Baroquemania: Italian Visual Culture and the Construction of National Identity, 1898-1945 - Hardcover
Baroquemania: Italian Visual Culture and the Construction of National Identity, 1898-1945 - Hardcover
Details
by Laura Moure Cecchini (Author)
Baroquemania explores the intersections of art, architecture and criticism to show how reimagining the Baroque helped craft a distinctively Italian approach to modern art. Offering a bold reassessment of post-unification visual culture, the book examines a wide variety of media and ideologically charged discourses on the Baroque, both inside and outside the academy. Key episodes in the modern afterlife of the Baroque are addressed, notably the Decadentist interpretation of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the 1911 universal fairs in Turin and Rome, Roberto Longhi's historically grounded view of Futurism, architectural projects in Fascist Rome and the interwar reception of Adolfo Wildt and Lucio Fontana's sculpture. Featuring a wealth of visual materials, Baroquemania offers a fresh look at a central aspect of Italy's modern art.
Back Jacket
This book radically reconceptualises Italian post-unification visual culture by exploring an element that has, until now, been systematically ignored: its fraught entanglement with the Baroque.
Evoking a glorious past - the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance - played a key role in constructing a common Italian identity following the country's unification in 1861. But the Baroque was considered too extravagant, kitsch, and whimsical to serve the aggressive nation-building impulse that led to Fascism. Baroquemania sets out to redress this narrative. It interrogates a diverse range of media, from paintings, sculptures, and buildings to commercial illustrations, postcards, posters, pageants, photographs, films, and exhibitions. Situating Italy within European and Latin American reimaginings of the Baroque, the book proves how widespread use (and misuse) of the style was integral to articulating Italians' ambivalent relationships with modernity and tradition. Unravelling the Baroque's protean afterlife in the work and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Armando Brasini, Adolfo Wildt, and Lucio Fontana, among others, this book reveals the Baroque's role in pioneering a distinctively Italian approach to modern art, one that was neither anti-modernist nor fully committed to avant-garde values. By examining how the Baroque haunted Italian visual culture, Baroquemania offers a fresh look at an essential aspect of Italy's development into a modern nation.Author Biography
Laura Moure Cecchini is Assistant Professor of Art History at Colgate University
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