17th Century Italian Art

Au regard de l’essor timide de la taille-douce à Paris au début du xviie siècle, l’expérience italienne devint une étape nécessaire pour les graveurs qui voulaient apprendre ou perfectionner le métier. À la différence de ses collègues, Jérôme David (v. 1590/1600 – v. 1670) vécut longtemps en Italie, et non seulement à Rome: son séjour atypique lui permit collaborer avec plusieurs artistes italiens, qu’il interpréta de manière assidue. À son retour en France, en 1637, David continua à graver d’après des modèles italiens et ses estampes contribuèrent à la diffusion du goût, déjà très présent à Paris, pour l’art italien. Après la mort de François Langlois, marchand, éditeur important pour les artistes français ayant voyagé en Italie, David cesse de graver d’après les maîtres italiens, mais son attachement à la culture  gurative ultramontaine s’exprimera tout au long de sa carrière parisienne à travers les citations ponctuelles des grands maîtres qui l’in uencèrent particulièrement.

Di fronte all’inizio esitante dell’incisione su rame a Parigi ai primi del XVII secolo, l’esperienza italiana divenne tappa necessaria per gli incisori intenzionati a apprendere o perfezionare il mestiere. A differenza dei suoi colleghi, Jérôme David (v. 1590/1600 – v. 1670) visse a lungo in Italia, e non solamente a Roma : il suo soggiorno atipico gli permise di collaborare con numerosi artisti italiani, che interpretò in maniera assidua. Al suo rientro in Francia, nel 1637, David continuò a incidere i modelli italiani e le sue stampe contribuirono alla diffusione del gusto, già molto presente a Parigi, per l’arte italiana. Dopo la morte di François Langlois, mercante e importante editore per gli artisti francesi che viaggiarono in Italia, David smise di interpretare gli artisti italiani, ma il suo attaccamento alla cultura  figurativa oltremontana si esprimerà durante tutta la sua carriera parigina attraverso puntuali citazioni dei grandi maestri che lo in uenzarono particolarmente.

This most recent edition of the bibliography contains almost 21,200 titles in English (64%) and French (36%), with an introductory section on historiography. It deals with every aspect of Italian history and culture from the Late Renaissance to the French Revolution.

Par Stéphane Loire, conservateur en chef au département des Peintures du musée du Louvre. Relié. 23,6 x 29,3 cm. 584 pages. 570 illustrations dont 160 en couleurs. ISBN 2-07-011828-2. Prix : 69,90 € Après un premier tome consacré à l'école de Bologne paru en 1996, cet ouvrage vient compléter la publication du catalogue raisonné des peintures italiennes du XVII e siècle du musée du Louvre. Il prend donc en compte, selon des principes identiques, celles qui proviennent des autres foyers artistiques (Florence, Gênes, Lombardie, Naples, Rome et Venise). Chaque oeuvre fait l'objet d'une étude aussi complète que possible permettant d'établir un bilan des connaissances sur ce magnifique ensemble. On y trouvera ainsi des notices détaillées pour cent quatre-vingt-un tableaux conservés au musée du Louvre ainsi que pour les décors exécutés à fresque par Giovanni Francesco Romanelli dans quatre pièces du Palais du Louvre, auxquels viennent s'ajouter cent quatre-vingt-dix autres oeuvres déposées hors du musée. Les limites chronologiques de l'étude sont les mêmes que celles du premier volume : ont donc été retenus les artistes dont les dates de naissance sont comprises entre 1555 et 1654.

Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to interest in the dramatic details of her early life, including the widely publicized rape trial of her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and her admission to Florence’s esteemed Accademia del Disegno. While the artist’s early paintings have been extensively discussed, her later work has been largely dismissed.

This beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book provides a revolutionary look at Artemisia’s later career, refuting longstanding assumptions about the artist. The fact that she was semi-illiterate has erroneously led scholars to assume a lack of literary and cultural education on her part. Stressing the importance of orality in Baroque culture and in Artemisia’s paintings, Locker argues for her important place in the cultural dialogue of the seventeenth century.

M.C.Cozzi, S. Guido, G. Mantella, "La Madonna di Ognissanti. Un dipinto di Battistello Caracciolo: la tecnica, il restauro e un'ipotesi interpretativa tra devozione e storia", in "La Madonna di Ognissanti di Battistello Caracciolo. Una riscoperta per il restauro" a cura di S. Guido, G. Mantella, Roma 2014, pp. 21-57. ISBN - 9788898455232

Sante Guido - Giuseppe Mantella, «si fabrichi una chiesola per conto della Religione … “. Mattia Preti e la Chiesa dell’Immacolata Concezione di Sarria a Malta, About art on line: https://www.aboutartonline.com/si-fabrichi-una-chiesola-per-conto-della-religione-mattia-preti-e-la-chiesa-dellimmacolata-concezione-di-sarria-a-malta/

Simon Vouet’s The Fortune Teller (1617) shows two women working together to swindle a foolish artisan. Some of the past interpretations of the work have focused on the man’s role in the economic exchange depicted in the painting. This article draws on archival research carried out during a Fellowship at the British School at Rome to argue for a different understanding of the way gendered exchange functions in and around Vouet’s painting. Working with the conclusion that the painting was sent by a mother, Biancamaria Cacherano, at the occasion of her youngest son’s marriage, the canvas is interpreted here as part of her communication directed at her new daughter-in-law through the medium of correspondence with her eldest son, Cassiano dal Pozzo. Focusing on the women in the painting, the article considers how Biancamaria may have interpreted the subject-matter in relation to her own experience as an economic agent and as a family advisor to the women and men of the younger generation. It concludes by considering how this message may have been tempered in Rome by another painting by Simon Vouet, also owned by the dal Pozzo family.

