Philip Sohm’s Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy shines a brilliant new light upon the concept and descriptive terminology of artistic style. A worthy successor to his excellent Pittoresco. Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Sohm’s new book maintains a high standard of critical sophistication, accurately framing a subtle analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stylistic vocabulary in relation to twentieth-century theories of language. He argues that the art-critical terminology of the period examined in the book was developed in an attempt to capture and control the visual qualities of style, and that verbal language proved incapable of performing this function. In the process, he illuminates the origins, significance, and usage of virtually every major stylistic term, covering approximately 250 primary sources. This study is intended for specialists in early modern Italian art and art theory, but Sohm’s own writing style, exquisite, incisive, and frequently witty, makes this complex topic accessible, enjoyable, and thought provoking well beyond these boundaries.

The book is divided in two parts. The first part, subtitled “Style and Language,” establishes the linguistic parameters of the investigation. Sohm argues that “style” was a highly unstable concept. He also offers a convincing reason for this instability: Style belonged to—and still belongs to—the technology of human self-definition, whether personal, regional, social, or, more broadly, political; and as such, it is continually redefined as individuals measure their own stylistic identities or allegiances against those of others. Therefore, he argues that stylistic terminology is a site of continual contention, where such differences are articulated or reified in language. Likewise, as Sohm makes clear from the outset, the varying definitions of, or attitudes toward, style that we encounter in the discourses of modern art history can be explained in terms of this identity function. Sohm’s own discourse is remarkably inclusive, weaving a fairly seamless synthesis of the past thirty years’ work in early modern art theory and critical language. While Michael Baxandall’s rather extreme view of the inadequacies of language raises Sohm’s eyebrow (he prefers the more moderate position taken by Elizabeth Cropper), there is only one attitude that Sohm is unwilling to tolerate, that is, Svetlana Alpers’s vision of a history of art free from the tyranny of stylistic classification. In Sohm’s view, this position is itself a product of style’s fundamentally contentious nature.

Sohm inaugurates Part 2 (“Definitions of Style”) with the Clintonesque-sounding project of “defining definition.” He reviews the philosophical and linguistic bases upon which early modern writers attempted to define style, arguing that the act of “definition” itself is conservative, seeking to stabilize what is fundamentally unstable; he also observes that some theorists (Nicolas Poussin, for example) may employ “tactical” definitions, radicalizing the definition of definition itself in order to further a particular stylistic agenda. Sohm argues that Giorgio Vasari was the first to formulate a philosophically rigorous definition of style, a necessary step, in the author’s view, toward the invention of a “history of art.” Later, in a section concerning Poussin, Sohm argues that the French master’s later articulation of a distinction between stile (an individual’s particular style) and maniera (a set of more universal, shared tendencies) was important, but not commonly accepted or enforced. He also sees Poussin’s theory of pictorial modes, which in Sohm’s view amounts to the “willful manipulation of style,” as highly unusual among artists of the period, and not (as has traditionally been understood) as a logical development of widely accepted principles of decorum. The chapter on Marco Boschini contains much new material on the stylistic discourse of the macchia and the problem of "finish"—a topic with art-historical ramifications reaching to the late nineteenth century; and the chapter on Filippo Baldinucci’s Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681) makes an important new contribution with its analysis of Baldinucci’s lexicographic methodology.

Sohm’s argument is structured by familiar linguistic and literary-critical paradigms. In his Introduction, for example, he adopts the position of the historical critic or philologist. At the same time he also states: “I have resisted imposing modern meanings on earlier art criticism, but reading literary theories, particularly those on indeterminacy by Hans Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, has led me to see certain issues as nascent during this period” (16). In his concluding chapter, Sohm seems to doubt whether he has yet convinced us: “Indeterminate style sounds like a precariously modern idea, but still I think that enough examples have emerged in the preceding chapters to justify a closer look” (185). He goes on to give such examples, the most important of which comes from the seventeenth-century rhetorical theorist Agostino Mascardi, whose professed inability to define style structures much of the chapter. Sohm also provides many situations in which artists and critics allude to the difficulties of classifying or capturing style. For instance, in a remarkable subsection on “Vagrant Styles,” we learn that the words vago and vaghezza (“graceful and elegant” and “graceful elegance”) were thought to be connected with the verb vagare, meaning “to wander,” as though such qualities were in their essence incapable of being pinned down (194–200).

This discussion on the indeterminacy of style is useful indeed, providing a framework for understanding these particular passages and their relationships to one another. But might it be possible for another art-historical reader to select a completely different set of passages, using non-Jaussian criteria, that might lead to exactly the opposite conclusion? Sohm does not say. Also unstated is the author’s position regarding the historical study of aesthetics. He makes some use of David Summers’s important and controversial studies Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) and The Judgment of Sense (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), but does not directly engage the most fundamental issue raised by Summers’s critics, namely that the modern notion of aesthetic judgment did not yet exist in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and that we have yet to understand what aesthetic experience might have meant to the early modern beholder. When critics described a particular artist’s style as legnoso (wooden-looking), bello (beautiful), or tagliente (unpleasantly sharp or “cutting”), what is the status of the feelings these terms seem to describe? Sohm’s approach renders this sticky philosophical question moot by foregrounding the slippery nature of language. But it is somewhat difficult to appreciate the practical applicability of his conclusions without knowing whether we are to understand these terms as referring to an actual mode of knowledge, or merely to a sensory accident accompanying the recognition of embodied concepts.

This book includes a useful “Index of Subjects and Terms,” which enables the reader to locate specific passages; there is also an equally useful Appendix containing an alphabetical list of the most commonly used stylistic terms. But Sohm plainly does not intend his readers to use this book as a dictionary. His discussions of terms are cast in the context of a specific argument and do not necessarily provide the reader with everything he or she might need to know in order to achieve a more universal lexical understanding. For example, in his analysis of Vasari’s stylistic vocabulary, Sohm shows that Vasari, Agnolo Firenzuola, and others use the words modo and ordine interchangeably (102), a point that goes to the larger argument that the words themselves were incapable of capturing the visual phenomena to which they are supposed to refer. But many other writers (such as Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, Orfeo Boselli, and Poussin), in passages unmentioned by Sohm, do clearly distinguish between these terms, which have precise meanings in the context of proportional mathematics. This is only to suggest that the interested reader should approach the material contained in this book with its methodology and purpose in mind.

It may puzzle some readers that a study of pictorial style would have only twenty-one illustrations, and that most of these are accompanied by, at most, a few lines of discussion in the text. For example, Niccolo Boldrini’s woodcut after Titian’s Monkey Laocoön is illustrated, but is cited briefly rather than analyzed as an example of how artists may use their pictures to do battle with one another, in this case by means of parody. Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, then, is really about the theory and criticism of style, and not about style itself.