"Ut pictura theatrum": Théâtre et peinture de la Renaissance italienne au classicisme françaisby Emmanuelle HéninReview by: Yves LabergeThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 875-876Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477526 .

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Book Reviews 875

the fables back to our human circumstances.Wisdom rules in the end as the narratives take on an emblematic function in our minds.

The Bidpai tales concoct a fascinating array of animals that could be integral to some of the cultures and domains, but anathema to others that this body of literature has passed through: the pig in one, the elephant in another, and the camel in yet another. The bull, the

mule, and the lion set the framework for most of the forty substories.The essence no doubt is culled from the Ocean of Story, a tapestry of similar weavings compiled by a Kashmiri

Brahmin in the early medieval period. These have been combined by Doni's taking work from Bidpai and Sendebar forming an interstice of motif on motif to develop an encyclope dia of morality.

Political in design, these works structurally internalize patterns of slander, rebellion, tyr anny, and forms of palace treachery. Telling them provides enlightening moments. This pub lication is vital for it provides lineages of fables that require interpretation of tropes and excavation of buried forms of ancient wisdom.

The fabulist mode sought to bring forward the world of the animals into the sphere of the human, the process humanizing the animal. In theJataka and the Panchatantra, the fables retain something of a primitive cachet that draws upon our earlier psychic phases and has links with the Indic doctrine of reincarnation.Vishnu had nine reincarnations, and Buddha took many births as deer, fish, quail, falcon, swan, monkey, buffalo, and elephant, thus illus trating the transformation of lower-life creatures to a higher stage in a process of spiritual evolution.

"Ut pictura theatrum": Theatre et peinture de la Renaissance italienne au classi cisme franVais. Emmanuelle Henin. Serie Travaux du Grand Siecle 23. Geneva: Droz, 2003. 707 pp. SF 240.00. ISBN 2-600-00825-X.

REVIEWED BY: Yves Laberge, Institut quebecois des hautes etudes internationales, Qu6bec

This interdisciplinary book is an outgrowth of Emmanuelle Henin's thesis, which she defended at the Universite de Paris in 2000.The topics are wide ranging and draw from the fields of aesthetics, art theory, ancient philosophy, French literature, and cultural history. Carefully defining at the outset concepts such as "representation," and "mimesis," the study traces from poetics, aesthetics, history of art, and semiotics in order to understand how rep resentations were conceived, allowed, or sometimes forbidden in France during the seven teenth century.The author identifies as a turning point in the history of ideas the rediscovery of Aristotle's works (mainly his Poetics), which happened around 1550 (14).

The Latin title of the book is inspired by an observation made by Horace (65-8 BCE), a lyric poet who once said that poetry is like painting ("Ut pictura poesis"), since both create images. In the case of this book's title, the words "Ut pictura theatrum" means that the drama created on stage by actors is somehow similar to painting, in its imitation of human behavior and illusions of reality. The theoretical framework draws mainly from aesthetics in literature and Italian art history. The starting point of Henin's research was partly inspired by an influ ential book, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967), by Rensselaer Wright Lee (1898-1984). Lee's book was the first theoretical work to articu late the links between the narratives of painting, theater, and poetry.

Henin's objective is to compare the various representations of human interactions made

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876 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/3 (2005)

in two creative universes: in painting and in theater. She analyzes the setting of the situations, simultaneous actions, and movements as they appear in paintings by Ripa, Leonardo da Vinci,Wronese, Nicholas Poussin, and others. She explores the evolution of playwriting and painting during the sixteenth century, a period that appeared to be a turning point in artistic creation although most of the ideas of the sixteenth century did not reach full development until the eighteenth century and the age of Diderot.

In exploring the question of whether an artist should imitate the environment or ide alize a vision of humanity, Henin discusses the theoretical contribution of many influential analysts and Italian philosophers from the sixteenth century, including Maggi, Lombardi, and Trissino, who revisited Aristotle's principles on art and mimesis. They also had all translated the Greek word eikdn as imago, a concept that could be understood as both portrait and image (65). Many sixteenth-century Italian authors proposed their own interpretations ofAristotle's

works on poetics, as did Castelvetro in 1570 (67). Other commentators from the Renais sance, such as Robortello, a critic ofAristotle (599), introduced in 1548 a theoretical notion still in use today, namely the habitus, which in this case describes the natural attitude of a character (586).

The book is divided into three parts. First, we see how drama and acting on stage were conceived of as make-believe, with illusions of feelings and imitations of nature, in a study employing concepts such as mimesis and diegesis (26).The second part focuses on the stage action, the spectator's gaze, and its scenic perspective. The third part concentrates on the representation of passion in theaters and on paintings, bringing emotions to the creative artist and for the audience. The tragedies and comedies shown in theaters and imagined in paintings had to conform to rules, moral limits, and norms for the sake of decorum (434). According to this concept of the spectacle, a fable had to be clear, understandable, likeable, believable, and these conditions had by then coincided with the definition of decorum (434). Consequently, H&nin devotes an entire chapter to catharsis (485ff.). Imitations and caricatures of nobles could be sketched by artists, but only within certain limits. In her conclusion, Henin repeats that she does not want to insist on the influences between two art forms, namely theater and painting, but she rather wants to illustrate that there is theater (drama, actions, movements, settings) featured in Renaissance paintings, and elements of visual art and art design were present in the scenery, costumes, and settings in sixteenth century theaters (614). Plates 8, 9, 14, and 15 show how a stage could be conceived during that era in Italy.

A valuable effort, Ut pictura theatrum is rich in historical detail, based on archival work and many secondary sources, and supplemented by seventy sketches (for costumes and scen ery) and paintings reproduced in black and white; there are more than a thousand footnotes. Henin's meticulous work is intended for specialists of aesthetics or sixteenth-century French literature; it requires the reader to be fluent in French and familiar with theories of poetics.

L'Ecriture du Scepticisme chez Montaigne: Actes des journees d'etude (15-16 novembre 2001). Ed. Marie-Luce Demonet and Alain Legros. Geneva: Droz, 2004. 347 pp. SF 92.00. ISBN 2-600-00898-5.

REVIEWED BY: Bernd Renner, Brooklyn College, City University of NewYork

The topic of Montaigne's skepticism has always been one of the most intriguing and most popular fields of investigation with regard to his Essais as well as his other writings. In

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