Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy

In the most transcultural and trans-media study of the phenomenon of From Life picturing to date, Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy investigates across works in print, graphic media, and painting to reveal new aspects of the artistic practice of a diverse cadre of artists in international Italian milieux and the critical implications of depicting dal vivo in Italy (and beyond) as a self-conscious departure from the norms of Italian arts, inflecting concepts of artistry and authorship, authority of images as sources of knowledge, boundaries between repetition and invention, and relations between images and words. Taking up a reconstructive approach similar to that brought to bear on Caravaggio's multi-layered canvases in Chapter 1, McTighe's analytical recourse to the print series in its original bound format enables an interpretation of the Capricci through the Erasmian lens of the Mirrors of Princes genre to clarify how Callot's marshalling of From Life pictorial modes formed and informed the etchings' theatrical and often vulgar, yet edifying and witty sequential narrativistic unfolding. Redounding this analysis of Cerquozzi's painting against the earlier account of Callot's Fair at Impruneta and period printed siege views, McTighe re-visits conflicting claims surrounding Revolt of Masaniello's status as a proto-journalistic first-hand depiction or an instantiation of absent witnessing resonating notions of From Life image-making to consider broader reconciliations of concepts of pictures' self-professed (topographical) accuracy and the reconstructive methods by which such pictures were manufactured in this period on both sides of the Alps. Namely, Parshall's recourse to an image produced by an artist of Northern European origin (Israhel van Meckenem) made in or after a sacred subject in Italy (the so-called Imago Pietatis icon in the church of Santa Croce di Gerusalemme in Rome), as possibly the first reproductive print and paradigm of a certain species of picture (the "counterfeit" image) that subsumed claims regarding its own origins in the presence of the subject through the artist's first-hand, objective eye-witnessing.