University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 1-1-2016 Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia Kirk Nickel University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Nickel, Kirk, "Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1916. http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1916 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1916 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia Abstract The er ligious paintings of Alessandro Moretto, also known as Moretto da Brescia, have endured a mixed reception from modern art historians. Certain of his paintings are routinely praised for their supposedly unaffected naturalism and their attention to the mundane details of lived experience, while many more of his altarpieces, chapel laterals, and domestic religious images have been criticized for their compositional incoherence and their overly obvious references to other artworks. Through four focused case studies covering the full extent of his career and including both domestic and liturgical images, this dissertation interrogates the relationship between Moretto’s compositional disintegration and the subject matter of the pictures where this lack of integrity is most pronounced. Moretto’s images concerning Christ’s body frequently pursued a strategy of pictorial incoherence that forcefully separated the recognition and interpretation of Christ’s physical form from a painting’s perceived ability to make absent bodies present for a beholder.