Italian Baroque Art

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.

Part I: Appearances. 1. What is Baroque? (Erwin Panofsky). 2. The Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor and the Architect (Pietro Bellori Giovan). 3. Fighting with Style (Phillip Sohm). 4. Bernini's Conception of the Visual Arts: 'Un Bel Composto' (Irving Lavin). 5. Ars Tornandi: Baroque Architecture and the Lathe (Joseph Connors). 6. A Taste for Tiepolo (Alpers, Svetlana and Michael Baxandall). Part II: Artistic Practice, Production and Consumption. 7. Practice in the Carracci Academy (Gail Feigenbaum). 8. Artemisia in Her Father's House (Patrizia Cavazzini). 9. Disegni, Bozzetti, Legnetti and Modelli in Roman Seicento Sculpture (Jennifer Montagu). 10. Architects and Clods: The Emergence of Urban Planning in the Context of Palace Architecture in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Dorothy Metzger Habel). 11. The Mechanics of Seventeenth-Century Patronage (Francis Haskell). 12. Scrambling for Scudi: Notes on Painters' Earnings in Early Baroque Rome (Richard Spear). 13. The Marketing of Pietro Testa's Poetic Inventions (Francesco Consagra). 14.Inside the Palace: People and Furnishings (Patricia Waddy). Part III: Meaning: Conceived and Received. 15. A Comment on the Iconography of Pietro da Cortona's Barberini Ceiling (Walter Vitzthum). 16.Seeing the Shroud: Guarini's Reliquary Chapel in Turin and the Ostentation of a Dynastic Relic (John Beldon Scott). 17. Myth and the New Science: Vico, Tiepolo, and the Language of the Optimates (Christopher Drew Armstrong). 18.Problems of the Theme (Rudolf Wittkower). 19. Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi (Karen-Edis Barzman). 20. Pastoralism in the Roman Baroque Villa and in Claude Lorrain (Myths and Realities of the Roman Campagna: Mirka Benes). Part IV: Critique of the Past and the New Science. 21. The Role of Classical Models in Bernini's and Poussin's Preparatory Work (Rudolf Wittkower). 22. The Greek Style and the Prehistory of Neoclassicism (Charles Dempsey). 23. Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: Capricci in the Service of Pre-Scientific Archaeology (Susan M. Dixon). 24. Cigoli's Immacolata and Galileo's Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome (Steven F. Ostrow). 25. The Fate of Pictures: Appearance, Truth, and Ambiguity (David Freedberg). 26. Lodoli on Function and Representation (Joseph Rykwert).