Low and high style in Italian Renaissance art /

Art historian Emison (Univ. of New Hampshire) is a widely published scholar with a particular interest in prints of the Italian Renaissance. In this interesting and erudite study she investigates the use of prints, as well as some paintings, in determining evidence of the increasing appearance of a "low style" in Italian Renaissance art. The book is divided into three chapters and a postscript. In the first chapter, Emison discusses how the low style developed in relation to changes in the intellectual and social life of the Renaissance and how in the prosaic and new medium of prints artists began to develop nonheroic figures in addition to the privileged iconography of mythology in paintings. She also cites precedents and parallels in the literature of the period. The other chapters deal with the various manifestations of the low style in pastoral settings, depictions of peasants and women, and even in a certain crudeness of form. There are 40 satisfactory black-and-white illustrations and a good bibliography. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. J. Howett emeritus, Emory University