Margaret M. McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance
France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), xiv +
461pp, ISBN 0300085354
This is a major book, providing an unparalleled resource for all students
of Renaissance history and culture. Professor McGowan has taken in a
great sweep of literary, visual and architectural events to reinterpret and
refine our appreciation of a main aspect of the Renaissance, the recovery
of knowledge of the ancient world. The chronological and geographical
scope of the book, as declared in its title, refers to late Renaissance
France. In fact, Professor McGowan provides the framework and much
of the detail for a pan-European survey.
The main focus of the book rests on the visual recovery of ancient
Rome. This appears at first blush a sufficiently limited topic. In fact, as
McGowan shows, its implications find their way into almost every facet
of the cultural and intellectual life of the period. Guidebooks to Rome by
lesser-known figures such as Nicolas Audebert lead on to the writings of
Montaigne and Rabelais in McGowan’s discussion of the fascinated
attention devoted to ancient Roman remains, and the dreams this attention
nurtured. Mimicry of Rome was inevitably coloured by acquisitiveness.
The French nobility from Francis I onwards boosted their prestige even as
they collected real and plausible Roman artefacts. Statues were joined by
coins and medals as objects of desire, and imitated in the official and
occasional coinage of the state. There were human imports too: Serlio
brought images of Rome into France by giving substance to an ancient
architectural vocabulary that proved initially alien. McGowan shows how
political and practical activity intertwined with the work of scholars, from
Francesco Colonna to Philibert de L’Orme, in creating a network of
affiliations perhaps more tightly drawn than almost any in Renaissance
Europe.
McGowan takes us on an astonishing journey through the wide
avenues and byways of Roman scholarship and practice in sixteenthcentury France, stopping off at great architectural achievements such as
Fontainebleau, archaeological discoveries led by the excavation of
Hadrian’s villa, works of scholarship and appropriation by, among many
others, du Bellay, J. J. Scaliger and (in complex fashion) Montaigne, and
the efflorescence of the Roman triumph as a model for contemporary
political display. Rome does not invariably emerge from all this as an
ideal city.
There are dissenting voices, such as Garnier’s, or
Montaigne’s, in his ambivalent portrait of Caesar, who see the civilisation
of Rome as a fearful warning as well as an inspiring precedent. Yet, the
overwhelming presence of images of Rome in tapestries, sculpture,
architecture, painting, engraving and public spectacle testifies to the
city’s huge imaginative influence on the habit of mind of at least the
privileged in late Renaissance France. McGowan has done a wonderful
job in assembling, sifting and interpreting the myriad instances of the
vision of Rome, and in the process provided information and stimulus for
necessary succeeding works of scholarship.
Ronnie Mulryne
University of Warwick