Baroque Art Research Articles

Sadeler and Procaccini: The Secular Decoration of Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo

The paper investigates the pictorial decoration of Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo, one of the finest examples of Lombard aristocratic villa of the first half of the seventeenth century. Built on a pre-existent medieval structure, the castle was richly decorated by a secular iconographic program that, drawn from Flemish sources, was executed in the period 1604–1609 by an équipe of painters gravitating towards the bottega Procaccini: the most important Milanese workshop of the time. The study, for the first time, retraces the genesis of this commission as well as the execution of the decorative program. Specifically, it individuates the complex series of iconographic sources used by Carlo Antonio Procaccini and his assistants, highlighting a coexistence of both Emilian and Flemish artistic references that is unprecedented in Lombard early Baroque art.

“Acis and Galatea” by Jean-Baptiste Lully and George Frideric Handel: Two Views on One Plot

“Acis and Galatea” by Jean-Baptiste Lully and George Frideric Handel: Two Views on One Plot

Painting with recycled materials: on the morphology of calcite pseudomorphs as evidence of the use of wood ash residues in Baroque paintings

The nature of ground preparations is of critical interest to those engaging in the study of historical painting techniques, as certain materials can be identified with specific regions and school of painting. This is the case of a particular ash-based, calcite-rich material obtained as a byproduct of lye production, recently identified for the first time in ground preparations by means of chemical analysis, and which is considered specific to Baroque artists of Spanish school. Because of limitations in the size of the samples that can be removed from works of art, and because of the intrinsic variability of ash composition, chemical analysis alone may not be representative of the whole ash-containing layer, thus limiting the identification of this material. By comparing the morphology, texture and composition of calcite pseudomorphs in laboratory ash to the ground preparations in three Baroque paintings, we provide additional, unequivocal tools to identify calcite particles from ashes in paint cross sections. The results demonstrate that the chemical composition of the ash can vary, but that the morphology and size of the calcite pseudomorph crystals abundantly present in the recycled ash applied to the canvas supports are consistent and extremely characteristic. The unique polygonal shapes and skeletal morphology of the pseudomorphs and their abundance make them ideal markers to recognize ash in paintings’ ground layers, even when very limited amounts of sample are available. The study shows also that the practice of using recycled ash in the preparation of ground layers occurred outside Spain, by artists with direct or indirect Spanish lineage.

«Мистецтво – це не тільки краса»: інтерв’ю з істориком мистецтва Кунрадом Йонкере

Koenraad Jonckheere is associate professor in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art at Ghent University. The interview was recorded in August 2017 by assistant professor Stefaniia Demchuk (Chair of Art History, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv). In the first part, Prof. Jonckheere talks about his career path of art historian, his teachers and the most influential books. He explains how the scope of his interests shifted from the Seventeenth-Eighteenth century art markets towards Iconoclasm, its impact and the theoretical debates on the Sixteenth century art. His Ph.D. research on art markets was summarized and published in 2008 under the title “The Auction of King William’s paintings”. It was innovative because the author developed a new approach to work on art markets using auction catalogue. In 2012 appeared his monograph on experiments in decorum in the Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm. The next year he curated the exhibition on the Sixteenth century Romanist artist Michiel Coxcie for Museum M (Leuven). Since 2014 Prof. Jonckheere has been working as an Editor-in-Chief at the Centrum Rubenianum (Antwerp). His own research on Rubens resulted in a monograph titled “Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard: portraits after existing prototypes” (2016). Now Prof. Jonckheere is developing a new methodological approach towards historical interpretation of artworks, which he called the “Thimanthes effect”. This approach uses the rhetorical concept of “quaestio” as a guiding principle for interpretation. Prof. Jonckheere discusses it in the second part of the interview. The third part focuses on the Reformation art and Iconoclasm. Prof. Jonckheere points out main directions in contemporary research on the Reformation art and highlights issues that are still to be solved. The interview concludes with advices to early-career art historians.

