In Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome, Frances Gage
undertakes an in-depth study of the writings of the physician and
art critic Giulio Mancini. Using Mancini’s unpublished treatises
as well as contemporary documents, Gage demonstrates that in the
early modern world, belief in the transformational power of images
was not limited to cult images, as has often been assumed, but
applied to secular ones as well. This important new interpretation
of the value of images and the motivations underlying the rise of
private art collections in the early modern period challenges
purely economic or status-based explanations. Gage demonstrates
that paintings were understood to have profound effects on the
minds, imaginations, and bodies of viewers. Indeed, paintings were
believed to affect the health and emotional balance of
beholders—extending even to the look and disposition of their
offspring—and to compel them to behave according to civic and
moral values. In using medical discourse as an analytical tool to
help elucidate the meaning that collectors and viewers attributed
to specific genres of painting, Gage shows that images truly
informed actions, shaping everyday rituals from reproductive
practices to exercise. In doing so, she concludes that sharp
distinctions between an artwork’s aesthetic value and its utility
did not apply in the early modern period.
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