School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemSwirls of shouts and rivers of shapes: futurism's crowd( 2016)This thesis sheds new light on the representation of crowds in paintings, drawings and illustrations by Italian futurist artists produced between 1900 and 1915. By focusing on the aesthetic and emotional responses of the Italian avant-gardist group to the urban multitudes, it proposes a new interpretation of how the Futurists conceived of the relationship between artist and crowd. Contrary to a tendency in recent scholarly literature to read Futurism's depictions of the crowd as constructing a political collective to be moulded in a manner akin to a proto-fascist vision of society, this thesis shows how in its early years the Italian artistic avant-garde elaborated a view of the crowd which resists such politically instrumental interpretations. Between 1910 and 1912 the Futurists artists, drawing upon attitudes to the crowd they had developed prior to joining the avant-garde movement, interpreted the spontaneous gatherings of the urban multitude as a startling visual phenomenon and as an expanded collective subject endowed with emotion. In such works, the futurist artists demonstrated their intention to implicate the viewer not in a collective action directed towards specific political goals, but rather in an intensely emotional, aesthetic experience. In 1914 and 1915, the Futurists turned their attention to mass gatherings associated with patriotic and interventionist campaigns in which the artists themselves were directly involved. In spite of their more explicitly political subject matter, in the artworks made during this period the Futurists were primarily concerned with depicting the crowd as a dynamic, heterogeneous context with which the artist was to merge and into which he disappeared. In both periods, this thesis argues, the Futurists did not envision the crowd in their visual works as a mouldable mass to be dominated and controlled by a political or artistic leader, but rather as an uncontrollable, immersive event in which the artist and viewer participated to the point of self-annulment and dispersion. Despite the rallying cries in the founding manifesto of 1909 and the various political views of the artists themselves in the period under analysis, futurist artistic depictions of the crowd between 1910 and 1915 were alternative to a proto-fascist imagery of political exhortation.
-
ItemAnatomy of a workshop: the Procaccini family in Milan( 2016)Contextualized in Milan between the end of the 16th and the start of the 17th century, this study investigates the artistic trajectory of the three Procaccini brothers: Camillo (1561-1629), Carlo Antonio (1571-1631) and Giulio Cesare (1574-1625), one of the most important families of painters of the early Italian Seicento. Descending from an Emilian background, the Procaccini influenced the evolution of Lombard art, establishing a famous workshop in Milan and playing a fundamental role in the artistic renovation of the Borromean era, one of the most fascinating periods in Milanese art history. Procaccini’s work is here analysed under the reciprocal perspective of the family workshop, inter-connecting their individual careers and understanding their success as the combination of mutual artistic choices, high level of specialization and precise business organization. In doing so this study revises and updates the modern scholarly literature, which has generally focused on the Procaccini’s individual careers, underestimating both their connections as family members and the importance of their workshop as the key locus of artistic growth and stylistic innovation. Predicated on a micro-sociological approach aimed at understanding the social and eco-nomic conditions under which Procaccini’s art was created, the study is organized according to a chronological framework that retraces the conceptualization, establishment and evolution of their family workshop. Starting from Camillo, Carlo Antonio and Giulio Cesare’s biographies as drawn in 1678 by the Bolognese art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia, it unravels the Procaccini’s business strategy, highlighting their mutual effort in becoming the most important family of painters working in Milan at the beginning of the 17th century. Dealing with macro-areas of analysis such as family workshops, artists’ training, aristocratic patronage and art market, the study looks at archival evidence of the Procaccini’s social and professional lives, proposing attributions based on documentary, stylistic and technical evidence. The result is a comprehensive analysis that, for the very first time, emphasizes the Procaccini’s role as a family of painters, providing an innovative approach for the study of their celebrated artistic careers.