GRI

Cardsharps and gypsy fortune tellers are among Caravaggio's most famous subjects, and for his followers all over Europe, these subjects became a badge of affiliation with the master. Today their appeal and popularity may seem so obvious as to require no explanation-the actors are attractive, the scenes are gently funny, and as in theater, the spectator enjoys being let in on the joke. No doubt these paintings worked their charm on their original owners for the same reasons. Their very charm, however, makes it easy to forget that these were not somehow natural or conventional subjects for painting. Caravaggio invented them. Iconographic precedents for them that have been adduced by scholars, myself included, serve mainly to demonstrate just how new Caravaggio's compositions were. Tracing the literary sources reveals how painters transformed them by selecting and emphasizing quite different aspects of the subject than writers did. The aim of this chapter is to analyze how Caravaggio exploited the obvious appeal of these subjects in order to thematize critical aspects of the role of the painter and his viewer.

Introductory essay for Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750,  edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini.

This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within a splendid environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery—the mainstay of museums—traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome.

Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy.

With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history—even the emergence of the modern category of fine art—was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.

«Non finiremmo mai »,writes Malvasia, « se tutte le copie cavate daglialtri maestri per mano di essi [Carracci] registrar volessimo ».1 Malvasia's extraordinary remark has been ignored, taken, no doubt, as a typically improbable hyperbole. Though it has often been said that the young Carracci, when they were starting out, did a little copying after Correggio and Titian, Malvasia's declaration goes much further, and here I would like to do the same by suggesting that the scope of their activities as copyists was as extensive as Malvasia's rhetorical figure implies.

Gail Feigenbaum, "Per una storia istituzionale dell'arte bolognese, 1399-1650: nuovi documenti sulla corporazione dei pittori, i suoi membri, le sue cariche e sull'accademia dei Carracci," Il restauro del Nettuno, la statua di Gregorio XIII e la sistemazione di Piazza Maggiore nel Cinquecento: contributi anche documentari alla conoscenza della prassi e dell'organizzazione delle arti a Bologna prima dei Carracci, Bologna, Minerva, 1999, 353-377