The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century

Renaissance et Réforme / 359 larger changes of subject and style in midcentury Dutch art.The new silk imagery was accompanied by a flood of aristocratic subjects such as hunting scenes and game still-life, luxury good still-life, mythological scenes and mythological por- traiture, neo-classical architecture and interior furnishings, oriental tapestries, and views of villas, gardens, and arcadian settings.To move from subjects to style, the new coloured silks participated in the larger shift toward a courtly aesthetic of rich colours and beautiful bodies.Thefljnschiider aesthetic then was the response of a socially presumptuous, bourgeois genre painting, dressing itself up in the aristocratic splendour usually reserved for history painting.Set within this aesthetic context, the clothing topic regains its traditional value as a metaphor for style and ornament.Along with colour and cosmetics, clothing was in fact one of the three most common metaphors for style in Western discussions of poetry, rhetoric, and art since antiquity (Elaine Fantham, Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery [Toronto, 1972], 166-167, 171).With her stronger background in social rather than literary history, the author never sees clothing on this more general level.Had she done so, the evidence she cites could have illuminated more fun- damental changes in mid-century Dutch art.Despite such drawbacks, Stone-Ferrier's book is lucid, intelligent, and usually convincing.If future scholarship on Dutch art disagrees with some of her conclusions, it will have to build on many of her findings.