Maarten Delbeke

Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry and allow us to understand the visual arts in papal Rome as a 'making manifest' of the fundamental truths of faith. Pallavicino's views on art and its effects differ fundamentally from the perspective developed in Bernini's biographies offering a perspective on the tension between artist and patron, work and message. In Pallavicino's writings the visual arts emerge as being intrinsically bound up with the very core of religion involving questions of idolatry, mimesis and illusionism that would prove central to the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century.

Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini's Rome

The Art of Religion

Matthew A. Cohen

Prior to the advent of modern structural engineering, architects and builders used proportional systems to imbue their works with a general condition of order that was integral to notions of beauty and structural stability. These mostly invisible intellectual frameworks ranged from simple grids and symbolic numbers, to sly manipulations of geometry and numbers that required privileged knowledge and arithmetical calculations to access. Since the origins of architectural history, proportional systems have served as objects of belief and modes of iconographical communication. Whether they are capable of fulfilling more tangible functions remains a matter of debate today, but as the contributors to this volume show, these ancient and diverse belief systems continue to infiltrate architectural thinking in subtle and sometimes surprising ways today.

A Critical Reconsideration

Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture

Evonne Anita Levy

Steven F. Ostrow

Unique among early modern artists, the Baroque painter, sculptor, and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini was the subject of two monographic biographies published shortly after his death in 1680: one by the Florentine connoisseur and writer Filippo Baldinucci (1682), and the second by Bernini's son, Domenico (1713). This interdisciplinary collection of essays by historians of art and literature marks the first sustained examination of the two biographies, first and foremost as texts. A substantial introductory essay considers each biography's author, genesis, and foundational role in the study of Bernini. Nine essays combining art-historical research with insights from philology, literary history, and art and literary theory offer major new insights into the multifarious connections between biography, art history, and aesthetics, inviting readers to rethink Bernini's life, art, and milieu. Contributors are Eraldo Bellini, Heiko Damm, John D. Lyons, Sarah McPhee, Tomaso Montanari, Rudolf Preimesberger, Robert Williams, and the editors.Maarten Delbeke is Assistant Professor of architectural history and theory at the universities of Ghent and Leiden. Formerly the Scott Opler Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College (Oxford), he is the author of several articles and a forthcoming book on Seicento art and theory.Evonne Levy is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Toronto. She is also the author of Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (2004).

Critical Essays

Bernini's Biographies

Caroline A. van Eck

Jürgen Pieters

Caroline Van Eck

Stijn Bussels

The present volume is a first attempt to chart the early modern translations of Peri hupsous, both in the literal sense of the history of its dissemination by means of editions, versions and translations in Latin and vernacular languages, but also in the figurative sense of its uses and transformations in the visual arts from 1500 to 1800.

The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre

Translations of the Sublime

Maarten Delbeke

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