Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

by Ross King
Walker & Company, 194 pp., $19.95

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In 1418, the people of Florence found themselves with a problem: they had built the bottom half of the city’s new cathedral without having pondered how to build a roof to cover it.  The vaulting of Santa Maria del Fiore was to become the great epic of Renaissance Florence, and its hero a disheveled and disgruntled architect named Filippo Brunelleschi, known to the city as “an ass and a babbler.”  Over the next thirty years, Brunelleschi engineered the complex double-shelled construction of the dome—still the largest masonry dome in the world—without ever designing a support system below.  In the process, he made enemies of a number of prominent Florentine artists, sank over a hundred tons of white marble in the Arno River, and found himself arrested for various high jinks committed alongside the equally intemperate Donatello.  Ross King, a British novelist, has told the story in the only way it should be told: as a series of delicious digressions (including an account of the world-class wine bar that Brunelleschi managed to nestle between the two shells of the dome).  This is architecture-cum-soap-opera, a picture of the short and dirty genius who conjured, from the mud of the Arno, “an enormous construction towering above the heavens, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow.”

- Susannah Rutherglen

Academic Instincts

by Marjorie Garber
Princeton University Press, 160 pp., $19.95

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The jacket of Marjorie Garber’s new collection of essays, Academic Instincts, is enough to tempt one into the classic sin of judging a book by its cover: on it is a reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens, an acceptable if rather uninspired choice for a book on intellectual culture—but if one looks closer, one can make out among the philosophers a tiny photograph of a woman, Garber herself, flanked by two jackal-sized dogs and wearing a vivid green dress of the sort favored by comic-book villainesses.

Readers who suspend judgment, undeterred by this exercise in solipsism, will be glad they heeded the old adage, for the cover design portends not only Garber’s regrettable inability to refrain from inserting herself into her discussion, but also a genuinely engaging refusal to observe rigid boundaries between high and low culture, between personalities and scholarship.  In these three essays, Garber casts fresh light on topics that seemed to have been argued to death in the “Culture Wars” of the late eighties and early nineties: the dichotomy between “professional” and “amateur,” the nuances of the phenomenon she identifies as “discipline envy,” and the role of jargon in academic discourse.

In a tone that blends slang and academic neologisms in irritating, Lingua Franca-esque fashion (“Does interdisciplinarity trump the disciplines?”), Garber offers a measured defense of the direction in which the academy has moved in recent decades. She assures those who worry about a narrowly specialized and professionalized academic world losing its ability to address larger concerns that “the professional makes the best amateur” and that the terms derive their force from a long-standing and productive tension between the two conceptions of the role of the scholar they represent.  Exploring the mutability of the concept of “jargon,” she provocatively argues that new and “infelicitous” words are crucial not only to intellectual communication, but also to the vitality of English as whole: “without it, we speak and read a dead language.”

This is a book that makes no pretensions to timelessness: the Oprah references and Tony Robbins-inspired bullet points that litter its pages, and, more profoundly, the atomization and alienation of the academic culture it describes, remind the reader that this book is irreducibly a product of our decade. Garber, however, has managed to transcend such ephemera in embracing them and so give us a thoughtful and ultimately upbeat tour of what she regards as salutary disarray.

- Carey Seal