Meaning and Its Objects: Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance France (review)
model of microand macro-art history. And, as the product of nearly a professional lifetime, it should give us pause in a publish-or-perish academic environment. Liebert, a psychoanalyst and not an art historian, shows us that artists’ lives and works are fruitfully examined by the non-artist and non-art historian. For an analysis of the monograph, however, the twentieth century is problematic not only because there were so many monographs written on major and minor artists, but because the model became, quite literally, a master with little apparent tolerance for variation. The twentieth-century monograph codified the canon, and established and upheld distinctions between major and minor. Once feminist art historians began to question the notion of artistic greatness and genius enforced by this model, the future of the monograph and the role of such an undertaking came into question. Guercio’s work reminds us that the artist’s monograph remains a core reference work for art historians and scholars in other disciplines whose research involves images and their creators. He also offers a history of art in the West based on scholars’ accounts of artists: what is privileged and when, what issues are taken up, when do we study the master and when do we consider the pupil. This is an important book to read if one is contemplating writing a monograph, reviewing the discipline’s history, or teaching the history of art. Regretfully, there is no bibliography, although the footnotes are a rich resource. A number of the illustrations are of title pages, the earliest from Vasari’s Le vite de’ piá eccelenti pittori, scultori, e architettori published in Florence in 1568, the most recent being Bernard Berenson’s Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism published in London in 1895. The illustrations are interesting as artifacts: a discussion of these as objects with a history would be valuable and would also put into practice what is implied in Guercio’s text, and that is that the subject of the monograph shares something with the history of our discipline. MARJORIE OCH University of Mary Washington