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Storytelling in Christian art from Giotto to Donatello . By Lubbock Jules . Pp. xiv+353 incl. 165 black-and-white and colour plates. New Haven-London : Yale University Press , 2006. £30. 0ￂ 300ￂ 11727ￂ 2
The argument of this book, that artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were motivated to depict biblical stories as a means to provoke viewers to reflect upon their moral significance, will not come to students of the period as a surprise. It may be, however, that art-historical interest in technique has occasionally distracted the attention of modern observers from the religious meaning of late medieval Christian art. To exemplify the way in which Christian doctrine has been translated into visual images, Jules Lubbock has selected a familiar line-up of Tuscan artists (a team first made collectively famous in the sixteenth century by Giorgio Vasari, who praised, similarly, their abilities as convincing and engaging story-tellers): Giotto, Duccio, Giovanni Pisano, Masaccio, Ghiberti and Donatello. Within these geographical and chronological confines, Lubbock has written a linked series of essays, each based upon close observation of particular works. Drawing attention to internal sightlines and external angles of visionￂ -ￂ a constant and valid motif is the viewer's mobility in front of an objectￂ -ￂ he arrives at a number of thought-provoking reflections and insights.
Lubbock emphasises the textual basis of these images, which he sees as essentially doctrinal. This emphasis informs the visual analysis, in...