Statuino:An Undercurrent of Anticlassicism in Italian Baroque Art Theory

Abstract

Although it first appears in the seventeenth century, the term statuino relates to an artistic concept and debate that originated in Vasari's Vite. In describing and examining works of art by Mantegna and Battista Franco, Vasari laments their persistent 'hardness' and 'sharpness', which he attributes to these artists' excessive adherence to the principles of ancient statuary. Moreover, Vasari strictly associates these flaws with a specific phase in the evolution of the arts: the 'seconda maniera'. Subsequently, artists such as Annibale Carracci and dilettanti such as Vicenzo Giustiniani picked up on Vasari's contradictions with regarad to the importance of imitating antiquity by questioning the validaty of his historical outlook and the supremacy that he proposed of Michelangelo's art. By targeting the 'hardness' and 'sharpness' of the Tusco-Roman pictorical tradition, Carlo Ridolfi and Carlo Cesare Malvasia not only underscored the limits of antiquity as a paradigm of artistic perfection, but also sought to build an alternative canon of perfection, epitomized, on the one hand, by Tintoretto and, on the other, by the Bolognese production of the Carracci and their disciples, in particular Guido Reni. This esay reconstructs this complex history and reveals the contradictory nature of the notion of ancient perfection in the Baroque era.