New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory

In 1614 Padovanino, a virtually unknown artist, arrived in Rome, where he copied Titian's Bacchanals in the Aldobrandini collection. At about the same time the celebrated painter Domenichino did the same. In that year Domenichino also unveiled The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, which was clearly a repetition of an earlier work by his master, Agostino Carracci. Although Giovanni Lanfranco, Domenichino's rival, dismissed the painting as a theft, the larger Roman art community did not quite agree. This paper examines artistic influence and production in an age before anxiety and outlines an aesthetic of repetition in an age before originality.