It is an iron law of art history that any critic who has a book or two in them will sooner or later wind up writing about the Renaissance. Moody, hard-living Jackson Pollock is all very well, and let’s hear it for the formidable Tracey Emin. But at art’s palace of varieties, it’s Leonardo and Michelangelo that the people come to see. If you only know Jonathan Jones from these pages, it may surprise you to find him tripping down this primrose path with his own book on the era, almost as big as a Domino’s box. Do the contents prove to be similarly comforting and carby? Fear not. This is the Jones you know and love, the man who went to Frieze London a few weeks ago and dared to say what the other critics were merely thinking, calling it a “graveyard of creativity” and leaving the site in Regent’s Park a smoking ruin.
The Renaissance is the Disneyland of art, with its much-loved characters and magical stories, the castles and princes and the guys from the sticks with seemingly supernatural powers in their fingertips. Earthly Delights duly gives us the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo toiling away in the Sistine Chapel with dollops of paint on his chin, and the dastardly Medicis twirling their moustaches and plotting world domination as their pet artists churn out flattery and propaganda. But Jones is a genuine authority on this period and he takes us beyond the cliches.
There’s a flash of his knuckleduster early on, as he confronts academics who have recently decided that the Renaissance isn’t really a thing. They appear to dispute that there was a big bang in culture half a millennium ago that left medieval Christian civilisation choking on its dust. Jones says it’s impossible to share this view “when you walk through the chronologically arranged rooms of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and see how completely the nature of art was revolutionised in the 1400s”. This is typical of Jones’s empirical approach: like all the best critics, he leads with his eyes.
Not only does he put in the hours in front of the Italian masterpieces, he pursues developments that were happening across the rest of Europe, even as far as these shores, where Holbein brought a new realism to portraits of Henry VIII’s court. The reader is unlikely to hear a better case that there was a significant traffic of ideas between artists based in Florence and Rome and their peers in the north of the continent.
The opening up of the New World also influenced European art. We know Hieronymus Bosch as the forbidding moralist of madcap and carnal crowd scenes. But Jones thinks his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights was inspired by explorers’ reports of Indigenous people who didn’t bother with clothes and seemed to live a happy agrarian existence. Only someone paying as much attention as Jones would notice that Bosch depicts their Eden without any iron tools, which he reserves for the right-hand panel documenting his own fallen European home.
This is not a glossy coffee table book but a thoroughgoing history. The author has a knack, or a compulsion, for making connections, no matter where they lead him – and that goes for a particularly queasy case of joining the dots between the sores on the body of a crucified Christ in an altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald and a common illness of the day caused by rye infected with a fungus.
In Jones’s survey, the Renaissance began with the discovery of perspective in art and went on to include other new ways of seeing things, with revolutions in science, exploration and belief. It was also about learning from history, from the extraordinary legacy of the Romans and, before them, the Greeks. Earthly Delights is an enlightening and entertaining account of what happened when western culture went back to the future. Rather fittingly, it’s the kind of book you finish only to find yourself looking forward to reading again.
• Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance by Jonathan Jones is published by Thames & Hudson (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
