Friday, November 2, 2018

Rococo Religiosity as Manifested by Italian Painters

Antonio Bellucci
St Sebastian
ca. 1716-18
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari
Susanna and the Elders
before 1727
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Giuseppe Bottani
Departure of Saints Paula and Eustochium for the Holy Land
ca. 1745
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Another stubborn commonplace in the literature is that Rococo is anti-religious.  Most would consider "Spiritual Rococo" to be a contradiction in terms, yet while Rococo was the style of the laity, as Fumaroli reminds us, it was not the style of atheism.  We must grasp this essential difference if we are to understand why Rococo became a major global religious style.  . . .  Throughout Catholic Europe religion remained central to intellectual life: as Tim Blanning notes, "the eighteenth century has as good a claim to be dubbed 'the age of religion' as 'the age of reason.'  The eighteenth century did not witness a mass exodus from churches until (in France only) the 1789 Revolution.  In fact religion – notably popular devotions – underwent a renaissance throughout Catholic Europe, with the rise of the cults of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart of Mary, a proliferation of new pilgrimages, a renewed enthusiasm for exterior manifestations of faith such as Corpus Christi processions and festivals mounted by confraternities, and a belief in an increasing number of present-day miracles."

"The Spiritual Rococo was not a reactionary movement but a subtle rebellion, all the more successful because it was dressed in the language of the leisured classes and "came playfully on little velvet paws," as Sedlmayr and Bauer famously remarked about the Rococo itself.  It embraced the anti-establishment stance of the Lumières – particularly through its challenge to the severity of the Church – yet it opposed the philosophers' stoicism with what Philippe Malgouyres calls "consolations," an epicurean emphasis on tenderness, comfort, sentiment, and the quotidian, which is "the point of the spear of a Christian apologetic against the philosophers."  Through its championing of society the Spiritual Rococo also became increasingly a theology of the laity: idiosyncratic, non-institutional, and worldly.  In what is perhaps the most classic text on eighteenth-century art, Levey's Rococo to Revolution (1966), Rococo is swept aside to make way for the individualism and natural speculation that would inspire revolution." 

– from The Spiritual Rococo by Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Routledge, 2017)

Sebastiano Ricci
Fall of Rebel Angels
ca. 1720
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Giambattista Pittoni
Sacrifice of Isaac
ca. 1715-20
oil on canvas
Chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna, Venice

Gian Paolo Panini
Classical Ruins with Woman Preaching
ca. 1735
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Gian Paolo Panini
Classical Ruins with St Paul Preaching
ca. 1735
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Francesco Solimena
St John the Baptist
1730
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Francesco Trevisani
Dead Christ supported by Angels
ca. 1710
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pompeo Batoni
Crucifixion
1762
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Giambattista Tiepolo
Stigmatization of St Francis
ca. 1767-69
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Alessandro Magnasco and Antonio Peruzzini
Christ and Angels
ca. 1705
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

follower of Alessandro Magnasco
Nuns at Work
before 1750
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pietro Longhi
The Confession
ca. 1755
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston