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Silent Poetry: The Disputation on the Immaculate Conception by Carlo Maratti, Revisited

  • Stefano Colombo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 16. Juni 2022
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Abstract

This paper re-examines the Disputation on the Immaculate Conception by Carlo Maratti (1686) and its reception in hitherto understudied poems which were first published in 1686 and 1687. Although the poems are chiefly celebratory and refer to the tradition of encomiastic pictorial description, this essay demonstrates how they help us understand the beholder’s engagement with Baroque art. It first analyzes the poems as both encomiastic speech and ekphrastic poetry to explain how epideictic description persuasively moves readers to venerate the Virgin, thus rekindling the cult of the Immaculate Conception. Subsequently, a comparative reading of the poems and the painting demonstrates how art and literature mutually informed each other to create new aesthetic and intellectual values. A detailed comparison between visual and verbal languages will therefore offer a new interpretative framework to reassess the painting, the poems, and their public.


STEFANO COLOMBO received his PhD in art history from the University of Warwick. His research explores the interplay of art, literature, and visual rhetoric in the seventeenth century. His publications include journal articles on rhetoric and architectural invention in seventeenth-century Venice (JSAH 2021), poetry and Baroque sculpture (Word & Image 2019), and Jacopo Palma Giovane (Artibus et Historiae 2017).

Research and writing of this essay were supported by a generous grant from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in April 2021. I wish to thank Jérémie Koering and Dominic-Alain Boariu for their advice and assistance, as well as the editors of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and the two anonymous reviewers. I also thank Giacomo Comiati for his help in translating seventeenth-century Italian into English, and Kayoko Ichikawa for her constant support throughout this research. Unless otherwise mentioned, all translations are my own.


  1. Photo Credits: 1–4 © 2022 Foto Scala, Firenze/Fondo Edifici di Culto – Ministero dell’Interno. — 5–7, 11, 12 Wikimedia Commons. ― 8 The Metropolitan Museum, Victor Wilbour Memorial Fund, New York. ― 9 The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (URL: https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digitalcollection/01.+paintings/31606 [last accessed February 2022]). ― 10 Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome (photo: Gabriele Fichera).

Published Online: 2022-06-16
Published in Print: 2022-06-27

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 2.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ZKG-2022-2003/html?lang=de
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