Lanfranco and Domenichino : the concept of style in the early development of baroque painting in Rome / Leslie Brown Kessler.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Kessler, Leslie Brown.

Contributor:

Campbell, Malcolm, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--History of Art.

History of Art--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--History of Art.

History of Art--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

xxii, 606 leaves : illustrations ; 29 cm

Production:

1992.

Summary:

The development of Italian Baroque painting has been characterized in the Twentieth Century as a matter of competitive conflict between two stylistic approaches: a linear/classicistic style grounded in disegno and a painterly style exploiting colore. As focussed on the early Baroque painters Domenico Zampieri and Giovanni Lanfranco, this conflict has been discussed in primarily formal terms, with little attention given to the representational functions of varieties of Baroque style. It is clear, however, that seventeenth-century artists and art theorists did not view the problem of style formally, but were rather concerned with the manner in which a style might interpret or support content. Their assessments of painters suggest that style, in the Seventeenth Century, was considered to be inextricably intertwined with subject, sentiment, and expression and that it was also considered to carry informational value.

The paintings of Giovanni Lanfranco demonstrate his adaptation and transformation of Carraccesque style for highly visionary or revelatory themes, requiring a treatment at variance with the expository or narrative approach taken by Domenichino, particularly in historical subjects. These approaches, in turn, were related to differing contemporary views of the role and ethical value of art in social and cultural discourse; and they also explain different assessments, or means of describing, the works of these artists and others in the writings of such theorists as Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Carlo Cesare Malvasia. The history of style in the Seventeenth Century should thus be regarded as part and parcel of the general history of ideas, and it should be recognized that style was not fully defined as a purely formal value, exclusive of content, until the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, when "scientific" and positivistic theories of form elements and their transformation displaced earlier, content-based art theory.

Notes:

Supervisor: Malcolm Campbell.

Thesis (Ph.D. in History of Art) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1992.

Includes bibliography.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 93-08606.

OCLC:

81748358