petrarchan ideal of beauty shifted attention away from the antique, Latinized p