Angelica’s Virginity: The Orlando Furioso and the Female Body in Florentine Seicento Painting

Angelica’s Virginity: The Orlando Furioso and the Female Body in Florentine Seicento Painting Morten Steen Hansen The majority of seventeenth-century works of art based on Ariosto were created in Florence.1 A number of these call attention to—and make deeply problematic—relationships between sight, desire, and touch. Examining paintings with the story of Angelica from the Orlando Furioso, I shall argue that artists used the poem to explore issues of pictorial representation that were particular to the first part of the seventeenth century, when the quest for more naturalistic painterly modalities led to a reinvestment in the erotic capabilities of painting. Angelica, the princess of Cathay, makes her first appearance in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. The king has sent her together with her brother Argalia to Paris, where Charlemagne is hosting a joust for Christians and Muslims. Argalia offers to fight the knights who, if they conquer him, will gain Angelica and, if they fail, enter their father’s army. The scheme backfires when Argaglia is killed, and in [End Page 83] the Orlando Furioso Angelica finds herself chased by amorous suitors, whose main objective is taking her virginity by force.2 The most common scene in art from the Orlando Furioso is taken from Canto 19 when the newlywed Anglica and Medoro carve their names on trees and rocks as tokens of their mutual affection. Having fallen in love with the wounded soldier Medoro, whom she has nursed back to health, Angelica finds herself dying from her passion for the youth. She declares her love for him and they have sexual intercourse before proceeding to marriage (OF 19.33.1–8). Representations of the couple include this moral ambiguity by showing Angelica in a state of undress. In the aftermath of the scandal that broke out when Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480–c. 1534) engraved Giulio Romano’s (c. 1499–1546) I Modi, Mannerist artists depicted love-making couples with intertwined limbs to suggest coitus without actually showing it.3 For instance, Giorgio Ghisi’s (c. 1520–84) engraving after a design by his brother Teodoro (1536–1601) pictures the undressed Angelica seated on Medoro’s thigh and positioned between his spread legs as she embraces him while he carves his name beneath hers on a tree (OF 19.36.1–8) (Fig. 1).4 As Charles Dempsey has observed, the engraving recalls Ariosto’s metaphors of lovers clinging to one another like the vine to the oak or the ivy to the elm tree, which is exactly what one sees behind the couple. Unlike the nervous energy of the bodily torsions seen in the print, artists after 1600 would picture the encounter in a more tranquil, pastoral mode, testifying to the change in literary taste in the aftermath of Torquato Tasso’s lyricism and the successes of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor fido and later that of L’Adone by Giambattista Marino. A painting by the French baroque artist Jacques Blanchard (1600–38) shows the lovers united in carving a single trunk, their raised arms forming a single, interlocking contour. This alludes to the nodi of the letters of their carved names as described by Ariosto (OF, 19.36.8) (fig. 2).5 In such pastoral interpretations the nudity of Angelica emphasizes post-coital, matrimonial bliss. From the scenes of Angelica in love I shall now turn to her plight, described earlier in the poem, as she strives to survive in a foreign world of chivalry and armed warfare. Painted for the Marquis Bartolomeo del Monte sometime before 1630, the Florentine Jacopo Vignali’s [End Page 84] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Giorgio Ghisi after Teodoro Ghisi, Angelica and Medoro, engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (1592–1664) Sacripante and Angelica focuses on the topos of male desire for an untouched woman and in turn, her attempt at using her virginity to control him (for a reproduction of the picture, please see http://www.orlandofurioso.org).6 Vignali painted the moment of his first awareness of her presence as he lifts his head from his melancholy pose (1.53.1...

For God and which Nation? The Ideology of František Jehlička, Priest, Politician and Pariah of the Slovak National Movement

For the last years of his life, Frantisek Jehlicka placed a copy of a painting by the Italian baroque artist Pompeo Girolamo Batoni on the walls of his cell in the Capuchin monastery in Vienna. The painting, completed in 1773 and entitled 'The Return of the Prodigal Son', portrays a father tenderly embracing his long-lost and half-naked son who, according to the famous parable, had taken 'his journey into a far country, and […] began to be in want'.1 It is likely that Jehlicka first came across the painting in the House of Habsburg's Imperial and Royal Gallery in Vienna's Belvedere Palace where it was hung following its acquisition by the Empress Maria Theresa. Jehlicka, a devout Catholic who had committed himself to becoming a priest at the age of fifteen, may have seen himself in Batoni's painting as the wandering son who could look forward to the moment, at the end of his life, when he would be welcomed with open arms by his Father in heaven.2 Alternatively, Jehlicka's attraction to Batoni's painting may be explained by his estrangement from his fellow Slovaks that led him to reside in Vienna's Capuchin monastery. Exiled from Czechoslovakia in 1919 due to his hostility to the new state, Jehlicka regarded himself as a 'spiritual father' forced to watch his beloved Slovak nation condemned to a life of want. In Batoni's moving depiction of the act of reconciliation, Jehlicka may have found the comforting hope that he too would eventually be reconciled with his fellow Slovaks. Both his detractors and his admirers have, however, disagreed about what form of reconciliation he actually desired. Did he hope to be welcomed back to an independent Slovakia as a national hero, or did he hope to welcome the Slovaks back into a greater Hungary from which they had been separated in 1918?.

