Livia Stoenescu | Texas A&M University (original) (raw)
Papers by Livia Stoenescu
The Pictorial Art of El Greco, 2019
Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art, 2018
Texas A&M University, 2020
Damiano Acciarino, ed. Paradigms of Renaissance Grotesques. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and R... more Damiano Acciarino, ed. Paradigms of Renaissance Grotesques. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2019. 597 pp. + 153 illus. $49.95. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University
The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez, exhibition catalogue, Mü... more The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez, exhibition catalogue, München: Hirmer, 2016. 334 pp. + 122 colored plates. €29. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University
Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art, 2021
Felipe Pereda. Crime and Illusion: the Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age, trans. Consuelo Lo... more Felipe Pereda. Crime and Illusion: the Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age, trans. Consuelo Lopez-Morillas. London/Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2018. 288 pp. + 127 illus. $151.25 Review by Livia Stonescue, Texas A&M University
Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds. Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions. Farnham, Surre... more Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds. Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014 + 358 pp. + 118 illus. $ 123.45. LIVIA STOENESCU, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY. This major collected volume demystifies an image of the extravagant Caravaggio looming large in art historical literature, and instead presents profound investigations of his historical underpinnings and pictorial idiosyncrasies. Caravaggio studies flourished exponentially in the wake of the 400th anniversary of his death, in 2010, that quickened an output of writings about this most independent and radical painter of the seventeenth century. In this massive outpouring of anthologies, single-authored books, and exhibition catalogues, Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone's Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions is riveting in its insights, breathtaking in its original methodologies, and standing out as an unsurpassably comprehensive foray into Caravaggio's art. Since the sec...
The Pictorial Art of El Greco, 2018
The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco... more The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco’s pictorial art as foundational to the globalising trends manifested in the visual culture of early modernity. It also exposes the figurative, semantic, and allegorical senses that El Greco created to challenge an Italian Renaissance-centered discourse. Even though he was guided by the unprecedented burgeoning of devotional art in the post-Tridentine decades and by the expressive possibilities of earlier religious artifacts, especially those inherited from the apostolic past, the author demonstrates that El Greco forged his own independent trajectory. While his paintings have been studied in relation to the Italian and Spanish school traditions, his pictorial art in a global Mediterranean context continues to receive scant attention. Taking a global perspective as its focus, the book sheds new light on El Greco’s highly original contribution to early Mediterranean and multi-institutiona...
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2017
Religions, 2021
Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) drew on the Italian Renaissance tradition of the Man of Sorrows to ... more Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) drew on the Italian Renaissance tradition of the Man of Sorrows to advance the Christological message within the altarpiece context of his Pietà with Saints (1585). From its location at the high altar of the Capuchin church of St. Mary Magdalene in Parma, the work commemorates the life of Duke Alessandro Farnese (1586–1592), who is interred right in front of Annibale’s painted image. The narrative development of the Pietà with Saints transformed the late medieval Lamentation altarpiece focused on the dead Christ into a riveting manifestation of the beautiful and sleeping Christ worshipped by saints and angels in a nocturnal landscape. Thus eschewing historical context, the pictorial thrust of Annibale’s interpretation of the Man of Sorrows attached to the Pietà with Saints was to heighten Eucharistic meaning while allowing for sixteenth-century theological and poetic thought of Mary’s body as the tomb of Christ to cast discriminating devotional overtone...
Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, Murillo: The Self-Portraits. New Haven, CT: Yale University... more Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, Murillo: The Self-Portraits. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 144 pp. + 65 color illus. $40.00. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University.
Andrew Casper. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy. University Park, Pennsylvania... more Andrew Casper. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. xiii + 221 pp. + 84 illus. $79.95. Andrew Casper's Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy breaks new ground in art historical literature by engaging recent research both in typological reassessment and in the plural temporality of works of art as well as the historical relations underpinning their meaning, form, and function. This represents a much-anticipated tack in El Greco studies, which have been dominated by questions of iconography, connoisseurship, and patronage. The book deals with the ten years encompassing El Greco's Italian sojourn, from his departure from native Crete in 1567-68 and subsequent settling in Venice, to his Roman period from 1570-76, before his final relocation to Toledo, his adoptive Spanish town where the artist died in 1614. The book concludes with a thoughtful analysis of the Santo Domingo...
Clare Robertson. Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. New Haven: Yale Univ... more Clare Robertson. Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. x + 450 pp. $75.00. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University.
The Assumption of the Virgin Mary has been regarded as a normative subject of post-Tridentine alt... more The Assumption of the Virgin Mary has been regarded as a normative subject of post-Tridentine altarpiece production. Yet it is actually a complex pictorial allegory that comments upon an archaic tradition of Christian narratives and its intersection with Marian devotion. The Assumption of the Virgin Mary belongs to a tradition of devotional images in which the Eucharistic meaning is the preferred means for furthering narrative ideas. The deeper meaning of the Assumption altarpiece becomes apparent in the light of the following points, demonstrated repeatedly throughout the study: 1) altarpieces of the Assumption represent a Marian subject informed by narrative liberty, not views of iconography and Tridentine history 2) their imagery is largely based upon visual narratives associated with the historical imagination of the painter 3) they disallow the pre-eminence of the classical model and incorporate other models derived from a resemblance to Byzantine icons and Northern prints 4) they are analogous to icons, essays praising truthfulness and inwardness which operate to convey complex pictorial ideas in narrative adaptations. The first chapter evaluates the narrative source of El Greco's altarpieces from Toledo. The medieval past of Toledo fused with the Byzantine tradition in an altarpiece form for which parallels are rare in the modern age. The second chapter examines Annibale Carracci's main Assumption altarpieces and a selection of related paintings. For Annibale Carracci, the original setting at the high altar safeguards the Eucharistic meaning of his Assumption narrative and in turn shapes the narrative link with the adjoining altarpieces. The third chapter involves the Northern devotional print as a narrative outset of Federico iii Zuccari's and Rubens' altarpieces. Their narrative solutions negotiate complex pictorial allegories and further the claim for truthfulness of representation inherent in the print.
The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velazquez, exhibition catalogue, Mu... more The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velazquez, exhibition catalogue, Munchen: Hirmer, 2016. 334 pp. + 122 colored plates. 29 [euro]. The catalogue associated with the exhibitions El Siglo de Oro: The Age of Veldzquez (Gemaldegalerie--Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2016) and The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velazquez (Kunsthalle der Hypo--Kulturstiftung 2016/2017) is a scholarly undertaking. While the exhibitions' purview was to present the German public with an unprecedentedly comprehensive access to leading seventeenth-century Spanish artists, the catalogue provided the theoretical undergirding for such enterprise. The focus on the significant, albeit understudied, painter Alonso Cano and sculptor Gregorio Fernandez; on the cultural differences and similarities between Spanish and Italian Baroque; on technical difficulty (dificoldad) as a feature central to the iconographical multiplicity of Spanish Baroque; on naturalistic t...
Aneta Georgievska-Shine and Larry Silver. Rubens, Velazquez, and the King of Spain. Farnham, Surr... more Aneta Georgievska-Shine and Larry Silver. Rubens, Velazquez, and the King of Spain. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014 + 297 pp. + 154 illus. $ 119.95. Review by LIVIA STOENESCU, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY. A seminal contribution to Spain's historical and visual culture in early modernity, the book deepens our knowledge of the Torre de la Parada, the former hunting lodge of the Hapsburg monarchs located near Madrid's Royal Palace of El Prado. The ruins of Torre still survive after the building's devastation by fire during the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, in the aftermath of which the Hapsburg collection was distributed among El Prado and other palaces. The authors focus on Torre's timeless attraction, namely, the painted decorations commissioned from Rubens, and subsequently from Velazquez, to personalize the hunting lodge to the Spanish court while maintaining a spontaneity inherent in the leisurely activities carried out in a royal environment. In 16...
RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne, 2010
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'
The Pictorial Art of El Greco, 2019
Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art, 2018
Texas A&M University, 2020
Damiano Acciarino, ed. Paradigms of Renaissance Grotesques. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and R... more Damiano Acciarino, ed. Paradigms of Renaissance Grotesques. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2019. 597 pp. + 153 illus. $49.95. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University
The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez, exhibition catalogue, Mü... more The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez, exhibition catalogue, München: Hirmer, 2016. 334 pp. + 122 colored plates. €29. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University
Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art, 2021
Felipe Pereda. Crime and Illusion: the Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age, trans. Consuelo Lo... more Felipe Pereda. Crime and Illusion: the Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age, trans. Consuelo Lopez-Morillas. London/Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2018. 288 pp. + 127 illus. $151.25 Review by Livia Stonescue, Texas A&M University
Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds. Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions. Farnham, Surre... more Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds. Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014 + 358 pp. + 118 illus. $ 123.45. LIVIA STOENESCU, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY. This major collected volume demystifies an image of the extravagant Caravaggio looming large in art historical literature, and instead presents profound investigations of his historical underpinnings and pictorial idiosyncrasies. Caravaggio studies flourished exponentially in the wake of the 400th anniversary of his death, in 2010, that quickened an output of writings about this most independent and radical painter of the seventeenth century. In this massive outpouring of anthologies, single-authored books, and exhibition catalogues, Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone's Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions is riveting in its insights, breathtaking in its original methodologies, and standing out as an unsurpassably comprehensive foray into Caravaggio's art. Since the sec...
The Pictorial Art of El Greco, 2018
The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco... more The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco’s pictorial art as foundational to the globalising trends manifested in the visual culture of early modernity. It also exposes the figurative, semantic, and allegorical senses that El Greco created to challenge an Italian Renaissance-centered discourse. Even though he was guided by the unprecedented burgeoning of devotional art in the post-Tridentine decades and by the expressive possibilities of earlier religious artifacts, especially those inherited from the apostolic past, the author demonstrates that El Greco forged his own independent trajectory. While his paintings have been studied in relation to the Italian and Spanish school traditions, his pictorial art in a global Mediterranean context continues to receive scant attention. Taking a global perspective as its focus, the book sheds new light on El Greco’s highly original contribution to early Mediterranean and multi-institutiona...
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2017
Religions, 2021
Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) drew on the Italian Renaissance tradition of the Man of Sorrows to ... more Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) drew on the Italian Renaissance tradition of the Man of Sorrows to advance the Christological message within the altarpiece context of his Pietà with Saints (1585). From its location at the high altar of the Capuchin church of St. Mary Magdalene in Parma, the work commemorates the life of Duke Alessandro Farnese (1586–1592), who is interred right in front of Annibale’s painted image. The narrative development of the Pietà with Saints transformed the late medieval Lamentation altarpiece focused on the dead Christ into a riveting manifestation of the beautiful and sleeping Christ worshipped by saints and angels in a nocturnal landscape. Thus eschewing historical context, the pictorial thrust of Annibale’s interpretation of the Man of Sorrows attached to the Pietà with Saints was to heighten Eucharistic meaning while allowing for sixteenth-century theological and poetic thought of Mary’s body as the tomb of Christ to cast discriminating devotional overtone...
Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, Murillo: The Self-Portraits. New Haven, CT: Yale University... more Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, Murillo: The Self-Portraits. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 144 pp. + 65 color illus. $40.00. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University.
Andrew Casper. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy. University Park, Pennsylvania... more Andrew Casper. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. xiii + 221 pp. + 84 illus. $79.95. Andrew Casper's Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy breaks new ground in art historical literature by engaging recent research both in typological reassessment and in the plural temporality of works of art as well as the historical relations underpinning their meaning, form, and function. This represents a much-anticipated tack in El Greco studies, which have been dominated by questions of iconography, connoisseurship, and patronage. The book deals with the ten years encompassing El Greco's Italian sojourn, from his departure from native Crete in 1567-68 and subsequent settling in Venice, to his Roman period from 1570-76, before his final relocation to Toledo, his adoptive Spanish town where the artist died in 1614. The book concludes with a thoughtful analysis of the Santo Domingo...
