From the Chapel to the Gallery: The Aestheticization of Altarpieces in Early Modern Italy

This dissertation examines the aesthetic response to altarpieces in early modern Italy, which culminated in the reconstitution of altarpieces as gallery paintings, when, beginning in the seventeenth century, wealthy collectors began removing them from churches and displaying them in their private collections. Such a transformation not only entailed a complete rupture in the function of these paintings – from object of public veneration to private delectation – but also frequently met with resistance and censure from local authorities. It is precisely because it was a very difficult thing to do that the documents concerning the removal of altarpieces are frequently revealing about contemporary attitudes toward art among collectors as well as ecclesiastics. In order to understand the mechanisms – both theoretical and practical –that had to be in place for such a transformation to occur, I explore the history of the altarpiece from the rise of ius patronatus as an economically motivated form of piety in late-medieval Italy, through the encroachment of artistic criteria such as invention and difficulty in the making and viewing of religious art in the sixteenth century, and, finally, to the post-Tridentine discourse on sacred images. Because the purpose of this study is to establish the church as a venue for a nascent connoisseurial discourse, I also consider the development of art collecting in Italy, which was circumscribed in extent through most of the sixteenth century. Lastly, I provide a comprehensive overview of the removal of altarpieces in seventeenth-century Italy, a phenomenon that has previously received only scant attention in art historical literature.Ph