Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy

This book focuses on artists who practiced depicting from life in Italy, both native Italians and migrants from northern Europe.

McTighe Sheila :

Sheila McTighe is Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She has written about Nicolas Poussin, Annibale Carracci, caricature, and genre painting and prints, focusing on 17th-century Italy and France.

"The objective of Sheila McTighe's book of this title is to understand the role of eye-witnessing, depicting 'from life', and the process by which works of art were made in Italy during the early modern period. [...] It is an ambitious remit that is superbly handled, revealing deep analysis based on close and prolonged looking, asking penetrating questions of the material, through contemporary sources."
- Mark McDonald, Print Quarterly, XXXIX, 2022, I

"Attending to recent focus in the discipline on the methods of artistic practice, the book sheds new light on little-understood aspects of early modern artistic working methods, from Caravaggio's 'true doubles' to Callot's miniaturization devices, to Claude's perspectival instruments. Through a rich historical contextualization, it also brings to the fore a range of interdisciplinary influences on art-making of the period, from court wit to instruments of vision, to mapping and measurement, and theatrical scenography."
- Professor Genevieve Warwick, University of Edinburgh

"[...] Representing from Life in Seventeenth-Century Italy contributes significantly to our understanding of a difficult and still underresearched subject. It can be recommended for undergraduates as well as specialists owing to its clarity of argument and sustained engagement with its visual materials."
- Thomas Balfe, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2

"In the most transcultural and trans-media study of the phenomenon of From Life picturing to date [...] this book restores richness and multifaceted complexity to the phenomenon, reframing it as a polysemous mode of picturing and unfolding the different utilities of representing From Life that served a range of meta-artistic, socio-political and cultural interests and agendas both individual and collective."
- Ruth Sargent Noyes, Seventeenth-Century News, Vol. 80, Iss. 1-2