Masters Of Italian Baroque Painting

This long-awaited publication - the second in a proposed series of three titles co-published with the Detroit Institute of Arts - presents seventeenth and eighteenth century Italian paintings from one of the world's finest collections of European art, which come together for the first time in one volume as a major addition to existing scholarship on Italian art of the baroque age. The volume presents 69 paintings in colour, many including colour details. Over 80 comparative illustrations provide vital art historical context to the featured paintings. The great number of important Italian works in Detroit is a testament to the institution's judicious purchases over the past 115 years, as well as to generous donations by museum patrons throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. A number of the paintings discussed were among the museum s earliest donations from prominent local collectors, such as Guido Reni s Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns and Gian Paolo Panini s Ruins of a Triumphal Arch, both received as gifts in 1889 from the prominent local newspaper magnate James Scripps; others, such as Samson and Delilah, one of Pompeo Batoni s very few Old Testament scenes, purchased in 2003, are very recent acquisitions. The range and scope of the works presented in this volume is truly impressive, from the ruggedness of Salvator Rosa's landscapes and sweeping gestures and visual richness of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo to the dramatic shadows and relief of Gentileschi. The volume features signature works by Canaletto (Piazza San Marco, Venice), Caravaggio (Conversion of the Magdalen), Carlo Dolci (Flight into Egypt), Artemisia Gentileschi (Judith with the Head of Holofernes), Guercino (Assumption of the Shepherds), Sebastiano Ricci (Camillus and Brennus), Salvator Rosa (Finding of Moses) and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (Magnanimity of Alexander the Great toward the Family of Darius) . To this day the works by Caravaggio, Gentileschi and Tiepolo in particular are recognized as masterpieces in which Italian baroque painting reached the pinnacle of its development in terms of visual excitement and movement. Works by lesser-known artists such as Gioacchino Assereto, Alessandro Turchi, Lorenzo de Caro and Filippo Falciatore also findtheir featured place as well alongside those of their great masters.

Dwight Miller is professor emeritus at Stanford University.