Un cuadro inédito de San Miguel Arcángel, obra de Giacomo Farelli, en Alcalá de Henares

En este artículo se da a conocer la existencia de un cuadro, hasta ahora inédito, que representa a San Miguel Arcángel venciendo al demonio. Es propiedad de la congregación de los Hermanos Maristas y se conserva en su casa provincial de Alcalá de Henares. Una reciente restauración ha permitido atribuirlo a Giacomo Farelli, artista barroco vinculado a la Escuela Napolitana de Pintura de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII. El cuadro tiene un notable interés por su calidad y por la escasez de obras de Farelli que hay en España. La publicación de este trabajo de investigación pretende contribuir a un mayor conocimiento de la figura de este pintor y de las fructíferas relaciones histórico-artísticas desarrolladas entre España e Italia.

La Semana Santa en el nacionalcatolicismo: espacio urbano, arte e historia. El caso de Valladolid (1939-1949)

This article looks at the (re)invention of Holy Week in post-Civil War Spain. Although clearly a “rite of victory”, Holy Week proved to be both durable and popular, a regular, annual event that became part of the social fabric of postwar provincial Spain. Taking the case of Valladolid, the article shows that Holy Week involved municipal and commerical interests from the start. The liturgies of Holy Week helped to define an emergent National Catholicism, which provided an alternative to Falangism from the very moment of victory. But the co-operation of town hall, diocese and, in Valladolid, a state cultural institution, the Museo Nacional de Escultura, also demonstrated a highly paternalistic conception of politics. Valladolid Holy Week was a clear example of invented tradition, collapsing historical time to evoke Catholic, imperial Spain. This apparent timelessness, with its “natural” social and religous order allowed a historicist recreation of “eternal” Spain, which contrasted sharply with fascism. In Valladolid, a key role was played by Baroque art. The article explores this mobilisation of Baroque art, which acted as a cultural shorthand for these intertwined aesthetic and political values. In its formality, its performance and display, Holy Week was entirely characteristic of National Catholicism. As an urban performance, however, Holy Week assumed a plasticity that allowed it change its meanings over time and to become the only “rite of victory” to survive the dictatorship.

D’Annunzio, Bernini, and the Baroque prelude of Il Piacere

This essay investigates the early rediscovery of Bernini and the Roman Baroque in D’Annunzio’s Il piacere. Starting from the analysis of the few explicit textual references and the many implicit allusions to the Baroque artist in the novel, the present study documents Bernini’s impact on Sperelli’s persona, poetic method, and artistic projects. At the same time, based on the protagonist’s radical re-evaluation of Bernini—after two centuries of critical dismissal—this article also sheds light on the deep and substantial relationship connecting the Roman Baroque and D’Annunzio’s aesthetics. The rediscovered culture of the 17th century indeed constitutes not only a key element in Il piacere, but also an important poetic prelude for D’Annunzio’s hoped-for renaissance of the arts, and for the scholarly re-appreciation of the genius of Bernini (from Riegl to Wittkower). In light of the later success of dannunzianesimo, the novel’s Baroque vein can also be read as the first historical spark of the fervent Italian debate known as the questione barocca.

Lezama Lima lee a Sor Juana

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s Sueno has led a varied range of interpretations. Scholars have identified, in her verses, tenets of neo-platonism, hermeticism, cartesianism and scholastic philosophy. However, in Lezama’s opinion, this unbeatable poem and unparalleled in American literature, has not yet been read in depth. In the essay Baroque curiosity from the book The American expression (1957), the Cuban writer proposes a different reading of the poem by Sor Juana in several ways. In principle, registered in the controversial horizon that characterizes the relationship of European art with American, Lezama’s interpretation recognized, in the Dream, the traces of the daring exploits of contra-conquest secretly express the Baroque art forms in these lands. But also he argues that assist in the verses of Sor Juana the deployment of an inordinate appetite for knowledge. The poem contains a knowledge achieved in the poetic experience starring the soul during sleep and configured in analogy mode Orphic knowledge that permeates the Lezamian worldview. This paper examines the factors that the writer ponders in his reading of Dream in an attempt to recover the secret meaning he discovers in the verses.