Between 1624 and about 1635, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) produced a series of mythological paintings that depict women looking at passive men. Read by modern commentators as a sign of the painter's fear of women, these pictures have contributed to the myth that this artist created predominantly masculine works of art. Laying aside biographical interpretation, this thesis investigates the relationship between Poussin's representations of masculinity and femininity and the social affairs of the gentlemen who bought these paintings. In order to address fully the paintings' unusual iconography, it has been necessary to take into account the importance of femininity in the sociality that permeated Poussin's visual repertoire. I analyse how culturally constructed gendered positions of viewing informed the design of these paintings and the kinds of viewing that occurred before them. By considering the social possibilities, the pictorial processes, and the physical locations through which these paintings affected their patrons, I establish that a connection existed between social experience and Poussin's representations of gendered looking. This discussion sets the parameters for an examination of how these paintings related intimately to the familial and status concerns of the painter's Roman clientele. I aim to demonstrate that Poussin's early mythological paintings functioned within a complex visual culture where gentlemen sought to utilise representations of powerful women positively. At the same time, this thesis attempts to restore aspects of femininity to perceptions of the gender of Poussin's early artistic production.

Sante Guido, "Marmi policromi, lapislazzuli e pietre dure: appunti di restauro dalla Cappella Cornaro a Santa Maria della Vittoria e dalla Cappella Paolina nella Basilica papale di Santa Maria Maggiore" in C. Giometti e C. M. Sicca (a cura di) " I colori del marmo",  Studi e fonti per la storia della scultura , 7, Pisa University Press, Pisa 2019, pp. 97-120. ISBN 8833392597, 9788833392592
(frutto di due giornate di studio svoltesi all'Università di Pisa il 15 e 16 febbraio 2019)

Nicolas Poussin's Tancred and Erminia centres on a woman's gaze. In its reference to noblewomen watching jousting knights, a motif present in the source poem, I argue that the format of the painting drew on ritualized practices of viewing. Contemporary depictions of a tournament reveal the specificities of this visuality for Poussin's patrons. In its replication of the classed and gendered spectatorship of papal court jousts, Tancred and Erminia was able to encourage aspiring papal courtiers to empathize with a coveted viewpoint gendered feminine. In so doing, I believe it offered viewers the possibility to identify with a standpoint, a cultural position of viewing constituted through representation.

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

The Carrara marble faun in The Metropolitan Museum of New York has been variously attributed to Pietro Bernini, to Pietro and Gianlorenzo together, to conceived by Pietro but carved by Gianlorenzo, to all by Gianlorenzo, and is probably a combination of all of these. Its date is surely c. 1616, a time when father and son were working closely together.  We know the statue was beloved by Gianlorenzo because he kept it throughout his life always visible in his house on the Via della Mercede in Rome.  The subject just as often has been debated: named il Fauno molestato dai Putti, interpreted as an image of Virgil’s dictum “Love Conquers All”, and seen as a confrontation to ancient art, in the manner of Michelangelo.  My interpretation is less metaphorical, more physical: it depends on the observation that the obstreperous position of the faun’s raised left leg is part of a long tradition of representing extreme love making, which Bernini shared with the poet Gian Battista Marino.  In fact, I purport that he, the faun, is locked in a position of eternal coitus with a beguiling female spirit in the tree.  For this reason I call the group “A Faun in Love”.

For long time, the so called Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis by Caravaggio, once in the oratory of St Lawrence in Palermo, was generally considered as executed in 1609 during the artist’s Sicilian stay. Recent acquisitions make us believe that, actually, this artwork was executed in Rome, in 1600, and then transferred from here to Sicily. If some important documentary findings were often ignored or not properly read, art historical essays focused less on complementary technical aspects, and opposite. A traditional dating still seemed to be the most credible hypothesis: the present essay aims at making a tabula rasa of all the previous ideas and at clarifying this matter with some logical order, without forgetting any element, rather adding new information. On this occasion, a copy of the painting is introduced, known only by a photograph, in addition to the one already known by Paolo Geraci.

Per lungo tempo la cosiddetta Natività con i santi Lorenzo e Francesco di Caravaggio, già nell’oratorio di S. Lorenzo a Palermo, si è generalmente creduta dipinta nel 1609 durante il soggiorno siciliano. Recenti acquisizioni portano tuttavia ad affermare che in realtà il quadro fu realizzato a Roma, nel 1600, e da lì spedito in Sicilia. Ma se importanti novità documentarie sono state talvolta ignorate o non valutate adeguatamente, contributi storico-artistici meno si sono soffermati su complementari aspetti più propriamente tecnici e viceversa. In assenza di un quadro completo la datazione tradizionale poteva sembrare ancora la più credibile: è certamente il caso di fare tabula rasa e riprendere ordinatamente la questione, senza trascurarne nessun aspetto e anzi cogliendo l’occasione per aggiungervi nuove acquisizioni. In tale occasione, è pubblicata una copia del dipinto, conosciuta solo attraverso una fotografia, in aggiunta a quella già nota di Paolo Geraci.