Parma
9438 Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Il Seicento
Catalogo delle opere. Il Seicento
VV. AA. Curated by Lucia Fornari Schianchi. Introduction by Luciano Silingardi
1999 / 230 PAGES.
Language: Italian
Edited, like the previous ones, by Lucia Fornari Schianchi, this third volume of the catalogue raisonné of the Galleria Nazionale di Parma stems from the need to shed new light on the 17th century that, in the curator’s view, for a long time and undeservedly did not enjoy adequate fame.
As Luciano Silingardi recounts in the preface to this volume, the 17th century was the period in which what Attilio Bertolucci calls ‘the Parma nation’ took shape, that is, a culture that diversified the capital of the duchy from the rest of the other cultural centres of the Po Valley and made it, together with nearby Piacenza, unique. This new culture was born in both cities from the great ambitions of the Farnese dukes of the Baroque century, ambitions that had great repercussions on the quantity and quality of the artistic products commissioned and then realised by artistic personalities such as the Carracci, Bartolomeo Schedoni, Giovanni Lanfranco, Luigi Amidano and Sisto Badalocchio. As in the previous two volumes, the volume offers readers an in-depth cataloguing and review by a group of experts of the 17th-century works in the Galleria Nazionale di Parma, often bringing to the fore works and masters previously not duly recognised by scholars.