Clare Robertson. Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. New Haven: Yale Univ... more Clare Robertson. Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. x + 450 pp. $75.00. Review by Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University.
The Assumption of the Virgin Mary has been regarded as a normative subject of post-Tridentine alt... more The Assumption of the Virgin Mary has been regarded as a normative subject of post-Tridentine altarpiece production. Yet it is actually a complex pictorial allegory that comments upon an archaic tradition of Christian narratives and its intersection with Marian devotion. The Assumption of the Virgin Mary belongs to a tradition of devotional images in which the Eucharistic meaning is the preferred means for furthering narrative ideas. The deeper meaning of the Assumption altarpiece becomes apparent in the light of the following points, demonstrated repeatedly throughout the study: 1) altarpieces of the Assumption represent a Marian subject informed by narrative liberty, not views of iconography and Tridentine history 2) their imagery is largely based upon visual narratives associated with the historical imagination of the painter 3) they disallow the pre-eminence of the classical model and incorporate other models derived from a resemblance to Byzantine icons and Northern prints 4) they are analogous to icons, essays praising truthfulness and inwardness which operate to convey complex pictorial ideas in narrative adaptations. The first chapter evaluates the narrative source of El Greco's altarpieces from Toledo. The medieval past of Toledo fused with the Byzantine tradition in an altarpiece form for which parallels are rare in the modern age. The second chapter examines Annibale Carracci's main Assumption altarpieces and a selection of related paintings. For Annibale Carracci, the original setting at the high altar safeguards the Eucharistic meaning of his Assumption narrative and in turn shapes the narrative link with the adjoining altarpieces. The third chapter involves the Northern devotional print as a narrative outset of Federico iii Zuccari's and Rubens' altarpieces. Their narrative solutions negotiate complex pictorial allegories and further the claim for truthfulness of representation inherent in the print.
The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velazquez, exhibition catalogue, Mu... more The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velazquez, exhibition catalogue, Munchen: Hirmer, 2016. 334 pp. + 122 colored plates. 29 [euro]. The catalogue associated with the exhibitions El Siglo de Oro: The Age of Veldzquez (Gemaldegalerie--Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2016) and The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velazquez (Kunsthalle der Hypo--Kulturstiftung 2016/2017) is a scholarly undertaking. While the exhibitions' purview was to present the German public with an unprecedentedly comprehensive access to leading seventeenth-century Spanish artists, the catalogue provided the theoretical undergirding for such enterprise. The focus on the significant, albeit understudied, painter Alonso Cano and sculptor Gregorio Fernandez; on the cultural differences and similarities between Spanish and Italian Baroque; on technical difficulty (dificoldad) as a feature central to the iconographical multiplicity of Spanish Baroque; on naturalistic t...
Aneta Georgievska-Shine and Larry Silver. Rubens, Velazquez, and the King of Spain. Farnham, Surr... more Aneta Georgievska-Shine and Larry Silver. Rubens, Velazquez, and the King of Spain. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014 + 297 pp. + 154 illus. $ 119.95. Review by LIVIA STOENESCU, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY. A seminal contribution to Spain's historical and visual culture in early modernity, the book deepens our knowledge of the Torre de la Parada, the former hunting lodge of the Hapsburg monarchs located near Madrid's Royal Palace of El Prado. The ruins of Torre still survive after the building's devastation by fire during the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, in the aftermath of which the Hapsburg collection was distributed among El Prado and other palaces. The authors focus on Torre's timeless attraction, namely, the painted decorations commissioned from Rubens, and subsequently from Velazquez, to personalize the hunting lodge to the Spanish court while maintaining a spontaneity inherent in the leisurely activities carried out in a royal environment. In 16...
RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne, 2010
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'