The first chapter may stand as an essay unto itself. He begins with the ancient story of Apelles hiding "behind his picture" and listening to the comments of the passing viewers: the story is then a metaphor, and of course the source of the title, for the book. This is an insightful chapter/essay on the limitations of our ability to comprehend the art of the past and how our visual knowledge and experience facilitates our understanding of images, however much there are restrictions of time, place, and language. This piece could be read as a complement to E. H. Gombrich's classic essay, "The Visual Image" (first published in 1972 in Scientific American; reprinted in 1982 in his The Image and the Eye, and again in 1996 in The Essential Gombrich, edited by R. Woodfield).

The next chapter is on what may be called the business of art, namely, the use of written records (contractual relationships) of lawyers and notaries for patrons and artists. The chapter, although tedious and tough sledding for this reader, provides a fundamental underpinning for the social and economic basis of "art," since artifacts in the Renaissance still functioned mainly within the craft tradition.

From artist as artisan or tradesman (Chapter 2) to artist as intellectual: Chapter 3 deals with five well-known theoretical texts, from Alberti's "On Painting" to Leonardo's "Treatise on Painting." In examining such texts Kemp retraces some of the ground covered in his previous book, The Science of Art (e.g., perspective), but here he is concerned more with setting these texts within their own time. Thus he points to the heterogeneous nature of the texts and notes that there was no real classifiable "art theory" as we conceive of it today (although it does have its origin in the Renaissance) and that they were not widely read (although some were copied). Kemp's exposé rather deflates many modern interpretations of the intellectual nature of art in the Renaissance. As he asserts, his functional approach precludes making overarching pronouncements about art--such as linking the new modes of representation to a new way of seeing. Instead, Kemp remains within the everyday world where Renaissance artisans make (or try to make) a living.

The issue of value applied to "art" (Chapter 4) we often take for granted. But in the Renaissance there was little uniformity in pricing: art works that today would be priceless masterpieces could be valued as less than an ornate bed. Only antiquities were consistently of high value. Similarly, artists' wages varied, with only a few "super-artists" (such as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian) earning a considerable income. The average artist's yearly wages, it seems, were about 1/3 that of a lawyer(!). This period also initiated an important shift, whereby the value or price set for an artifact was based less on the materials required and the time spent making it, and more on the skill of the maker and the aesthetic quality of the piece--another step toward our modern view.

The content of such works (e.g., iconography) poses problems, because Kemp, keeping close to the original sources, is thus sensitive to reading too much into the past, particularly from modern viewpoints such as feminism and psychoanalysis. Hence, in Chapter 5, he underscore the limitations of what we can know about the original meaning of, say, Botticelli's, Primavera. The most significant insight for me in this chapter was Kemp's argument that for many works there probably was no fixed, preconceived single meaning; instead such meaning evolved--as an interaction between form and content--as the work progressed. Hence, neither is there a documented "program" for Renaissance works nor are we always able to reconstruct unequivocally their original meanings. This chapter dovetails nicely with another important essay by Gombrich on the interaction between form and expression, "Four Theories of Artistic Expression" (first published in 1980 in vol. 12 of the Architectural Association Quarterly and reprinted in 1996 in Gombrich on Art and Psychology, edited by R. Woodfield).

As implied in Chapters 3 & 4, there occurred in the Renaissance a shift toward the modern concepts of "art" and "artists," the topic of Chapter 6. But even here Kemp--always keeping an eye on the sources--puts a break on how much post-Romantic baggage we may legitimately read back into this period. At most he concedes that some features of the modern viewpoint may be seen as having their genesis in the Renaissance but that they were certainly not articulated as full-blown categories of "Art."

The last chapter (which could have come first; indeed, the reader need not read this book in the given order) puts Kemp's approach into an historical context, although not a comprehensive one. To be specific: it is more of an autobiographical essay, where Kemp reviews his intellectual development in art history after his early "inglorious" effort at science (biology, to be exact) as a student at Cambridge in the 1960s. Interestingly he speculates that his previous training in biology may influence his "functional approach." His range of study reads as an outline of the historiography of 20th century art history: beginning with the early focus on formal analyses (growing out of the "significant form" of Clive Bell and Roger Fry), through the iconographical approach (from the "symbolic form" of Ernst Cassirer), to various types of "social history"--the latter, from the Marxist to the modern and postmodern varieties, entailing semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and so forth. Kemp is less than enthusiastic about recent "theories," although he recognizes that these approaches have provided significant insights into specific areas of art history. His main gripe, I think, is that the "New Art History" has not broken from the vast overarching schemes of the previous methods by still imposing preconceived concepts upon the past rather than listening to the sources themselves. In a sense one could say that Kemp has begun the real legwork into the material and social history of Italian Renaissance art that some postmodern writers crow about.

This is not to say that Kemp is oblivious to what our present understanding can illumine about the past. He clearly acknowledges that the sources are incomplete; that we have learned much about the nature of the visual experience which we may apply to the past; and that sometimes only hindsight allows us to see the so-called forest for the trees. But we should still be ever on our guard not to impose present values, ideologies, and obsessions on the past if we wish to reconstruct as best we can--and as Ranke decreed--the authentic experience of the Renaissance artists.

I believe that Kemp has established himself as one of the foremost art historians of our time. He is especially to be admired because of his ability to produce an eclectic array of works without sacrificing a high quality of scholarship. His previous book, the monumental Science of Art (1990), synthesized and digested a wide range of texts on perspective, color theory, and other "scientific" matters in European art. As well, Kemp has written numerous essays on what he calls the "history of the visual," exploring images beyond the "fine arts" category, such as scientific illustrations. As one reads Kemp more and more, it becomes increasing evident that the wide and sometimes seemingly disparate range of material he tackles may really be all of one piece. Copyrighted Leonardo Digital Reviews, 1998