Richard E. Spear | |
---|---|
Born | 1940 |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Chicago, Princeton University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Art historian |
Institutions | Oberlin College;Allen Memorial Art Museum;George Washington University;University of Florida,Gainesville;University of Maryland,College Park |
Main interests | Italian Baroque painting |
Richard E. Spear (born 1940 in Michigan City,Indiana) is an American art historian and professor who specializes in Italian Baroque painting.
Spear was educated in art history at the University of Chicago (B.A.,1961) and Princeton University (Ph.D.,1965). His research and publications have focused on seventeenth-century European art,ranging from a two-volume catalogue raisonné on Domenichino (1581–1641) to studies based on iconographic,psychoanalytic,feminist,and economic methodologies. He taught at Oberlin College from 1965 until 2000,where he also directed the Allen Memorial Art Museum (1972–83). He was appointed distinguished visiting professor at George Washington University in 1983–84 and held the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair at the University of Florida,Gainesville,in 1997–98. Since 1998,he has been distinguished visiting and affiliated research professor at the University of Maryland,College Park.
Spear's research on prices paid to painters in seventeenth-century Rome is a searchable online database administered by the Getty Research Institute. [10] In addition to nearly 100 articles on Baroque art (see From Caravaggio to Artemisia:Essays on Painting in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France,pp. 601–06,for a complete bibliography through 2002),he has published studies on the European painting collection in the Prince of Wales Museum,Bombay,India,and written for the Times Literary Supplement,The Artnewspaper,The Washington Post,and The International Herald Tribune. He was editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin from 1985 to 1988.
Spear was art historian in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1988. He received many research grants,including a post-doctoral Fulbright scholarship to Italy (1966–67),and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (1971–72),the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980–81),the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,D.C. (1983–84),the Guggenheim Foundation (1987–88),and the National Humanities Center (1992–93). Twice he won a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (1996,2007). In 1972 he was awarded the Daria Borghese Gold Medal for the best book of the year dealing with a Roman subject.
Guido Reni was an Italian painter of the Baroque period,although his works showed a classical manner,similar to Simon Vouet,Nicolas Poussin,and Philippe de Champaigne. He painted primarily religious works,but also mythological and allegorical subjects. Active in Rome,Naples,and his native Bologna,he became the dominant figure in the Bolognese School that emerged under the influence of the Carracci.
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists,initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of fifteen. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists,Gentileschi was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and she had an international clientele.
The Caravaggisti were stylistic followers of the late 16th-century Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. His influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from Mannerism was profound. Caravaggio never established a workshop as most other painters did,and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art,the psychological realism which can only be deduced from his surviving work. But it can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens,Jusepe de Ribera,Bernini,and Rembrandt. Famous while he lived,Caravaggio himself was forgotten almost immediately after his death. Many of his paintings were reascribed to his followers,such as The Taking of Christ,which was attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst until 1990. It was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. In the 1920s Roberto Longhi once more placed him in the European tradition:"Ribera,Vermeer,La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix,Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Berenson stated:"With the exception of Michelangelo,no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."
Simon Vouet was a French painter who studied and rose to prominence in Italy before being summoned by Louis XIII to serve as Premier peintre du Roi in France. He and his studio of artists created religious and mythological paintings,portraits,frescoes,tapestries,and massive decorative schemes for the king and for wealthy patrons,including Richelieu. During this time,"Vouet was indisputably the leading artist in Paris," and was immensely influential in introducing the Italian Baroque style of painting to France. He was also "without doubt one of the outstanding seventeenth-century draughtsmen,equal to Annibale Carracci and Lanfranco."
Domenico Zampieri,known by the diminutive Domenichino after his shortness,was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School of painters.
Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato,also known as Giovanni Battista Salvi,was an Italian Baroque painter,known for his archaizing commitment to Raphael's style. He is often referred to only by the town of his birthplace (Sassoferrato),as was customary in his time,and for example seen with da Vinci and Caravaggio.
Giovanni Lanfranco was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.
The Palazzo Spada is a palace located on Piazza di Capo Ferro #13 in the rione Regola of Rome,Italy. Standing very close to the Palazzo Farnese,it has a garden facing towards the Tiber river.
Francesco Furini was an Italian Baroque painter of Florence,noted for his sensual sfumato style in paintings of both secular and religious subjects.
San Carlo ai Catinari,also called Santi Biagio e Carlo ai Catinari is an early-Baroque style church in Rome,Italy. It is located on Piazza Benedetto Cairoli,117 just off the corner of Via Arenula and Via dei Falegnami,a few blocks south of the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle.
Clovis Whitfield is an art historian and art dealer based in London,where he runs Whitfield Fine Art. He is a member of the Society of London Art Dealers.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori,also known as Giovan Pietro Bellori or Gian Pietro Bellori,was an Italian painter and antiquarian,but,more famously,a prominent biographer of artists of the 17th century,equivalent to Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century. His Lives of the Artists,published in 1672,was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art. «Bellori is the "predecessor of Winckelmann" not only as an antiquarian but also as an art theorist. Winckelmann's theory of the "ideally beautiful" as he expounds it in Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums,IV.2.33 ff.,thoroughly agrees—except for the somewhat stronger Neoplatonic impact,which is to be explained perhaps more as an influence of Raphael Mengs than as an influence of Shaftesbury—with the content of Bellori's Idea; he frankly recognizes this indebtedness in Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1767),p. 36.»As an art historical biographer,he favoured classicising artists rather than Baroque artists to the extent of omitting some of the key artistic figures of 17th-century art altogether.
Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693) was an Italian scholar and art historian from Bologna,best known for his biographies of Baroque artists titled Felsina pittrice,published in 1678.
Sir Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse was an English art historian and museum director who specialised in Roman baroque and English painting. He was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland (1949–52) and held the Barber chair at Birmingham University until his official retirement in 1970.
Italian Baroque art is a term that is used here to refer to Italian painting and sculpture in the Baroque manner executed over a period that extended from the late sixteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries.
The Lives of the Modern Painters,Sculptors,and Architects or Le vite de' pittori,scultori et architetti moderni is a series of artist biographies written by Gian Pietro Bellori (1613–96),whom Julius von Schlosser called "the most important historiographer of art not only of Rome,but all Italy,even of Europe,in the seventeenth century". It is one of the foundational texts of the history and criticism of European art.
The Last Communion of St. Jerome is a 1614 painting by Domenichino. It was commissioned for the church of San Girolamo della Caritàin Rome in 1612 and is now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. The composition is very similar to a painting of the same subject by Agostino Carracci. Domenichino's rival,Giovanni Lanfranco,accused Domenichino of plagiarism due to the similarities.
The Archery Contest of Diana and Her Nymphs is a 1616 painting by Domenichino.The painting was stolen by Cardinal Scipione Borghese from its original owner,Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini. This painting is also known as Diana and her Nymphs after the Hunt,Diana Hunting, and even The Hunt of Diana. This painting is now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome,Italy.
Marjorie Elizabeth Cropper is a British-born art historian with a special interest in Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque art and art literature. Dean of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) since December 2000,she previously held positions as Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University and director of the university’s Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at Villa Spelman in Florence.
Portrait of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi is a 1604 oil on canvas painting now in York Art Gallery,to which it was presented via the National Art Collections Fund in 1955 by Francis Denis Lycett Green (1893–1959),a collector and younger brother of Sir Edward Arthur Lycett Green,3rd Baronet. Long attributed to Domenichino,it is now usually attributed to Annibale Carracci,though some art historians still support the old attribution based on archival discoveries. The Gallery accepts the new attribution,though this is not yet reflected in its ArtUK entry.