Italian Baroque Art

This anthology presents classic and recent scholarship on Italian art from 1600-1750, highlighting the key debates with which art historians continue to grapple.

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• Explores themes including: style or the visuality of art; artistic practices and production; artistic communication as projected and experienced; and artists’ interactions with the ancient world and with the new sciences
  
• Examines the work of key painters, architects and sculptors from this period, including Caravaggio, Bernini, Guarini and Poussin
  
• Published in the expanding Blackwell Anthologies in Art History series

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiv

Part I Appearances 1

1 What is Baroque? 7
Erwin Panofsky

2 The Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor and the Architect 22
Giovan Pietro Bellori

3 Fighting with Style 34
Philip Sohm

4 Bernini’s Conception of the Visual Arts: “Un Bel Composto” 51
Irving Lavin

5 Ars Tornandi: Baroque Architecture and the Lathe 57
Joseph Connors

6 A Taste for Tiepolo 65
Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall

Part II Artistic Practice, Production and Consumption 81

7 Practice in the Carracci Academy 87
Gail Feigenbaum

8 Artemisia in Her Father’s House 98
Patrizia Cavazzini

9 Disegni, Bozzetti, Legnetti and Modelli in Roman Seicento Sculpture 113
Jennifer Montagu

10 Architects and Clods: The Emergence of Urban Planning in the Context of Palace Architecture in Seventeenth-Century Rome 120
Dorothy Metzger Habel

11 The Mechanics of Seventeenth-Century Patronage 133
Francis Haskell

12 Scrambling for Scudi: Notes on Painters’ Earnings in Early Baroque Rome 151
Richard E. Spear

13 The Marketing of Pietro Testa’s “Poetic Inventions” 169
Francesca Consagra

14 Inside the Palace: People and Furnishings 178
Patricia Waddy

Part III Meaning: Conceived and Received 195

15 A Comment on the Iconography of Pietro da Cortona’s Barberini Ceiling 201
Walter Vitzthum

16 Seeing the Shroud: Guarini’s Reliquary Chapel in Turin and the Ostension of a Dynastic Relic 209
John Beldon Scott

17 Myth and the New Science: Vico, Tiepolo, and the Language of the Optimates 230
Christopher Drew Armstrong

18 Problems of the Theme 251
Rudolf Wittkower

19 Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi 265
Karen-Edis Barzman

20 Pastoralism in the Roman Baroque Villa and in Claude Lorrain: Myths and Realities of the Roman Campagna 283
Mirka Beneš

Part IV Critique of the Past and the New Science 299

21 The Role of Classical Models in Bernini’s and Poussin’s Preparatory Work 305
Rudolf Wittkower

22 The Greek Style and the Prehistory of Neoclassicism 311
Charles Dempsey

23 Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: Capricci in the Service of Pre-scientific Archaeology 326
Susan M. Dixon

24 Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome 339
Steven F. Ostrow

25 The Fate of Pictures: Appearance, Truth, and Ambiguity 361
David Freedberg

26 Lodoli on Function and Representation 372
Joseph Rykwert

Index 384

"Scholarly and thorough." [Four star rating] Art Times

"Old classics and new team up in this exciting anthology that will serve students and scholars alike for years to come. The Seicento field is not only represented here by broad discussions of style, art theory, and patronage but also by fascinating case studies of artistic practice, gender, science, and the art market . . . A shot of adrenalin for this important area of art history." David M. Stone, University of Delaware

"Those of us working in baroque studies are lucky to have some of the best scholars and essayists in the discipline of art history writing about European, and specifically Italian, art of the 17th and 18th centuries; we are doubly lucky that Susan Dixon has gathered together so many of them for this volume." Vernon Hyde-Minor, University of Colorado at Boulder

Susan M. Dixon is Associate Professor of Art History at University of Tulsa, Okalahoma. Grandeur, intensity, passion, and motion – these are the defining characteristics of art created during the Baroque period in 17th and early 18th-century Italy. This rich and turbulent era heralds the Age of Enlightenment, and Italian art engages closely with key intellectual debates of the period, including the secular vs. the sacred; the role of the individual within a Catholic state; and the rise of cultural politics over military might.

This anthology presents classic and recent scholarship on Italian art from 1600-1750, highlighting key debates with which art historians continue to grapple. Its essays explore the concept of style or the visuality of art; the creation and utilization of art; artistic communication as projected and experienced; and artists’ interactions with the ancient world and the new sciences. Italian Baroque Art is an innovative, intellectual, and instructional collection for students and lovers of 17th and 18th-century art.