Antal and his critics: A forgotten chapter in the historiography of the Italian renaissance in the twentieth century

Frederick Antal's Florentine Painting and its Social Background, published in 1948, was harshly criticized for its Marxist orientation, expressed in the notion that style and social class are closely related. Yet the study of art patronage in the Italian Renaissance, now essential to any responsible discussion of objects from this time, seeks to connect visual culture with larger issues in economic, political, or social history. This paper examines the appearance and dismissal of Antal's book for the insights it yields on the practice of the social history of art. Reviews written by prominent scholars such as Millard Meiss and Theodore Mommsen express frustration that while Antal was clearly an excellent scholar, he compromised his insights by presenting them within an ideologically charged matrix. Before emigration to England, Antal had been a member of the Sunday Circle, a group of intellectuals who gathered in his native Budapest. Antal naturally gravitated toward the Renaissance, for it represented the crystallisation of the economic and cultural institutions which led to the formation of the modern Nation State. The anti-Marxist tone to many reviews of Florentine Painting and its Social Background was as much part of the times as was the book itself. Although Antal's book is significantly flawed, it stands as a monument to a transition that occurred in the historiographic construction of the art of the Renaissance-a transition directly inspired by the events of the early twentieth century which re-drew the borders between nations as well as ideas.