HISTORY OF ART PATRONAGE

The course will examine the relationship between patrons and artists in the Italian and European context, mainly during the 17th and 18th centuries.The artworks that will be analyzed will cover works of architecture, sculpture and painting.
The course will provide the students with the appropriate tools to consider the artistic and architectural expressions in relation to the context in which they were born.The artistic "genius" will then be compared with the dynamics of the commission and the expectations of the patrons to highlight the dialectical relationship between society and artistic creation.
At the end of the course students will be able to deal with the analysis of a work of art not only in terms of their formal and stylistic qualities, but they will also have acquired the ability to read the artist and his work from a socio-cultural angle.

- Knowledge and understanding: students must be able to know the examples treated in class and to understand their meaning in a historical and contemporary perspective.
- Ability to apply the acquired knowledge: students must use an appropriate vocabulary to express contents and meanings.
- Communication skills: students must know how to formulate the acquired knowledge in written and oral form.
- Learning skills: at the end of the course the student must be able to recognize and historically place the examples treated during the lessons. To this end, the student must know how to integrate the lecture notes with the reading of the indicated bibliography.

Basic knowledge of art and architectural history.

The program of the course includes an analysis of the relationship between patrons and artists in early modern Venice. We will mainly investigate the 17th and 18th centuries, but it will be necessary to frame the phenomena of the Baroque period in a wider temporal radius. The dynamics that led to the realization of significant architectural, pictorial and sculptural works both in the religious and in the profane and public sector will be examined. During the lectures certain works will be examined, crossing formal, typological, iconographic and stylistic analysis with the reading and interpretation of texts and historical documents.

Some visits are planned. Their organization will depend on the number of attending students.

A comment on the bibliography will be given during the course.
The texts dealing with specific topics of the course will be available through the Moodle page.

General studies on Venice:
• M. Favilla - R. Rugolo, Venezia barocca. Splendori e illusioni di un mondo in 'decadenza', Schio, Sassi editore, 2009.
• F. Haskell, Patrons and painters. A study in the relations between italian art and society in the age of the Baroque, London, Chatto and Windus Ltd, 1963 [trad. it. Mecenati e pittori. Studio sui rapporti tra arte e società italiana nell'età barocca, Firenze, Sansoni, 1966 e successive ristampe]
• Painting for profit. The economic lives of seventeenth-century Italian painters, a cura di R.E. Spear e P. Sohm, New Haven-London, Yale Univ. Press, 2010: cap. 5, Venice, pp. 206-244.
• R. Wittkower, Art and architecture in Italy 1600-1750, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, 1958 [trad. it. Arte e architettura in Italia 1600-1750, Torino 1972 e successive ristampe]; capitoli dedicati a Venezia.

The evaluation will be based on a written exams (approx. 2 hours) with three types of questions
1) 3-4 questions on topics discussed during lessons, conceived for very short ("telegraphic") but precise answers
2) From a range of several topics discussed during the course students will have to choose one and answer in form of a short paper
3) Students will be asked to write a short abstract of the text they have chosen from the above indicated bibliography.

lectures
Several visits will be organized.

Italian

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development