Baroquemania explores the intersections of art,
architecture and criticism to show how reimagining the Baroque
helped craft a distinctively Italian approach to modern art.
Offering a bold ...reassessment of post-unification visual culture,
the book examines a wide variety of media and ideologically charged
discourses on the Baroque, both inside and outside the academy. Key
episodes in the modern afterlife of the Baroque are addressed,
notably the Decadentist interpretation of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the
1911 universal fairs in Turin and Rome, Roberto Longhi's
historically grounded view of Futurism, architectural projects in
Fascist Rome and the interwar reception of Adolfo Wildt and Lucio
Fontana's sculpture. Featuring a wealth of visual materials,
Baroquemania offers a fresh look at a central aspect of
Italy's modern art.
Studies based on a scientific approach to materials and techniques used in Portuguese gilded retables from the Baroque are very scarce and focus particularly on works with erudite features and on the ...characterization of the superficial gold leaf. The conservation and appearance of gilded surfaces, however, depended on the qualities of the clayey ground layer underneath, which is the bole. Colour and texture are closely related to its mineralogical composition.
Boles were healing clays. Red to orange varieties could also be used for gilding, usually agglutinated with animal glue when the gold surface was meant to be burnished. Armenian was the name used to identify the best quality material.
Microsamples collected from erudite and popular gilded retables, respectively belonging to the city of Oporto and its rural surroundings, were selected for elemental and mineralogical characterization. It was intended to shed light on the characteristics of boles used in Portuguese retables and to understand if there are any differences between materials used in works of distinct artistic quality.
Elemental analysis was performed through SEM–EDS. SR-XRD was used for phase identification, performed with a six-circle diffractometer at the DIFFABS beamline of SOLEIL Synchrotron. Portuguese clay standards of identifiable composition and provenance were also analysed.
The results suggest that boles are mainly kaolinitic, with variable amounts of illite and smectite. Gypsum was used as an extender. Although the proportions of the main clay minerals are similar in erudite and popular works, in Oporto homogeneity is clearly higher.
•Of all materials used to produce gilded surfaces, boles are the least known.•Boles were never systematically studied.•An approach based on the use of SEM–EDS and SR-XRD is proposed.•The main goal is to answer some questions raised by Conservation and Art History.
This volume gathers together recent research from leading scholars specializing in the history of collecting. American Southern art collections, both public and private, contain rich and ...representative holdings of Renaissance and Baroque art which remain understudied, compared to the collections bracketing the east and west coasts of the United States. This anthology considers how these works of art were acquired for both prominent public and private collections, how they have been curated and displayed in exhibitions, and how they have also been preserved historically. Individual essays address a variety of art media representative of the early modern period in Europe and the Americas. Case studies of specific works of art, collections, and collectors address the broad geographic scope of Southern collections, inclusive of Washington, DC, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.
This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro’s miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power ...of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.
This article takes a trans-historical approach to the notion of a baroque aesthetic as the expression of a particular set of societal and cultural circumstances. Drawing on the works of French ...philosophers, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Christine Buci-Glucksman, a baroque episteme is characterized in terms of the suspension of reason or reality through various representational ambiguities, highlighting the tension between being and appearing (etre et paraitre). Concluding with an invocation of Guy Debord's La Societe du spectacle, the above outlined perspective contributes to an understanding of contemporary representational practices in order to elucidate a sublime baroque madness that results from the suspension of certainties. Keywords: Sublime, Baroque, Spectacle, Madness, Reason
Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this ...frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens.
Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos —divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization.
Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.
This monograph serves as an introduction to the art, architecture and literary culture of the Eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries. The geographical area under ...discussion comprises the regions of contemporary Lithuania, western Belarus and western Ukraine. The introduction of the Renaissance and Baroque classical revival into these lands is considered here within the political context of nationalistic and religious loyalties, as well as economic status and class. The central discussion focuses on the issue of national identity and religious loyalty in the inter-relation between the Byzantine inheritance of the Lithuanian and Ruthenian populace and the Polonizing Catholic influences entering from the west.
Il saggio analizza l'evoluzione italiana del genere pittorico della ghirlanda di fiori, una tipologia devozionale nata dalla collaborazione intellettuale tra il cardinale Federico Borromeo e Jan ...Brueghel il Vecchio. Prendendo spunto dagli studi di David Freedberg e Pamela Jones, l'articolo ricostruisce le dinamiche della creazione del genere, sottolineando il ruolo fondamentale esercitato dal Borromeo e rimarcando la sua dimensione italiana, troppo spesso dimenticata in relazione alla maggiore attenzione accordata alla diffusione del genere in ambito fiammingo. Il contributo offre una panoramica sulla diffusione italiana di questa particolare tipologia iconografica e sottolinea aspetti chiave dello sviluppo nordicizzante dell'arte lombarda che, tra gli altri, riguardano Carlo Antonio Procaccini, membro a lungo dimenticato di una delle importanti famiglie di pittori della Milano borromaica. In risposta alle esigue pubblicazioni sull'argomento, il saggio si pone l'obiettivo di aggiornare il campo di studi, riscoprendo una dimensione artistica e devozionale che si intreccia indissolubilmente con l'evoluzione del gusto artistico della Milano dei primi decenni del Seicento.
