Book Review

Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII

Stoenescu, Livia

2016

Overview

Pamela Jones, who objected to the state of research in the post-Tridentine decades, urged art historians in the introductory chapter of her monumental Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (1993) to explore the interrelation of art and patronage as well as the new avenues for religious art that the Counter-Reformation artist was provided with when working for his ecclesiastical patrons.Robertson posits Pope Clement VIII, Rome's most influential patron, as fully committed to Counter-Reformation goals and censorial measures (184); at the same time, Robertson cogently remarks that Clement VIII's interest in the reform of images fizzled out decades after the Council of Trent laid down regulatory measures in its concluding session (1563).[...]Robertson provides experts with a dense referential text, even as she perhaps deliberately avoided up-todate scholarly findings, instead choosing to include in her footnotes a large number of citations from Sebastian Schütze and Pamela Askew, whose studies have been drastically superseded since 1990 by novel and more complex literature.

• Publisher: Seventeenth-Century News
• Subject: 17th century / Artists / Carracci, Annibale / Clement VIII (Pope) (1536-1605) / Nonfiction / Novels / Painters / Patronage