Vol. 3.

Prints and drawings have been keenly collected in Europe since at least the early sixteenth century. Relatively modest in price, they offered artists, amateurs and collectors of a systematic turn of mind the opportunity to put together holdings with a wide representation of different hands, schools and types of subject. Prints and drawings are traditionally treated separately, but their collecting is shown here to raise many interrelated issues. Employing a wide range of methodologies, the essays in this volume offer a number of innovative investigations into the collecting, perception, classication and display of works on paper.

This volume represents a long overdue reassessment of the Neapolitan painter Paolo de Matteis, an artist largely overlooked in English language scholarly publications, but one who merits our attention for the quality of his work and the originality of its iconography, as well as for his remarkable ability to respond creatively to his patrons? aesthetic ideals and agendas. Following a meticulous examination of the ways in which posterity?s impression of de Matteis has been conditioned by a biased biographical and literary tradition, Livio Pestilli devotes rich, detailed analyses to the artist?s most significant paintings and drawings. More than just a novel approach to de Matteis and the Neapolitan Baroque, however, the book makes a significant contribution to the study and understanding of early eighteenth-century European art and cultural history in general, not only in Naples but in other major European centers, including Paris, Vienna, Genoa, and Rome.