La costruzione della monarchia pontificia durante l’età barocca, partendo dal Papato umanistico-rinascimentale di metà XV secolo e passando per la svolta cruciale segnata dalla Riforma e dalla Controriforma, fu un processo incessante che incominciò con l’elezione di Martino V Colonna (1417-1431) e si protrasse durante il pontificato di Papa Urbano VIII (1623-1644) sino al consolidamento dello Stato Pontificio in una vera e propria monarchia assoluta e, insieme, allo sbocciare dell’attuale splendore di Roma come residenza dei Papi. In tale percorso si possono evidenziare due tendenze principali. 1. Gli ambiti sacro e profano si mescolarono perfettamente in virtù del duplice ruolo del Papa, capo di uno Stato italico e supremo pastore della Chiesa universale (“un corpo e due anime”) benché, spesso, fossero incompatibili l’uno con l’altro. 2. La trasformazione del Papato in una monarchia assoluta, unita a una forte centralizzazione amministrativa dello Stato ecclesiastico, determinò altresì lo sviluppo della Curia Romana.

Il volume raccoglie vari interventi dell'incontro organizzato dal CESPoM nel giugno 2004 sul tema "L'Europa di Giovanni Sobieski: cultura, politica, mercatura e società". Questi pongono in luce la figura del sovrano polacco come uomo politico e fautore dell'alleanza con la Francia prima e con l'Impero dopo, il suo governo durato dal 1674 al 1696, gli effetti della sua politica, frutti che continuarono a prolungarsi dopo la sua morte, ma anche le difficoltà che l'Europa della seconda metà del Seicento, condizionata dal dualismo franco-asburgico, dovette affrontare.

Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome offers a new perspective on the world of painting in Rome at the beginning of the Baroque, from both an artistic and a socioeconomic point of view. Biased by the accounts of seventeenth-century biographers, who were often academic painters concerned about elevating the status of their profession, art historians have long believed that in Italy, and in Rome in particular, paintings were largely produced by major artists working on commission for the most important patrons of the time. Patrizia Cavazzini&’s extensive archival research reveals a substantially different situation. Cavazzini presents lively and colorful accounts of Roman artists&’ daily lives and apprenticeships and investigates the vast popular art market that served the aesthetic, devotional, and economic needs of artisans and professionals and of the laboring class. Painting as Business reconstructs the complex universe of painters, collectors, and merchants and irrevocably alters our understanding of the production, collecting, and merchandising of painting during a key period in Italian art history.

Drawing on rich archival research and focusing on works by leading artists including Guido Reni and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Karen J. Lloyd demonstrates that cardinal nephews in seventeenth-century Rome – those nephews who were raised to the cardinalate as princes of the Church – used the arts to cultivate more than splendid social status. Through politically savvy frescos and emotionally evocative displays of paintings, sculptures, and curiosities, cardinal nephews aimed to define nepotism as good Catholic rule. Their commissions took advantage of their unique position close to the pope, embedding the defense of their role into the physical fabric of authority, from the storied vaults of the Vatican Palace to the sensuous garden villas that fused business and pleasure in the Eternal City. This book uncovers how cardinal nephews crafted a seductively potent dialogue on the nature of power, fuelling the development of innovative visual forms that championed themselves as the indispensable heart of papal politics. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, early modern studies, religious history, and political history.

Childhood is not only a biological age, it is also a social construct. The essays in this collection range chronologically from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and geographically across England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. They chart the depictions of children in various media including painting, sculpture and the graphic arts.

L’opera si concentra sul ruolo e le attività dei rappresentanti diplomatici (nunzi) inviati da papa Urbano VIII presso la corte della Rzeczpospolita, il regno polacco-lituano governato dai Waza (o Vasa). Urbano VIII, papa dal 1623 al 1644, mantenne relazioni politiche e religiose con i regni europei durante un periodo segnato da forti tensioni religiose e da conflitti come la Guerra dei Trent'anni.

This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within a splendid environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery— the mainstay of museums—traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history—even the emergence of the modern category of fine art—was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.

As this collection of essays makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio?s art are multiple and variable. Art historians from the UK and North America offer new or recently updated interpretations of the works of seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and of his many followers known as the Caravaggisti. The volume deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio?s paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception, and new hermeneutical trends. The concluding section tackles the essential question of Caravaggio?s legacy and the production of his followers-not only in terms of style but from some highly innovative strategies: concettismo; art marketing and the price of pictures; self-fashioning and biography; and the concept of emulation.