TAIGA'S TRUE VIEWS: THE LANGUAGE OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYJAPAN by Melinda TakeuchiReview by: Nancy S. AllenArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 11, No. 4(Winter 1992), pp. 205-206Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948498 .

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Art Documentation, Winter 1992 205

attempts to rectify these errors. The most recent monograph on

Palma by Mariacher (Giovanni Mariacher, Palma il Vecchio [Mi lano: Bramante Editrice, 1968]) corrected some errors of chro

nology, but as Rylands notes, was "prepared in haste and riddled

with errors," and "represents a step back from the point reached

in 1937 by Gombosi." In discussing Palma's chronology, Rylands

groups the paintings not into phases or manners but into themes?

altarpieces, Sacre Conversazioni, and portraits?following the ob

servations of Vasari et al. that Palma specialized in certain kinds

of paintings. Rylands develops his own chronology for Palma's

paintings based not on following his career, but on studying each

painting in relation to known documents and to other compa rable works. Rylands groups all firm attributions to Palma in the

main catalogue, and relegates all others (workshop paintings,

questionable attributions, and excessively damaged works) to the

secondary catalogue. The other chapters of the text deal with "Documents and docu

mented paintings (except altarpieces)," "The Altarpieces," "The

Sacre Conversazioni," "The Portraits," and a "Conclusion." The

documents chapter provides known dates, collections, and docu

mentation of Palma's works. Inventories are cited as well as a

financial statement from Palma himself. The chapters dealing with themes are those which shed the most new light on Palma's oeuvre. By grouping

on type of painting, Rylands traces a chro

nology within each chapter; the catalogue at the end combines all of Palma's works into one final chronology. This makes for a

much clearer discussion of Palma's works, in comparison to pre vious scholars who have discussed his works totally chronologi

cally. By taking each group of works separately, the reader can see a progression from early to late styles and can more clearly understand Palma's growth as a painter and his assimilation of

the varied influences in Italy in the 16th century. The concluding chapter draws together facts on Palma's life,

his workshop, and ties with other painters and their influences on Palma's work. Rylands also includes a brief discussion of Pal

ma's drawings, tracing his stylistic progression in this media which often illustrates an artist's style more clearly. Rylands discusses

Palma's early works as a whole and the gradual transformation of

his style, which he sees as being influenced by central Italian

figurative innovations. Titian's influence is discussed, especially in

Palma's Venetian characteristic of "the amply robed and fleshly blond?whether saint or courtesan," but many other influences

are discussed as well. Lorenzo Lotto's friendship and influence is

touched upon briefly. Rylands sees Palma's death in 1528 cutting short a career which could have seen more fame and more

deprovincialization. Palma painted at a time and place in Italy which was undergoing a variety of changes, especially the secular

current emerging in Venice and Mannerism.

This volume is definitely intended for a university audience, undergraduate and graduate. As the only English-language mono

graph on Palma it is important to the undergraduate; the com

pleteness and scholarship in the catalogue raisonn? makes it also

useful for the graduate student and scholar. The book is written

in a style which is easy to read and not at all pedantic. Even the

catalogue raisonn? entries are well written, interesting, and often

entertaining. Rylands discusses the history, condition, and prove nance of each painting as well as the style and subject matter. Each entry has a bibliography. Rylands includes many snippets of information often not included in such entries. For instance,

in the entry for an attributed work, Mars and Venus, he cites a

note by Federico Zeri in the Fogg Museum files on the condition of the painting's restoration.

The book's layout and design are also well done. The first part, or monograph, is divided into the six chapters mentioned pre viously. This arrangement gives the reader a clear sense of Ry land's intent. The page layout is clear, with large margins, and

often entire pages are given over to illustrations, each identified

by title, date, place, and catalogue number. The catalogue rai

sonn? portion is clearly laid out, and the photographs of each

work are twice the size of those in the Italian edition. The photo

graphs in this section are black and white as are those illustrating the text. A 16-painting color section gives the reader a better

idea of Palma's work, since color is such an important element of

his painting style. Gombosi's volume had no color plates, and

Mariacher's had only a few throughout the text. Since there are

so few of Palma's works in American collections, the inclusion of

color plates in this work is important. The color of the English edition tends to be more yellow in tone than the Italian edition, and it seems, from descriptions of Palma's works, that the true

colors would lie somewhere between the two editions.

