Scenes from the religious life according to Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749)
(2024) Performing Theatricality and imaging religious ceremonies in early modern Western Europe — Location: Ghent University (15.May.2024)
Files
ScenesMagnascoGhentUniversity2024.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 114.04 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- As this conference deals with the theatricality and the ‘imaginaire’ of religious ceremonies, my intervention will focus on religious paintings made by the Genovese artist Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749). The artist is renowned for his paintings of religious life. We owe him "moineries" (Montesquieu's word), scenes of monastic life featuring Trappists, Franciscans, Camaldolese, Capuchins and Rococo nuns. The painter anchors these nuns and monks sometimes in their convents, sometimes outside, burying a monk, for instance. The painter is also famous for scenes of Quaker sermons, synagogue interiors and Jewish funerals, as well as paintings of pagan rites from Greco-Roman mythology. All these paintings attest to the artist's and his commissioners’ curiosity and interest in the diversity of religions and their rites. During his lifetime, this thematic originality was noted by the Magnasco's biographers, Ratti and Orlandi. Both praised, his invenzione non ordinaria implemented by his unusual, fragmented touch, which sometimes resulted from the use of the brush tip. In her dissertation on Magnasco published in 2022, Charlotte Mende even considered the painter's work as "a visual history of religions". But what kind of history does Magnasco construct with his colors? What are the specificities of his paintings in relation to the nascent comparative and ethnographic literature and iconography on the history of religions (Selden, Picart, etc.)? And how do they transform into pictorial facts religious rites, practices and cults that the painter may have witnessed or documented indirectly, presumably through engravings?
- Affiliations
Citations
Somon, M. G. M. (2024). Scenes from the religious life according to Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749). Performing Theatricality and imaging religious ceremonies in early modern Western Europe, Ghent University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/217541