Genoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power into a thriving banking center for Europe in the seventeenth century. The wealth accumulated by its leading families spurred investment in the visual arts on an enormous scale. This volume explores how artists both foreign and native created a singularly rich and extravagant expression of the baroque in works of extraordinary variety, sumptuousness, and exuberance. This art, however, has remained largely hidden behind the facades of the city's palaces, with few works, apart from those by the school's great expatriates, found beyond its borders. As a result, the Genoese baroque has been insufficiently considered or appreciated.0Lavishly illustrated, 'A Superb Baroque' is comprehensive, encompassing all the major media and participants. Presented are some 140 select works by the celebrated foreigners drawn to the city and its flourishing environment. Offering three levels of exploration-essays that frame and interpret, section introductions that characterize principal currents and stages, and texts that elucidate individual works-this volume is by far the most extensive study of the Genoese baroque in the English language.00Exhibition: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA (03.05.-16.08.2020) / Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, Italy (03.10.2020 - 10.01.2021).

Genoa was a fabulously wealthy cosmopolitan municipality in the 17th century, with a rich and diverse artistic tradition. Nourished by a range of commercial links with other European cities, its rulers and citizens built sumptuous palaces and churches on the strength of the wealth generated by the Genoese bankers who came to dominate international finance. From about 1600 to the early-18th century the large patrician class, composed of wealthy and educated patrons, vied with one another to commission the most beautiful and lavish altarpieces, paintings and sculpture.

In the seventeenth century, many young artists from the north and south of the Netherlands gained experience in Rome. However, that Flemish artists in Genoa contributed to lively artistic exchange and trade is less known. In this book the author Alison Johnston Stoesser throws new light on their activities during that day and age, particularly on those of the brothers Lucas and Cornelis de Wael. As artists and dealers, the brothers had connections with many key figures in the Flemish and Genoese art world, including the painter Anthony Van Dyck. For forty years Cornelis, the youngest brother, enjoyed great successes with his paintings of everyday scenes, fairs, and field and naval battles. In addition, the brothers sold the works of other artists as well as many other objects of devotion.

Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.

The second largest city in 17th-century Europe, Naples constituted a vital Mediterranean center in which the Spanish Habsburgs, the clergy, and Neapolitan aristocracy, together with the resident merchants, and other members of the growing professional classes jostled for space and prestige. Their competing programs of building and patronage created a booming art market and spurred painters such as Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano as well as foreign artists such as Caravaggio, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Giovanni Lanfranco to extraordinary heights of achievement. This new reading of 17th-century Italian Baroque art explores the social, material, and economic history of painting, revealing how artists, agents, and the owners of artworks interacted to form a complex and mutually sustaining art world. Through such topics as artistic rivalry and anti-foreign labor agitation, art dealing and forgery, cultural diplomacy, and the rise of the independently arranged art exhibition, Christopher R. Marshall illuminates the rich interconnections between artistic practice and patronage, business considerations, and the spirit of entrepreneurialism in Baroque Italy.

"Seventeenth-century Genoa was a fabulously wealthy cosmopolitan city with a rich and diverse artistic tradition. Its trade links reached across Europe and Genoa's patrician bankers, who came to dominate international finance, decorated sumptuous palazzi and churches. Into the early eighteenth century prosperous and educated patrons vied with one another to commission the most beautiful and lavish altarpieces, paintings and sculptures." "Baroque Painting in Genoa features the work of both native-born artists such as Bernardo Strozzi, Valerio Castello and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and those influential outside painters, including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck, who lived and worked in the city. It discusses the circumstances that made Genoa the centre of this remarkable flourishing of the arts and illustrates in full colour the masterpieces that define this fascinating period of Genoese history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Examines the designs of Italian buildings in the baroque and rococo architectural styles and discusses the careers of architects such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietra da Cortona