Review of Fraser, Hilary, 'The Victorians and Renaissance Italy', Oxford and Cambridge Mass., 1992: cloth; pp. xii, 308; 25 plates; R.R.P. AUS$69.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin].

Abstract

This hugely stimulating volume of interdisciplinary richness is concerned to take the reader through the complex tale of how the Victorians, notably historians and artists of various media, endeavoured to 'reinvent' the Italian Renaissance. Beginning with the seminal notions of the earlier cultural dawn/Renaissance by Jules Michelet in 1855 and Jacob Burckhardt in 1860, Dr. Fraser argues most persuasively that the named continental writers, to whom the work of making the particular grand images is customarily ascribed, were to some extent preceded in Britain by many writers, artists, critics, and historians who had already begun the task influenced by 'specifically British cultural values and conditions'. Of enormous importance here was the massive growth of interest in Italian Renaissance history and art, due in particular to the increase in gallery exhibitions from mid-century and to the positive contribution from 1849 of the publications of the London-based Arundel Society or 'Society for promoting the knowledge of Art'.