Conference by Prof. Sante Guido
With interventions by prof. Denis De Lucca, Director of the International Institute for Baroque Studies
Under the patronage of the University of Malta – International Institute for Baroque Studies
Giovan Pietro Bellori (Rome 1613 – 1696) was one of the most important history of art theorists. With his very famous report “L’Idea del Bello” which he wrote in 1664 at Accademia di San Pietro he changed the perception of taste in Europe. Bellori was also the biographer of Baroque Italian artists. He was considered to be the equivalent of Giorgio Vasari of the Baroque period. The great art historian Julius von Schlosser in his fundamental work Letteratura artistica manuale delle fonti della storia dell’arte moderna (pp. 463-464) of 1924, wrote “the most important historiographer of art, not only of Rome, but of all Italy, actually of Europe in the Seventeenth Century is the erudite Giovan Pietro Bellori, whose value and whose influence cross by far the limits of this close field to which he belongs”, even though in 1950 Roberto Longhi criticized harshly Bellori because he did not understand the revolutionary value of Seventeenth century artists among whom Vélazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Cortona and Borromini.
Bellori’s biography of Caravaggio remained a fundamental text to understand the life of this great “damned” painter. Sante Guido will read and comment excerpts from Bellori’s work while at the same time explain works by Caravaggio, recreating the artistic and cultural atmosphere in which some of the most important works of art were born.
Free admission