Andrew Casper. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy

Andrew Casper. Art and Religious Image in El Greco's Italy. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. xiii + 221 pp. + 84 illus. $79.95. Andrew Casper's Art and Religious Image in El Greco's breaks new ground in art historical literature by engaging recent research both in typological reassessment and in plural temporality of works of art well historical relations underpinning their meaning, form, and function. This represents a much-anticipated tack in El Greco studies, which have been dominated by questions of iconography, connoisseurship, and patronage. The book deals with ten years encompassing El Greco's Italian sojourn, from his departure from native Crete in 1567-68 and subsequent settling in Venice, to his Roman period from 1570-76, before his final relocation to Toledo, his adoptive Spanish town where artist died in 1614. The book concludes with a thoughtful analysis of Santo Domingo retable in Toledo's Church of Santo Domingo El Antiguo culmination of El Greco's formal integration of his Italian Renaissance experience into his then-emerging pictorial discourse in Spanish devotional paintings. The author's choice to examine El Greco's Italian activity leads to a discussion of Cretan painter if he were an Italian Renaissance artist ab initio or a painter associated with Bamboccianti, Fiamminghi or other sort of emigres who trained at high levels of Italian art instruction available to local Roman artists. This application of an Italian Renaissance-focused methodology to an Eastern painter enables meaningful observations that El Greco is far more conventional than what is normally said about him (3) and that he used his Italian career as a vantage point for reevaluating religious image in sixteenth-century Italy (7). Casper argues that El Greco's Byzantine retentions resurfaced in new and improved contours in to openly respond to creative conditions of devotional image-making after concluding session of Council of Trent (1563). El Greco inspiringly mastered latent connections between legendary role of Evangelist Luke a painter of Marian icons and Western perception that painting is a divine activity--one governed by angelic artists who depict a spiritual endeavor rather than slavish imitation of natural forms (21-32). Notwithstanding these East-West rapprochements, crowning achievement of El Greco's Italian career was not a mere translation from an Eastern into a Western idiom, but rather ambitious enterprise of applying his artistic virtuosity to his efforts to create what Casper names the artful (75). Although icon was not a novel category of image production in either or in Northern Renaissance, El Greco invested it with a heightened sensitivity and skill by displaying most advanced Italian styles and techniques, well engaging with contemporary critical and philosophical issues when making his devotional images. One of overriding topics in literature about devotional images has been vexed question of whether aesthetic quality and devotional engagement together can flourish despite restrictions upon religious image production in sixteenth century. The artist's talent negotiated ecclesiastical rules of decency and propriety. Addressing this issue, book contributes to some remarkable efforts to elucidate nuanced balance between artistry and devotion, including Alexander Nagel's The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011), Stuart Lingo's Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (2008), Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach's The Idol in Age of Art: Objects, Devotion, and Early Modern World (2009), and Megan Holmes's latest research on miraculous images in Renaissance Florence. On other hand, Casper disregards Marcia Hall's trust in style and her contention, in The Sacred Image in Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (2011), that El Greco reprised visual representations he derived from his study of Italian masters to amplify affective tenor of his devotional images. …