The appendices are selected documents chronicling Palma's

life and works. A "Register of Documents" preceding these ap

pendices lists all the known documents on Palma by date, place, a

short summary, and if any, a bibliography. A family tree is also

given at the end of this section.

The bibliography is the same as in the Italian edition, but it has been updated with references more recent than 1988. The

indexes of names and places are complete and precise. Gombosi

did not include a bibliography, and Mariacher has a 14-page bibliography which is outdated.

The completeness of this book in text, illustrations, and ap

pendices makes it a definite purchase for graduate collections

and museums. Because of the extent of the monograph, the

book would be more valuable if it could be placed in the circulat

ing collection rather than reference.

Patricia L. Keats

Towson State University

PASSION FOR TRAVEL TAIGA'S TRUE VIEWS: THE LANGUAGE OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN / Melinda Takeuchi.?Stanford: Stanford University Press, May 1992.?

225 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-8047-1915-2; LC 91-11862: $45.00.

We encounter Ike Taiga (1723-1776) at the age of 14 and learn of his rise from anonymous artisan, creator of fans, lan

terns, and fabrics, to young painter with his first documented

commission from a shrine in Kyoto. His love of Chinese literary and visual traditions provided stylistic inspiration which Take uchi illustrates with the Chinese woodblock books known to the painter in his teens. Taiga studied ancient Chinese script and

seals and used Chinese poetry to supplement his visual imagery. As his artistic personality developed, he expanded the vocabulary of Chinese ink painting by adding a uniquely Japanese idiom. This intermingling of styles was fueled by his passion for travel and resulted in Taiga's quest to capture the atmosphere and essence of places beloved to all Japanese, a genre which is now

referred to as shinkeizu, "true-view painting." His divergence from

the idealized landscapes of Chinese painting to a distinctly Jap anese genre elevated Taiga to a position of renown within his

lifetime.

After a long biographical chapter, Takeuchi examines the art ist in the context of his time, providing understanding of the intellectual and cultural backdrop to his work. She closes her study with an extensive look at shinkeizu and Taiga's influence on

his younger contemporaries. Previous Western-language books on Japanese 18th-century

ink painting have offered some coverage of this artistic tradition in general, and Taiga in particular. Such books have been part of survey series which have included volumes on the Nanga School

and/or Bunjin-ga or literati painting such as the Heibonsha Survey of Japanese Art, exhibition catalogues such as Miyajima Shin'ichi and Sato Yasuhiro's Japanese Ink Painting, (Los Angeles: Los An

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206 Art Documentation, Winter 1992

geles Museum of Art, 1985), or stylistic analyses of the entire

genre such as Sherman Lee's Reflections of Reality in Japanese Art

(Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1983). Takeuchi's book makes new contributions to the literature in

several ways. She has focused on Ike Taiga as a personality and

interwoven contemporary, or near contemporary, documenta

tion about Taiga's life with the study of the works themselves. While this methodology is not foreign to Western art historical traditions, few books have been written on Japanese art that

provide the Western reader with footnoted reference to the pri

mary sources that inform any serious, scholarly art historical

analysis. It also serves to bring the artist to life to a degree un

precedented in other Western books on Japanese painters. She

has examined approximately 400 works by Taiga worldwide, which allows her to judge authenticity, quality, and dating, form

ing the only comprehensive view of the artist's shinkeizu.

The book contains a full complement of scholarly compo nents. Takeuchi precedes the bibliography with a brief essay which explains the basic 18th- and 19th-century sources as well

as the modern Japanese works on Taiga. She thus gives the non

Japanese reader an understanding of the framework upon which

she has built her arguments. The bibliography is a composite of Western and Japanese books, catalogues, and articles. All Jap anese words in the notes, bibliography, and index are given in

romanization; they are followed by English translations in the index. A character index lists the Chinese and Japanese nouns

and proper names used in the text. Reproductions of 115 seals

used by Taiga will assist future students with identification and

dating of his paintings, and the annotated chronology of his life enlivens the understanding of the historical man and informs an

understanding of his artistic genius. The high points this book earns in the quality of its text are

slightly diminished by several poor editorial and design deci sions. The captions for the 100 color and black-and-white illus

trations of Taiga's work lack credit lines, requiring the reader to

flip from the text to the list of illustrations for this important identifying information. In addition, Stanford University Press has carelessly flawed the publication by printing numerous double

page illustrations into the gutter of the book. This catalogue raisonn? of Ike Taiga's topographic

or "true

view" paintings will be a readable source for undergraduates, a

necessary reference for the serious student of the artist and his

time, and a model for publications of future scholars.

