The art of poverty : irony and ideal in sixteenth-century beggar imagery / Tom Nichols.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nichols, Tom, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poverty in art.

Beggars in art.

Art, European--16th century.

Art, European.

Physical Description:

xxi, 266 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press : distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2007.

Summary:

The art of poverty is the first book in English to analyse depictions of beggars in sixteenth-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, France and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery in many different media, from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It develops a striking thesis, arguing that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches.

The earlier chapters follow the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds whose idleness and thievery threatened the values of sixteenth-century society (especially its growing emphasis on the need to work). In the other predominant visual mode, beggars are shown as examples of sacred purity. In many Italian religious paintings, beggars are morally exalted with reference to sacred texts, and made formally beautiful with reference to revered artistic models. Though these approaches reflect the impact of religious reform, it is shown that, by the end of the century, they happily co-existed within Protestant and Catholic cultures. The final part of the book is concerned with the issue of artistic style and with the growing tendency of the beggar image to mediate and dissolve the didactic traditions through which it had originally been defined.

The art of poverty will be of special interest to scholars and students of Renaissance art history, and its progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme and perspective will also make it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture.

Contents:

Introduction: the art of poverty 1

Irony and ideal 6

Defining the beggar: subject and image 7

1 The beggars' place 17

Traditional locations 17

In terror of the tramp 26

The rise of the false beggar image 32

False charity 36

2 Lazy beggars: the working context 49

Everyday poverty: the beggar image as genre 50

Lazy beggars 57

The image of sinful disability 60

The idle beggar as the negative image of production 80

3 Paragons of poverty: picturing the deserving poor 99

Reforming beggars: the impact of Protestantism 99

The imagery of civic charity 109

The imagery of civic charity in Venice 116

Iconographies of the deserving 120

The absence of false beggars in Italian art before 1580 123

4 Treasures of the church: the sacred poor in Italian painting 136

Iconographies 137

Classicising beggar bodies: Raphael and his followers 152

Heroic beggars in Venetian painting 158

Ideal poverty in Bolognese painting 170

5 Beggar style: issues of form and interpretation 184

Text and image in naturalistic depictions of beggars from northern Europe 187

Beggar style in Italian painting 202

Images of false beggars from the circle of Annibale 207

6 The art of poverty: conclusion 230

Beggars and artists 237.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780719075827

0719075823

OCLC:

166359161