What do we mean when we attribute a painting to an artist in the Netherlands or consider it belonging to the “school of Florence”? These regional designations, the coupling of artworks with place, are central to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new book, which examines notions of cultural geography as they apply to art. Toward a Geography of Art offers the first concentrated consideration of the value of location in the definition of works of art and, as such, is a thoroughly useful endeavor. Only some twenty years ago, Karl Poma, vice president of the Flemish Government of Belgium, introduced a lavish volume on Flemish Art (Antwerp: Mercator, 1985) by declaring that the “Flemish people” owed their “identity to the Scheldt basin, in the same way as the land of the Walloons is born out of the Maas, and the Dutchmen, the third people of the delta, have lived and grown on the junction of both rivers” (9). The ascription of national character to the rivers that run through a people, or to the soil that lies beneath them, has a long tradition in the literature of culture and the arts. It has led to racialist theories of the twentieth century advanced most noticeably by the Nazis, and it deserves some reflection. This Kaufmann provides in his admirably wide-ranging study.

The book opens with an extensive section on historiography. The tradition of comprehending cultural artifacts in terms of their location is an old one; Herodotus spoke of the monuments of the people of Asia in his account of the Persian wars long before the writers of the Annales School devised their geographie humaine. Quintilian compared types of sculpture with categories of eloquence that were bound to place: Asia became the region of the luxurious, while Europe was associated with subtler manners of eloquence. Writers of the Middle Ages maintained the line drawn by the Greeks in specifying certain architecture, for instance, as opus francigenum. It was but a further step in this development to the writings of the great seventeenth-century critics Agucchi and Bellori, who discussed painting in terms of particular schools situated in the individual cities of Italy.

Kaufmann then turns to the establishment of chairs in art history at leading European universities during the early nineteenth century and to the cross-fertilization between geography and other disciplines that took place at that time. Discussions of the effect of climate on art marked the first investigations into the field. The determination of ethnic contributions, the delineation of ethnic communities and their role in the shaping of art, was actively pursued by many of the early art historians; Herder, Goethe, and Hegel all wrote on the tribal character of German art. They were followed not only by later German scholars, but also by French, Dutch, Belgian, and other European art historians who all claimed for their countries an essentially ethnic property tied to land. Josef Strzygowski in Vienna was one of the major proponents of a racialist art history, borrowing the term Blut und Boden (blood and soil) from the writings of the sociologist Oswald Spengler on the decline of the West. But writers soon turned to subnational regions, which were defined as independent artistic landscapes. For instance, Karl Maria von Swoboda, writing in Prague, defended the German Sudetenland as a distinct cultural area. These interests peaked with the thirteenth International Congress of Art Historians in Stockholm in 1933, at which the rise of a national style in art was made the central theme.

The discussions of nationality in art furthered the consideration of cultural identity. Some writers have opted for a more complex “patchwork identity,” replacing an association with a single specific region. According to Kenneth Gergen and others, one should speak of identities as multiple and mythic. A person might think of himself, for example, as a member of a local confraternity, a citizen of a city, a resident of a duchy or county, and a loyal supporter of a dynastic realm such as that of the Habsburgs. Such a position redresses notions, for example, of Dutch nationality in Dutch art, more recently restated by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). As Kaufmann appropriately demonstrates, this view of Dutch naturalism as a national style ignores several aspects of the arts in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, strains of pronounced naturalism occurred elsewhere, particularly at Antwerp in the sixteenth century. Second, naturalism was only one mode of Dutch art in the seventeenth century. Classicism, or Palladianism in architecture, was equally prominent, a Dutch inflection on an international artistic language. And third, little difference was perceived by foreigners between northern and southern Netherlandish art, a distinction so important to the supporters of a separate northern (Dutch) artistic style. Although concepts of a northern Netherlands Dutch nation were beginning to evolve by around 1600, partly in self-conscious defense of the rebellion against Spain, they always competed with other configurations of identity.

Kaufmann’s fifth chapter deals with the issue of centers and peripheries, of artistic metropolises and provincial points of reception. The literature on this model is surveyed, an example of cultural studies following economic prototypes. The relationship of center to periphery, however, represents the “colonizer’s model of the world” (163). Kaufmann introduces modifications drawn from postcolonial studies to offset the inherent prejudices in such a paradigm. Eastern Europe serves as a point for discussion in this section. Buda, Prague, and Krakow would all seem to qualify as artistic metropolises of their regions, even though they lack the one hundred thousand inhabitants required by most writers to satisfy the designation of metropolis. All three cities were the site not only of innovation and imports, but also of production, and they all served as the center for expansive trade routes. Buda, under the enlightened rule of Mathias Corvinus, functioned as a dissemination point for Italian products and Italianate designs through much of Eastern Europe. During the years around 1500, Prague was partly a satellite of Buda; the architect Benedikt Ried adopted Italianate forms on the Hradcin castle at Prague after presumably seeing Renaissance architecture and carving at Buda. Prague, Kaufmann judges, qualifies as an artistic center only after about 1580, and even then it was short-lived. Netherlandish Mannerism was one of the inventions of the Prague court that spread across Europe, yet this mode had lost much of its force by 1620.

In chapter 7 Kaufmann turns to America—South America and specifically the writings of George Kubler. Before more recent investigations of the center/periphery model, Kubler had proposed such a paradigm to account for the dissemination of artistic forms in Spanish South America. In doing so, Kubler opposed racialist interpretations, or mestizo accounts, that sought to explain formal properties by the ethnic makeup of artists and public. On the one hand, Spain could be seen as an artistic capital, radiating its forms throughout the Spanish colonies. On the other hand, there were already artistic metropolises in South America such as Quito, where distinctive religious sculpture and other art forms developed and which served as a local center for other Spanish towns in South America.

Kaufmann then discusses the Jesuit contribution to the arts. He notes the spread of Jesuit churches across Europe in the wake of Il Gesù in Rome and discounts the identification of the Baroque style with Jesuit design. The Jesuit churches in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Münster, for instance, all show different approaches that register the various local architectural traditions and the differing requirements for Jesuit art in the three cities. And yet several façades, particularly in Eastern Europe, continue to recall Roman types. Ultimately the spread of Jesuit designs must be understood in connection both with the pan-European aims of the order and with local factors.

The last two chapters of the book deal with specific artistic productions and usages in South America and Japan. The spectacular façade of San Lorenzo in Potosi (in what is today Bolivia), the plush and replete design recalling Spanish Plateresque façades, appears to show both European and Indian features. Are the caryatids and angels that are so prominently displayed wearing Roman or Indian dress? Are these features a continuation of Habsburg and Bourbon iconography, or do they show hybrid features indicative of a negotiation between native and European imagery? Kaufmann discusses racialist and Marxist interpretations of these “Indiantids” in probing such issues. And finally the author turns to Japan, to the reuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of Western Christian images as fumi-e, as objects trampled underfoot in order to show the subjugation of a troublesome foreign religion by the Japanese.

Kaufman’s book is an enlightening study of the consequences that arise in associating art with specific location. The author is particularly instructive on Eastern Europe, where shifting political and cultural boundaries have led to a continual redefinition of the region and its culture. The chapters on historiography demonstrate that geographical considerations of art have long occupied prominent scholars, who have left an appreciable intellectual legacy. Toward a Geography of Art impressively exposes the advantages and pitfalls to thinking about art in terms of place, still one of our preeminent categories for classifying cultural products.