080104 SE Ancient Philosophers and Philosophical Pictorial Themes in 17th Century Art (2024S)

In an essay published in 1970 (Il dissenso nella pittura: intorno a Filippo Napoletano, Caroselli, Salvator Rosa e altri, in Storia dell'arte, 5, 1970, pp. 34-65), the Italian art historian Luigi Salerno recognized similarities between a group of 17th-century artists with regard to their choice of rare and remote pictorial subjects. Artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Pierfrancesco Mola, Salvator Rosa, Pietro Testa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione were often in conflict with the authorities and expressed their rejection of the powerful in works that testify to shared intentions and philosophical interests. The condemnation of their own time and the shattering of hierarchical structures within society are expressed in these artists' preference for themes of Stoic and ascetic origin. At the same time, the search for escapism branches out into a dense network of themes such as magic, alchemy, the natural sciences and exoticism. The anecdotes surrounding the lives of ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Democritus, Heraclitus and Diogenes became increasingly prominent in the works of these artists from the 1630s onwards. From Diogenes throwing away his drinking cup after seeing a boy drinking water with his hands, to depictions of Socrates showing his students the path to self-knowledge, to Democritus meditating on the ills of his time, and images of the dramatic suicides of Seneca and Cato the Younger, a wide variety of philosophical pictorial subjects survived into the 17th century. Helen Langdon wrote of the ancient philosophers who suddenly took on a new significance in painting and printmaking: "They were outsiders, lonely and alienated, and they became symbols of many of the deepest concerns of the age. Around them clustered debates about the virtues of the simple life, about the ethics of poverty and the corrupting power of wealth, about the relationship of the intellectual to monarch and state." (Helen Langdon, Relics of the Golden Age: the vagabond philosopher, in T. Nichols [ed.], Others and outcasts in early modern Europe, Burlington 2007, p. 157). Building on the essay by Salerno and a fundamental contribution by Oreste Ferrari (L'iconografia dei filosofi antichi nella pittura del sec. XVII in Italia, in Storia dell'arte, 57, 1986, pp. 103-181), the course will examine representations of ancient philosophers and philosophical pictorial themes of the 17th century, focusing not only on the precise stylistic and iconographic analysis of selected works, but also on aspects of collecting and the social and cultural conditions under which these works were created.