Nancy S. Allen

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

FRINGE BENEFITS IMAGE ON THE EDGE: THE MARGINS OF MEDIEVAL ART / Michael Camille.?Cambridge: Harvard University Press, May 1992.?176 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-674-44361-6; LC 91-077846: $35.00.

Casual observers, students, and scholars of Medieval art will be

intrigued by this book as they try to find explanations for the

many curious marginal images in Gothic art. The author at

tempts an explanation of the marginal imagery of the whole

spectrum of Gothic art from the viewpoint of several methodolo

gies, including art history, anthropology, sexuality, semiotics, psy

choanalysis, and literary criticism.

The text is divided into six chapters. "Making Margins," the first chapter, "examines the cultural space of the margins and

explores how it came to be constructed and colonized with such

creaturely combinations." In this chapter the author sets the

stage for the following four chapters, which are topical examina

tions of the margins and of the places where marginal art was

created, namely the monastery, cathedral, court, and city, the

"sites of power in medieval society." "The End of the Edge," the

last chapter, examines the demise of Gothic marginal art.

Marginal manuscript images have been examined before, par

ticularly by Lilian M. C. Randall in her well-known study Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of Cal ifornia Press, 1966), which is essentially a classified index of sub

jects found in the manuscripts, with good plates illustrating those

subjects and an introduction that is exemplary in its conciseness

and extent of coverage of the meaning and interpretation of

those images. Since Randall's study, a basic book for medieval

studies, there have been many studies of individual manuscripts, motifs and figures in manuscripts, and surveys of medieval manu

scripts too numerous to mention in this brief review. Image on the

Edge, however, embraces not only marginal manuscript imagery but architecture and some minor arts as well. It is a fascinating synthesis of many new approaches to topics that have tradition

ally been treated from an art historical perspective, and it is a

study that will cause the reader to think and rethink the later middle ages from a wholly new viewpoint.

While there is no doubt that this approach is extremely inter esting, this reviewer finds problems with the author's attempt to

use vernacular words (e.g., shit, prick, turd, etc.) which detract

somewhat from the overall significance of the work. There are

problems especially with many of the manuscript illustrations being muddy and not shown in sufficient detail. The overall

layout of the manuscript page is important, but it is also impor tant to be able to see clearly the details of the image on the page that the author is discussing. Finally, this reviewer must fault the

author for a very carelessly edited list of references wherein the

footnote citations often have different dates from the complete citations in the bibliography. There are additional problems with the dates and some spellings in the bibliography as well. Such carelessness would not be acceptable in an

undergraduate term

paper; why should it be acceptable in a published work? Such carelessness causes unnecessary problems for careful readers who

want to read the cited references. The "rush to press" process seems to preclude this book being a worthy addition to the Es says in Art and Culture series of Harvard University Press of

which it is part. If these problems were corrected, the book would be a good

addition to all academic, museum, and public art libraries. This

reviewer does not think the book is of the same caliber as the author's earlier The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medi

eval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). It is

clearly intended for a more general readership and doubtless will be purchased by many libraries. This book will probably find its way into most libraries because it bears the Harvard Univer

sity Press imprint, an imprint that most librarians and scholars trust and is therefore included in most standing order and ap

proval plan arrangements. Such carelessly edited books raise the

issue once again that scholars and librarians can no longer trust

all university press imprints to be carefully edited and meet the

requirements of good book design (i.e., choice of paper, plate placement, and illustration legends). In summary, such a new

approach is needed and exciting, but the technical problems stand in the way of total excellence.

Thomas J. Jacoby University of Connecticut

1 1 POWERFUL HATS GLORY REMEMBERED: WOODEN HEADGEAR OF ALASKA SEA HUNTERS / Lydia T. Black.?Juneau, AK: Alaska State Museum, dist. by University of Washington Press, May 1992.? 176 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-295-97151-7; $24.95 (pa).

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