Remp’s Ceiling Paintings in the Palais Attems in Graz

In the 17th and 18th century reproductive prints were one of the main mediators of artistic solutions and played a key role in the creation of ceiling paintings. This article discusses their use in three monumental frescoes in the Palais Attems in Graz, made by Franz Carl Remp (1674–1718) between 1705 and 1711, for Ignaz Maria Count Attems (1652–1732). All three frescoes testify of Remp’s use of reproductive prints made after works by Italian painters Pie- tro da Cortona (1596–1669) and Annibale Carracci (1560–1609). In some cases, Remp’s scenes are almost identical copies of depictions in reproductive prints, while sometimes they served as a compositional template or source for motifs, which he combined with other visual sources creating a whole new iconographic message.

Retooling Medievalism for Early Modern Painting in Annibale Carracci’s Pietà with Saints in Parma

Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) drew on the Italian Renaissance tradition of the Man of Sorrows to advance the Christological message within the altarpiece context of his Pietà with Saints (1585). From its location at the high altar of the Capuchin church of St. Mary Magdalene in Parma, the work commemorates the life of Duke Alessandro Farnese (1586–1592), who is interred right in front of Annibale’s painted image. The narrative development of the Pietà with Saints transformed the late medieval Lamentation altarpiece focused on the dead Christ into a riveting manifestation of the beautiful and sleeping Christ worshipped by saints and angels in a nocturnal landscape. Thus eschewing historical context, the pictorial thrust of Annibale’s interpretation of the Man of Sorrows attached to the Pietà with Saints was to heighten Eucharistic meaning while allowing for sixteenth-century theological and poetic thought of Mary’s body as the tomb of Christ to cast discriminating devotional overtones on the resting place of the deceased Farnese Duke.

O semblante como "palimpsesto transfigurado": de Annibale Carracci a Sherlock Holmes

La parte virgolettata del titolo la devo a un’espressione di Cesare Lombroso, il quale – nella Prefazione alla quinta edizione de L’uomo delinquente – scriveva di voler trattare il corpo umano alla stregua di un testo vivo in cui s’inscriverebbe la segnatura dell’interiorità umana, vale a dire il carattere e la nostra disposizione spirituale ai vizi e alle virtù. Sicché, nel caso dei pazzi e dei criminali, «si pu‰ spesso indovinare dalla fisionomia e dal cranio la loro tempra morale», mettendo in atto «una lettura, direi, di un palimsesto alla rovescia».