POWER AND IMAGINATION: City-States in Renaissance Italy

by Lauro Martines ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1979

Since Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance has been common ground. Martines (History, UCLA) could have justified his new contribution on the basis of the ever-increasing mass of narrow scholarship which he has neatly incorporated into his narrative. Instead, he takes up an old theme, the relation between ""society"" and ""culture,"" with new terms--""power"" and ""imagination""--in an effort to shed fresh light on the sources of Renaissance artistic and intellectual achievements. Martines argues that the socioeconomic transformations which accompanied the rise of the Italian city-states out of the medieval communes set the foundation for the cultural flowering that marked the 14th to 16th centuries. He has chosen to call the struggle for social domination a struggle for ""power"" in order to emphasize the all-pervasive and continuous character of it, while ""imagination"" is meant to convey the ability to project the fundamental aspects of that power in cultural form. The culture of the Renaissance is therefore seen as ideological in the sense that it expresses the consciousness of the ruling classes, but reaches beyond its own ideological bounds through a creative power understood here as imagination. In making this argument, Martines examines both the patronage system and the content of cultural products from literary humanism (Castiglione et al.) to Titian's paintings. In the case of humanism, he maintains that the values of civility and heroism it expressed, as well as the moral context in which it cast such problems as disparities of wealth, played an ideological role in the interest of plutocratic ruling classes. Although buttressed by an impressively detailed history of urbanism and the transmutations of city-states from 1100 to 1600, the effort to reduce art to interest is too simple to be convincing, and the creative urgency promised in the idea of imagination gives way to the static concept of ideology-as-mystification. A good and valid synthesis, but it falls short of the more innovative claims by which Martines would like to be judged.

Pub Date: March 1, 1979

ISBN: 0801836433

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION