*Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy* centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.
- Half title page
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Dedication information
- Acknowledgements
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Still-Life as Culture
- The Biographies of Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera
- Still-Life Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Lombardy
- Still-Life (with Musical Instruments) Is Not Just Vanitas
- Still-Life Painting: The State of Research
- Baschenis’s and Bettera’s Still-Life Paintings: The State of Research
- Bergamo: Portrait of an Ebullient Cultural Hub
- 3. Keeping Score: Painting Music
- The Conception of Music in Italy of the Early Modern Period: Sounds, Words, and Colour
- Music in Bergamo
- The ‘Music Paintings’: Variations Composed by Baschenis and Bettera with their Paintbrush
- 4. Banned Books and Blockbusters
- Books and Libraries in Seventeenth-Century Bergamo
- Books in Baschenis’s Paintings
- The Count, Historian, and Politician Alfonso Loschi
- Books Concerned with Nobility, Law, Jurisprudence, and Poetry
- Different Books in Similar Compositions
- Hippocrates
- Laurentius Fornelius
- Argenide
- La Rosalinda – Hidden in the Shadows
- Bisaccioni: Jurist, Historian, and Writer in Service of Patrons
- The Gardener’s Guide: From Cultivating Flowers to Procuring Aristocratic Titles
- Vittorio Siri: On the Shoulders of the Giants Plato and Plutarch
- Torquato Tasso: Poetry Writing and the Reverence of Truth
- Books in Bettera’s Paintings
- The Many Faces of Fioravanti: On the Mirror of Knowledge
- Silk and Book-Keeping
- Bettera’s Book
- 5. A Double Act: Still-Life and Theatre
- A Gaze at the Theatre
- The Background and the Stage
- Curtains
- Table Coverings and Carpets
- Stage Props
- Seven Modes of Painting Theatre
- 6. Paragone: May the Best Art Win
- The Paragone
- Painting and Music
- Painting and Poetry
- Painting and Sculpture
- All of the Arts: Music, Painting, Sculpture, Literature, and Science
- Music and Science
- Painting, Music, and Literature
- Painting and Music in the Absence of a Paragone
- 7. Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Index
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