Description
Book SynopsisThrough a study of the writings of the papal physician and art critic Giulio Mancini, explores early modern art collecting in Italy. Argues that art within domestic contexts was understood to create healthy bodies, minds, and societies through the mechanism of the imagination.
Trade Review“Gage breaks fertile new ground for the history of medicine and religious studies as well as art history and the history of collections. Highly recommended.”
—C. A. Hanson Choice
“Gage’s book provides an engaging, lucid, and learned account of how medicine and painting coincided in the thought of Mancini and his contemporaries. In doing so, it ranges over a vast gamut of secondary literature drawn from several distinct fields, and it grapples with many of the most stimulating lines of inquiry in the current scholarship on early modern visual culture.”
—Sheila Barker CAA.Reviews
“An important contribution which reminds readers of the strong ties between scientific and artistic thinking in early modern Rome, and urges scholars to push further the discussions of art beyond the limits of aesthetic discourse.”
—Ioana Magureanu Sixteenth Century Journal
“The vast range of primary source materials that builds this argument makes this volume especially useful to both historians of science and historians of art.”
—Jacqueline Marie Musacchio Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
“An important addition to studies in early modern criticism that are on a larger scale rethinking the emotional work of the early modern self. . . . Painting in Early Modern Rome is a well-organised and ambitious book, and it is worth noting that the book is gorgeous, with many works included to illustrate Gage’s analyses.”
—Kristine Johanson Renaissance Studies
“Many scholars have noted the originality and value of the papal physician Giulio Mancini's writings as a source for artists and artistic thinking in seventeenth-century Rome, but Frances Gage is the first to devote attention to his therapeutic and historical theories regarding painting and its display as contributing to the maintenance of good health. She presents an absorbing view of the relations between art and medical thought of the period, and in so doing contributes significantly to the histories of both art and science.”
—Charles Dempsey,Johns Hopkins University
“Mancini's treatises are regarded as precious, if baffling, testimony about the early modern display of art. Frances Gage’s original approach illuminates how Mancini's mentality and training as a physician colored his writing. Mancini focused on the effects of beholding paintings, especially in domestic settings. Aesthetic criteria are considered alongside values aligned with humanist medicine, as Mancini attends to how the various genres and qualities of painting should be deployed to affect a viewer—to influence his health, shape the beauty of eventual progeny, exercise or tire the eye, or inspire virtue by presenting models of civil order.”
—Gail Feigenbaum,Getty Research Institute
“A remarkable study of the way in which seventeenth-century viewers often looked at paintings through a very particular and unusual lens, one focused on the various ways in which pictures affected health. This analysis of the ‘efficacy of art’ brings us a new perspective with which to consider seicento art and culture. Among the dozens of intriguing ideas Frances Gage brings to our attention is the concept of the ‘maternal imagination.’ In this period, women were thought to be extremely sensitive to pictures—so much so that, while they were pregnant, images they viewed could be internalized via their fertile imagination (literally). The wrong images could have harmful effects and even produce birth defects and ‘monsters.’ This book will be of interest to scholars of women’s studies, anthropology, the history of science, and religious studies, in addition to all art historians. Gage’s scholarship is deep; her citations are wide ranging. The writing is very clear and a pleasure to read.”
—David M. Stone,University of Delaware
“A text that is exceptionally pleasant to read. All students of painting in Rome—and beyond—will need to take note of it.”
—David Cast Renaissance Quarterly
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Art, Medical Culture, and Mancini’s Critical Fortune
2 Illness, Health Preservation, and Recreation
3 From Exercise to Repose
4 For Beautiful, Healthy Children
5 Preserving the Civic Body
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
