Volume 1, Number 4 · October 17, 1963
Going for Baroque
By Creighton Gilbert
Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque
by Francis Haskell
Knopf, 454 pp., $15.00
This is a fascinating book, on a fairly special subject. To read it, one has to possess a developed curiosity about historical causes and effects, and know something about artists of seventeenth-century Italy like Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Starting from that base, the author's Part One ties the careers and the styles of painting of these artists and others to the interests of the patrons who made them prosperous. The motivations of the Popes are the chief key: the violent shifts of taste when a new Pope appeared, the urgent need to create images of power quickly during a single reign, the preference for artists from the Pope's home town, the relative submissiveness of the Jesuits and other religious orders, all fall vividly into place. Some of the trends which Mr. Haskell illuminates and most of the facts are known to investigators of Baroque, but many items are the author's own finds, and his synthesis offers much that is new to the deepest specialist. Each of his criss-cross presentations dovetails beautifully.
Review, 1658 words
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