Overview

In Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome, Frances Gage undertakes an in-depth study of the writings of the physician and art critic Giulio Mancini. Using Mancini’s unpublished treatises as well as contemporary documents, Gage demonstrates that in the early modern world, belief in the transformational power of images was not limited to cult images, as has often been assumed, but applied to secular ones as well. This important new interpretation of the value of images and the motivations underlying the rise of private art collections in the early modern period challenges purely economic or status-based explanations. Gage demonstrates that paintings were understood to have profound effects on the minds, imaginations, and bodies of viewers. Indeed, paintings were believed to affect the health and emotional balance of beholders—extending even to the look and disposition of their offspring—and to compel them to behave according to civic and moral values. In using medical discourse as an analytical tool to help elucidate the meaning that collectors and viewers attributed to specific genres of painting, Gage shows that images truly informed actions, shaping everyday rituals from reproductive practices to exercise. In doing so, she concludes that sharp distinctions between an artwork’s aesthetic value and its utility did not apply in the early modern period.

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Mancini's treatises are regarded as precious, if baffling, testimony about the early modern display of art. Frances Gage s original approach illuminates how Mancini's mentality and training as a physician colored his writing. Mancini focused on the effects of beholding paintings, especially in domestic settings. Aesthetic criteria are considered alongside values aligned with humanist medicine, as Mancini attends to how the various genres and qualities of painting should be deployed to affect a viewer to influence his health, shape the beauty of eventual progeny, exercise or tire the eye, or inspire virtue by presenting models of civil order. Gail Feigenbaum

Frances Gage s book is a remarkable study of the way in which seventeenth-century viewers often looked at paintings through a very particular and unusual lens, one focused on the various ways in which pictures affected health. This analysis of the efficacy of art brings us a new perspective with which to consider Seicento art and culture. Among the dozens of intriguing ideas Gage brings to our attention is the concept of the maternal imagination. In this period, women were thought to be extremely sensitive to pictures, so much so that, while they were pregnant, images they viewed could be internalized via their fertile imagination (literally). The wrong images could have harmful effects and even produce birth defects and monsters. This book will be of interest to scholars of women s studies, anthropology, the history of science, and religious studies, in addition to all art historians. Gage s scholarship is deep; her citations are wide ranging. The writing is very clear and a pleasure to read. David M. Stone, University of Delaware

A remarkable study of the way in which seventeenth-century viewers often looked at paintings through a very particular and unusual lens, one focused on the various ways in which pictures affected health. This analysis of the efficacy of art brings us a new perspective with which to consider Seicento art and culture. Among the dozens of intriguing ideas Gage brings to our attention is the concept of the maternal imagination. In this period, women were thought to be extremely sensitive to pictures, so much so that, while they were pregnant, images they viewed could be internalized via their fertile imagination (literally). The wrong images could have harmful effects and even produce birth defects and monsters. This book will be of interest to scholars of women s studies, anthropology, the history of science, and religious studies, in addition to all art historians. Gage s scholarship is deep; her citations are wide ranging. The writing is very clear and a pleasure to read. David M. Stone, University of Delaware

A remarkable study of the way in which seventeenth-century viewers often looked at paintings through a very particular and unusual lens, one focused on the various ways in which pictures affected health. This analysis of the efficacy of art brings us a new perspective with which to consider Seicento art and culture. Among the dozens of intriguing ideas Gage brings to our attention is the concept of the maternal imagination. In this period, women were thought to be extremely sensitive to pictures so much so that, while they were pregnant, images they viewed could be internalized via their fertile imagination (literally). The wrong images could have harmful effects and even produce birth defects and monsters. This book will be of interest to scholars of women s studies, anthropology, the history of science, and religious studies, in addition to all art historians. Gage s scholarship is deep; her citations are wide ranging. The writing is very clear and a pleasure to read. David M. Stone, University of Delaware

Mancini's treatises are regarded as precious, if baffling, testimony about the early modern display of art. Frances Gage s original approach illuminates how Mancini's mentality and training as a physician colored his writing. Mancini focused on the effects of beholding paintings, especially in domestic settings. Aesthetic criteria are considered alongside values aligned with humanist medicine, as Mancini attends to how the various genres and qualities of painting should be deployed to affect a viewer to influence his health, shape the beauty of eventual progeny, exercise or tire the eye, or inspire virtue by presenting models of civil order. Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute

Author Information

Frances Gage is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Buffalo State College, State University of New York, where she focuses on early modern Italian Art. She has contributed widely to books and journals, including Renaissance Quarterly and Burlington Magazine.

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