Marinelli, Alice; (2024) Painting Beyond: Encounters between Genre and New Testament Subjects in Early Modern Roman ‘Galleria’ Painting. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Alice_Marinelli_Alice Marinelli_Thesis_Library Version.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 December 2025. Download (1MB)

Abstract

In the picture galleries that emerged in seventeenth century Rome, New Testament scenes, whose boundaries were elsewhere policed by the stricter directives of the Counter-Reformation Church, were perplexingly allowed to intersect with a new repertoire of subjects representing everyday life and ordinary people. This thesis examines the uneasy relation between these previously distinctive types of painting, surprisingly brought together within the same representation. Such intersections, I argue, were made possible by the new space of the gallery itself, where religious art came to form part of a corpus of collected images and objects grouped not for reasons of iconography, style, or value, but primarily for purposes of intertextuality. This offered unparalleled opportunities to the young artists that, arriving in Rome from all over Europe at the turn of the century, set out to navigate an expanding art market. These artists, whose pictorial languages are generally flattened out by their outworn categorization as ‘followers’ of Caravaggio, were actually responsible for the creation of the complex intertextual images discussed in this thesis. These proved to be highly sought-after by patrons and thus required artists to continuously seek innovative approaches to the subject at hand. One of the goals of this thesis, thus, is that of returning distinctiveness to these artists’ visual vocabularies. At the same time, this thesis explores the new ways of seeing and knowing fostered by the different systems of knowledge these complex paintings brought together. Indeed, the intertextual compositions discussed also lead me to infer what challenges and opportunities they presented to the viewers of the galleria and what new forms of reception they activated. In particular, the unsettled and open-ended potential of these paintings turned beholders into active participants, something that was also allowed by the increased proximity between viewers and artworks that characterized the experience of art in the picture gallery.

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