BRILL eBooks, 2022
Unlike central and northern Italy, neither the city of Naples nor the Kingdom of Naples, before the seventeenth century, had their own school of painting, with recognizable stylistic characteristics and a continuous and autonomous history over time. This fact was evident to people at the time, such as, for example, Giorgio Vasari, whose judgements on southern Italian artists have for so long influenced studies of painting in the region. Vasari, who had stayed in Naples between 1544 and 1545 and claimed to have had a pioneering role in the dissemination of the art of his time in the south, wrote that "after Giotto"-and until his own arrival-there had not been in Naples "artists" who "had achieved anything of importance in painting, though some works by Perugino and by Raphael had been brought there from outside […]". Writing later about the Calabrian painter Marco Cardisco (ca. 1490-1546)-the only southern Italian painter deemed to be worthy of a short biography-Vasari constructs an ambiguous and highly qualified eulogy, expressing his "joy" but also his "astonishment" that Cardisco's talent could have emerged "in a place where other artists do not exist", while he is even more sharply critical in his life of Polidoro da Caravaggio, in which he extends his severe judgement to cover the whole of southern Italian society and links the lack of success of artists from the region to the absence of patronage, since the local "gentili omini" show "very little interest in the excellencies of painting", so that Polidoro almost ended up dying of hunger in the place until "seeing his skills so little valued, he decided to take his departure from people who thought more highly of a jumping horse than of an artist who could make painted figures appear like living beings".1 What lay behind Vasari's evaluation was certainly the profound difference between southern Italian society, largely feudal and agrarian, and the urban and mercantile character of Tuscan society. Despite the frequency and persistence of political and economic contacts between the two regions, this contrast gave rise to a lively rivalry, amply represented in contemporary literature, where the two ambiences, and especially their two nobilities, were often seen as dia-
Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350): Reality and Reflexivity - IntroImages-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350): Reality and Reflexivity. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015
The rebirth of realistic representation in Italy around 1300 led to the materialization of a pictorial language, which dominated Western art until 1900, and it dominates global visual culture even today. Paralleling the development of mimesis, self-reflexive pictorial tendencies emerged as well. Images-within-images, visual commentaries of representations by representations, were essential to this trend. They facilitated the development of a critical pictorial attitude towards representation. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian meta-painting in the age of Giotto and sheds new light on the early modern and modern history of the phenomenon. By combining visual hermeneutics and iconography, it traces reflexivity in Italian mural and panel painting at the dawn of the Renaissance, and presents novel interpretations of several key works of Giotto di Bondone and the Lorenzetti brothers. The potential influence of the contemporary religious and social context on the program design is also examined situating the visual innovations within a broader historical horizon. The analysis of pictorial illusionism and reality effect together with the liturgical, narrative and typological role of images-within-images makes this work a pioneering contribution to visual studies and premodern Italian culture. ‘Reflexivity is the name of the game they say when it comes to modern and especially to postmodern art. This study tells a different story. Péter Bokody’s book goes back to where it all began: to Italian Trecento painting which marks the beginnings of the realistic mode. Realism means, among many other things, that one medium can embed another medium. If it does so it will enhance its realistic potential, strengthen the meaning of the whole scene and, finally, it makes a meta-statement: about the power of images, the different qualities of the artforms or even about stylistic options.’ Wolfgang Kemp, University of Hamburg 'Bokody’s book combines visual sensitivity, methodological variety, historical erudition and theoretical sophistication. His work encourages us to think with more precision and flexibility about the concepts of "realism" and reflexivity as applied to the achievements of Giotto and his contemporaries and in relation to subsequent generations of artists. Bokody provides fresh insights for all those who study, admire and teach this material.' Joanna Cannon, Courtauld Institute of Art, London 'Engagingly written, this study will add significantly to our understanding of Giotto and his circle (including Lorenzetti, Gaddi and Daddi) in the dynamically changing world of fourteenth century Italy. Although primarily concerned with images within images in panel and mural painting, the work goes beyond its initial parameters and looks at such concepts as realism, spatial relations, illusionism, meta-painting, self-reflexivity, time and reception in Italian art. It is a study which exposes the viewer to new ideas and details that could easily be passed and whose iconography is significant in understanding the work in its entirety.' Colum Hourihane, Independent Scholar, UK
An Examination of the Place of Fresco in Contemporary Art Practice2004
Vesuvius erupted, burying the city under a three-metre-high sea of volcanic debris. It was not until the eighteenth century that the remains of the city were uncovered and frescoes of such beauty were discovered that Pompeii immediately became a treasure. If this city, not even one of the thirty largest of the Roman Empire, contained so many frescoes, we are left to imagine the quantity and quality of lost fresco production elsewhere in the Roman Empire. 6 The creators of the Pompeii frescoes used a similar technique to their late Minoan period and Greek antecedents. Like them, they were expert plasterers, using limestone, marble and stone powder, and sand in from one to three undercoats. 7 Artists applied brightly coloured pigments to rectangular divisions of walls while the plaster was still damp. The resulting frescoes were stunningly luminous, a necessary attribute, for rooms in Pompeiian households were windowless. 8 11.4 Renaissance Fresco Although its painting process and materials were essentially the ones inherited from Greece, Rome, and medieval Italy, Renaissance fresco's context and role became more specific, rich, and functional. Its large-scale religious projects were catalysed, beginning in the thirteenth century, by the growth of the
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