Hope and Healing
Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800
Distributed for Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
272 pages
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38 color plates, 71 halftones
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11 x 8_1/2
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© 2005
The bubonic plague ravaged early modern Europe from the mid-fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, striking so often and in so many localities that people constantly were on guard against the scourge. Hope and Healing explores the response of the visual arts to this omnipresent aura of death, decay, and tragedy in the early modern European experience, focusing on Italy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
An esteemed group of contributors draws on a wide range of materials, including diaries, medical and devotional treatises, poetry, sermons, letters, and chapbooks to illuminate the various aesthetic, social, and religious concerns that preoccupied artists, patrons, and the general populace. This vibrant and fascinating volume ultimately offers a fresh and intriguing perspective on the forces and concerns that shaped early modern Italian art.
An esteemed group of contributors draws on a wide range of materials, including diaries, medical and devotional treatises, poetry, sermons, letters, and chapbooks to illuminate the various aesthetic, social, and religious concerns that preoccupied artists, patrons, and the general populace. This vibrant and fascinating volume ultimately offers a fresh and intriguing perspective on the forces and concerns that shaped early modern Italian art.
"Although the exhibition does include some notable works, the publication succeeds primarily on the strength of the seven accompanying essays, which together offer many insights on Baroque plague imagery in major Italian cities. . . . An excellent and essential study for future scholarship[."
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Art: European Art
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