Description
"The painterly style known as bravura emerged in sixteenth-century Venice and spread throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. While earlier artistic movements concealed artists' craftsmanship and creative process for the sake of presenting an ideal artistic image, bravura celebrated a painter's materials, techniques, and skill. This led to innovations in techniques and a popular understanding of the artist as an impetuous wunderkind and daring rebel. Practitioners of bravura included François Boucher (1703-70), Caravaggio (1571-1610), Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Frans Hals (1582-1666), Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Tintoretto (1518-94), and Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), among others. In this book, a translated, revised, and expanded edition of the author's German-language Bravura (Wilhelm Fink, 2010), Nicola Suthor offers the first sustained analysis of bravura painting as a movement, revealing its meaning as an artistic style, a term, and a cultural phenomenon. Suthor explores bravura's visible brushstrokes, sharp chiaroscuro, severe foreshortening of the body, and other forms of visual emphasis that cause the viewer to intensely feel the touch of the artist-all of which were groundbreaking inventions in visual presentation. Suthor examines bravura's etymological history, tracing its association with courage, boldness, impetuosity, and spontaneity, as well as imperiousness and arrogance, and henchmen, mercenaries, and hired thugs. Exploring bravura as a cultural phenomenon, Suthor examines the personality cult of the daring artist and the self-taught, antisocial genius who rebels against traditional education in stunning displays of skill. She also studies the ways in which bravura artists sought applause and admiration, and how they created new modes of representation, embraced the spontaneous and unpredictable, and manifested, as painter Giovanni Battista Armenini (1530-1609) wrote, the "greatness and obscurity of painting."--