Eclecticism and the Emergence of Baroque Painting in Italy

Daniel M. Unger

One of the most profound confusions that had a devastating impact on the entire study of Baroque painting in modern times relates to the concept of eclecticism. The idea of eclecticism is, actually,quite simple: It means borrowing freely from various sources. But in art history it became a very fundamental conceptbecause this theoretical viewpoint was attributed to a particular group of painters and affected their status for many years to come—theBolognese school of painting which included such great masters as Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Guercino.

Considering these painters as eclectics by later generations had a tremendous impact on the historiography of seventeenth-century painting and shaped the shifting attitudes toward Baroque art in general and the Bolognese school of painting in particular.

Eclecticism has been at the core of modern scholarship about the Bolognese school of painting from the time it was first applied to the Carracci in the second half of the eighteenth century. The dramatic vacillation—alternate acceptance and rejection—of the Carracci and the painters that were considered to be their followers, in the last 250 years, was connected to and affected by the prevailing attitude toward this concept. Eclecticism was defined, praised, condemned, and dismissed—but without a full and thorough examination of what it might stand for.

The purpose of my paper is to reconsider the validity of eclecticism, to demonstrate eclecticism in Baroque painting and to assess what might have been its ideologicalpurpose and its use in helping to deliver religious messages. I would like to argue that the use of eclecticism at the beginning of the Baroque period had an important and practical implication.

A Biographical Note

Daniel M. Unger is a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His main concern is on art and politics in seventeenth-century Italian painting.His monograph on Guercino was published by Ashgate in 2010. Danielpublished in such venues as Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte , Word & Image , Storiadell ’arte ,and Renaissance Studies . Currently he is writing a book onthe eclectics fromBologna.