ABSTRACT
R-e-n-a-i-s-s-a-n-c-e is a sequence of keys I rarely type, especially without the scholarly safety net of scare quotes. The term is so problematic, the literature so vast, and the deconstruction now so familiar, that I rarely engage the concept. Yet, as someone who works outside of European art history, while it may not be my place, it is nevertheless my battle. Indeed, the term suggests more an edifice of doxa than a field of artifacts for me, a theoretical and historiographical colossus rather than an archive. As its detractors note, it has become shorthand for privilege, orthodoxy, Eurocentrism, chauvinism, patriarchy, and all that the field has long sought to shed. 1 If such a concept is indeed so troubled, one might ask, why on Earth would we “globalize” it? The question suggests this is something taking place now, when, in fact, the global purview was fait accompli before any contributor to this volume was born. The complex is so tightly enmeshed in the history of art that it structures in a systemic fashion even those who believe themselves to be writing in geographical and temporal fields with no relation to it. The Renaissance is an eerie revenant, one whose ghostly gaze seems to haunt every corner of the history of art. And it will require work from the entire discipline—even “subfields” that purport to be removed—if we are ever to put it to rest.
