Baroque Irony: Humor as a Painterly Strategy in the Counter-Reformation

Isabella Foglia, M.A.

This dissertation aims to examine humor and burlesque forms that found modes of expression in post-Tridentine Italy. In other words, it investigates how ironic, grotesque, and obscene language continued to manifest itself—transforming, adapting, and at times hiding—within Italian artistic production during the Baroque period. The research perspective is therefore also that of exploring possible forms of resistance to these dogmas on the part of artists, shedding light on the persistence of a comic code tied to a popular tradition deeply rooted in the preceding centuries, both in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A form of visual resistance that engages with the culture of concettismo, with artists’ academies, and with the dynamics of post-Tridentine patronage. Through an interdisciplinary methodological approach, the research also seeks to deepen the understanding of the influence of Italian burlesque poetics on Baroque artistic production. In Rome, I focus in particular on the Tuscan painter Giovanni da San Giovanni who, during his Roman period, carried out, among other commissions, seven frescoes for the cardinal’s palace of Guido Bentivoglio, today Palazzo Pallavicini–Rospigliosi. Central to the analysis of the painter’s use of irony is a group of letters he wrote during his Roman stay.