Word: seicento
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Even in its more refined moments, seicento art in Naples was geared to a love of strong sensation and imminent catastrophe: crowds and Vesuvius in the background, diseases of the body, instabilities of the soul, Thanatos and Eros beating the big bass drum. One recognizes in the Magdalens and Madonnas the women that visitors like John Evelyn wrote of, "generally well-featured, but excessively libidinous." Even still lifes by artists like Paolo Porpora and Giovanni Battista Recco have the swollen intensity of painting infatuated with the surface of the world. However, Recco's picture of objects on a kitchen...
...degli Arcadi in imitation of classical antiquity, and stocked it with a museum of oils, many of which she had brought as baggage. Her Palazzo Riario near the Vatican became a "stopping place for every prominent and noble art lover of the age. While they proclaimed the era "il seicento de Cristina" she peeked and listened through a window concealed in the ceiling of her painting gallery. And when she died at the age of 61, Pope Innocent XI broke precedent by having her buried in a Vatican vault. As her death mask, disinterred last year, revealed, she remained cold...
Into the Future. Had he lived longer, says Hinks, Caravaggio "might even have diverted the whole course of seicento [17th century] painting." Even as it was, he inspired dozens of later masters. Rubens borrowed from his swirling, figure-full compositions; Vermeer took over and refined his trick of illuminating dim interiors with dramatic shafts of light; Rembrandt adapted to deeper use his habit of painting the faces of real people mysteriously veiled in shadow; Georges de La Tour appropriated his favored color scheme (red on black); Velasquez, the realest of realists, gained conviction from Caravaggio's absolute devotion...