Secular painting in the Ionian islands and Italian art: Aspects of a multi-faceted relationship

The contribution of Italian art, especially Venetian, was decisive to the secularisation of art in the Ionian Islands and the shaping of the so-called Ionian School, in the context of a broader Western influence affecting all aspects of life and culture, especially on the islands of Zakynthos and Corfu. Italian influences, mainly of Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque art, can be identified both on the iconographic and the stylistic level of artworks, with theoretical support. This article explores facets of the dialogue of secular painting in the Ionian with Italian art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focussing on works and artists that highlight significant aspects of this multilayered phenomenon and also through secondary channels that expand the horizon of analysis. Procession paintings, with their various connotations, and portraiture, which flourished in secular Ionian art, offer the most interesting material as regards the selection, reception and management of Italian models and points of reference.

“The Lord Struck Him Down by the Hand of a Female!” Baroque Artists Depicting Judith in the Renaissance

Gender themed Research Project, using the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes to examine how Baroque artists tackled representing Judith as a female figure who openly subverts the Renaissance gender norms by defeating a male. Focusing on the artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Orazio Gentileschi and Artemisia Gentileschi, the paper explores through visual analysis how each artist approached representing the gender issue within the biblical narrative in their artwork. The biblical narrative is discussed and two well-disseminated published articles about gender roles are reviewed. Additionally, how the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Church’s assertive stance for the purpose of art effects how images of Judith are painted.

An Arcadian Poet in a Baroque City: Cláudio Manuel da Costa’s Urban Pastorals, Family Life, and the Appearance of Race

With focus on Cláudio Manuel da Costa and his life in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, this article places into dialogue seemingly contradictory notions of baroque urbanism, art, and poetics. It explores how Cláudio’s work engages baroque and Arcadian tropes, re-writing pastoral conventions with awareness of the production of nature through artifice. Some of his poems emerge as narratives of wilderness subsumed by colonial forces, others offer clues about his relationship with Francisca Arcângela de Souza, a woman of African descent (archival findings about her are presented here for the first time). Cláudio Manuel da Costa, a writer and public gure of many masks, helps us to make sense of tensions, changes, and apparent paradoxes of the period.

Caravaggios Medusenschild von 1597 – ein Gorgoneion?

Abstract Caravaggio’s emblematic Medusa is mostly regarded as a representation of the mirrored decapitation of the Gorgon and thus as a reflection on Perseus’ protective shield. This essay proposes a new interpretation: Caravaggio’s Medusa is an adaptation of the antique Gorgoneion. The Gorgoneion historically depicted Medusa’s head with its petrifying gaze, which was placed on the shield of Athena. Due to its symbolic and protective power, the Gorgoneion became a frequent subject in art and handicraft well into Baroque art. Caravaggio’s contemporaries – including the poets Gaspare Murtola and Giambattista Marino – left witness that they interpreted the image as a Gorgoneion. In addition, the image itself contains elements that buttress this interpretation, including, inter alia, the green surface of the shield and the shadow. Both the historic accounts and the painted details therefore render an interpretation of the painting as Gorgoneion very likely.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

A Phaedrus baroque art of maintenance or constant fabulating qualia becoming quality

This article is crafted through three scenes, through which the author tries to imagine quality as something that is third space, semiotic, plasticity, eternal, and simultaneously something solid and obviously good here and now, through a Spinozian/Deluzian/Braitottian joy/you/me. The author rhizomatically tries to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority – on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, theories, philosophies, stories, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations, and her desires. Scene One is from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and is about censuring. Scene Two is from Robert M Pirsig’s story Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. The third scene (and all scenes) is a DeleuzoGuattarian fabulation, writing qualia becoming quality and hopefully transgressing universal quality measuring projects that are addressing specific professionals and/or preschools or child/ren/hoods, where early child/hood is ultimately seen as a matrix of becoming and early childhood education centres as translocal places preparing for future contingent events. The author tries to provide a chance to see better the airy void around us – to see beneath the stucco surface of the purely phenomenal, insubstantial character of the everyday world – so as to enjoy fleeting quality life all the more, at least for a moment. The author is initiating new discourses on childhood – ultimately, children’s political subject formations.

The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439–1650: Italian Art and Theatre by Alessandra Buccheri

