This paper re-examines the
by Carlo Maratti (1686) and its reception in hitherto understudied poems which were first published in 1686 and 1687. Although the poems are chiefly celebratory and refer ...to the tradition of encomiastic pictorial description, this essay demonstrates how they help us understand the beholder’s engagement with Baroque art. It first analyzes the poems as both encomiastic speech and ekphrastic poetry to explain how epideictic description persuasively moves readers to venerate the Virgin, thus rekindling the cult of the Immaculate Conception. Subsequently, a comparative reading of the poems and the painting demonstrates how art and literature mutually informed each other to create new aesthetic and intellectual values. A detailed comparison between visual and verbal languages will therefore offer a new interpretative framework to reassess the painting, the poems, and their public.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, following the deaths of Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Carlo Maratti became the pre-eminent representative of the modern mode of painting ...in Rome, a style that was soon to be exported all over Europe. He was praised by his biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori as the "Raphael of his time" and was the favorite painter of kings, cardinals, and the Roman, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, as well as four popes: Alexander VII, Clement IX, Clement X, and Clement XI, who honored him with the title of Cavaliere di Santa Croce. From a young age, Maratti was committed to several specific approaches in his art, from deriving inspiration from the Antique (reproducing Roman statues and reliefs), to studying the works of the great masters of classicism, Annibale Carracci, and Guido Rem, to drawing from life (both nude and draped models). Maratti achieved great precision as a draftsman of both figures and compositions, accurately rendering parts of the human figure in space, with naturalistic and well-defined three-dimensional values. Such stylistic elements—traits that define classicizing artists—remained characteristic of his activity as a draftsman his whole career. It should thus come as no surprise that two beautiful sheets with anatomical studies preserved in the Courtauld Gallery, London, attributed here for the first time to Maratti, were in the past attributed to Charles Le Brun (1619—1690), the major representative of classicism in France in the seventeenth century.
The article analyzes the loss of interest in the study of human anatomy through dissection of cadavers that characterizes the Baroque period, and that distinguishes the Baroque from the Renaissance ...and from Neoclassicism. It is a change that can be a key to understanding the aesthetics of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the almost obsessive study of the draperies replaced that of the anatomy. The contest between Carlo Maratti and Carlo Cesi within the Academy of St. Luke was an important turning point in this process.