Reviewed by: The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439–1650: Italian Art and Theatre by Alessandra Buccheri Alice Isabella Sullivan Buccheri, Alessandra, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439–1650: Italian Art and Theatre (Visual Culture in Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 216; 55 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781472418838. This study addresses the representation of clouds in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, from the initial formulations in early fifteenth-century Florentine stage designs to the full development of cloud illusionism in Rome, in both theatre and fresco painting, during the first half of the seventeenth century. The author, Alessandra Buccheri, seeks to explain the origins of Roman Baroque cloud designs; at the crux of her main argument stands the relationship between the representation of clouds in religious stage designs and in Italian art. This is a study, therefore, that brings into dialogue histories of art and theatre. The nine chronologically arranged chapters address the ways in which cloud machinery and the theatrical heaven informed the painted formations of cloud illusionism from the early fifteenth century and through the middle of the seventeenth century. Chapter 1 addresses the representations and functions of clouds in late medieval art and theatre, with a focus on cloud machinery as a theatrical device. The second chapter considers the development, in the fifteenth century, of ‘heaven machinery’ and its subsequent adaptation in paintings by artists, such as Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lipi. Chapter 3 engages with Raphael’s and Correggio’s painted cloud structures and their distinct designs of illusionistic space (platform-clouds vs. bubble-clouds), along with the relationships of their respective modes of representation with religious theatre. Chapter 4’s discussion centres on the shift that took place in sixteenth-century Italy from religious plays to Vitruvian-inspired theatrical spaces. The intricate stage designs and props used in these spaces were designed through a series of working drawings and etchings that likely also served as inspiration for artists. The compositional and perspectival struggles of painting large-scale cloud formations in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the solutions Venetian artists, like Tintoretto, found in Florentine theatrical designs are addressed in Chapter 5. In the next chapter, Buccheri deals with the factors that contributed to the new cloud constructions seen in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century that combined Correggio’s cloud structures and approaches to spatial illusionism with foreshortenings and aerial perspectives. Chapter 7 addresses the role of Tuscan artists in the development of cloud illusionism in seventeenth-century Rome, with a focus on Lodovico Cardi di Cigoli’s innovative contributions to cloud composition, in which heaven appeared as a series of platform-clouds devoid of architectonic barriers. Chapter 8 focuses on the work of Giovanni da San Giovanni and Giovanni [End Page 183] Lanfranco as pioneers of the Roman Baroque, although with distinct approaches to cloud illusionism. The last chapter serves as the conclusion. The Appendix provides two excerpts from Vasari, and the Bibliography contains both primary and secondary sources mostly in English and Italian. Alice Isabella Sullivan University of Michigan Copyright © 2016 Alice Isabella Sullivan

El símbolo en la experiencia latinoamericana y su incidencia para la enseñanza de la Filosofía.

<p>El presente artículo plantea la incidencia de lo simbólico en la reflexión filosófica a partir la experiencia latinoamericana. Se puede pensar en un quehacer filosófico a través del símbolo, como lugar de una multiplicidad<br />de significados y sentidos. Una nueva comprensión del símbolo lleva a re-descubrirlo desde la experiencia de las comunidades indígenas andinas y el arte barroco latinoamericano. La incidencia de lo simbólico en el proceso<br />educativo se realiza a través de una perspectiva ética y hermenéutica que planteará nuevas alternativas para la enseñanza de la filosofía en el aula.</p>

Faith, gender and the senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art: interpreting the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas

Contents: Preface Introduction Verifying the Resurrection: St. Mary Magdalene and St. Thomas at the intersection of word and image, c. 400-1300 Mary Magdalene as a model of piety in mendicant art The Doubting Thomas and Franciscan renewal in the early Renaissance 'Toccate il vero': evidence, belief, and images of the Doubting Thomas in the public eye The decorum of touch: private devotional images of St. Mary Magdalene and the Noli me tangere in central and northern Italy Experiencing faith after the Reformation Conclusion Bibliography Index.

“Ut Pictura Poesis”: the Poetic and Pictorial Emblem of the Baroque

The article describes parallelism of the two arts, poetry and painting, in the emblematic books of the Baroque epoch. In the Baroque art, an emblem, as a visual metaphor, formed stylistic singularity of the culture of the 16th-17th centuries. The emblem represented the principle of simultaneity, a picture with a brief motto coexisting with a didactic or spiritual text. Not only was the emblem an ornamental “insertion”, a piece of encrusted graphics, but it also reflected the Baroque principle of a witty game. A book of emblems could act as a visual dictionary of signified objects. The significance of finished emblems was not limited to their pictographical meanings, they could also include some symbolic senses. Such verbal pictures illustrating abstract notions can be found in the “Emblemata” (1531) by Andreas Alciatus. The synthesis of the verbal and the visual, as an allegorical way of defining the world and the exegesis of Biblical texts, provided wide opportunities for the emblematic signification. The Picta Poesis Baroque book “Graphical Poetry. Alchemy” (1552) by Barthélemy Aneau contained an alchemy symbolism reflecting the character of the Renaissance worldview. Dutch artists of the 17th century developed the theme of evanescence and vanity in their emblematic still-life painting.