Baroquemania: a book talk by author Laura Moure Cecchini

Be a part of us at CIMA for a ebook chat with creator Laura Moure Cecchini presenting her newest e book Baroquemania: Italian visible culture and the design of national identity, 1898–1945 (Manchester University Push, 2022).

Laura’s ebook research the cultural politics of the Baroque in Italian modernism. This e-book radically reconceptualises Italian publish-unification visual lifestyle by checking out an element that has, right until now, been systematically ignored: its fraught entanglement with the Baroque.

Evoking a glorious earlier – the Roman Empire, the Center Ages, the Renaissance – performed a key part in developing a common Italian id adhering to the country’s unification in 1861. But the Baroque was thought of way too extravagant, kitsch, and whimsical to serve the intense country-constructing impulse that led to Fascism. Baroquemania sets out to redress this narrative. It interrogates a numerous variety of media, from paintings, sculptures, and properties to industrial illustrations, postcards, posters, pageants, images, films, and exhibitions. Situating Italy in just European and Latin American reimaginings of the Baroque, the book proves how prevalent use (and misuse) of the design was integral to articulating Italians’ ambivalent associations with modernity and tradition.

Unravelling the Baroque’s protean afterlife in the function and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Armando Brasini, Adolfo Wildt, and Lucio Fontana, amid many others, this e-book reveals the Baroque’s part in revolutionary a distinctively Italian strategy to present day artwork, one that was neither anti-modernist nor completely dedicated to avant-garde values. By analyzing how the Baroque haunted Italian visual society, Baroquemania delivers a clean glimpse at an vital component of Italy’s development into a fashionable country.

Gentle Refreshments will be served.

Laura Moure Cecchini is Assistant Professor (Ricercatore di tipo B) in the Office of Cultural Heritage at the Università di Padova (Padua, Italy). She was a receiver of the Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard College and Associate Professor of Artwork and Art Heritage at Colgate University. Her investigate focuses on the transnational legacies of fascist visual and content society. She is now at perform on two tasks, one examining creative exchanges concerning Italy and Argentina in the context of transatlantic fascist diplomacy, and the other on the product ‘debris’ of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Her do the job has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Selva, 3rd Text, Modernism/modernity, and Oxford Artwork Journal. Laura’s investigation has been supported by grants from the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities, CIMA- Heart for Italian Modern day Artwork, The Wolfsonian-Florida Global College, and the Cesare Barbieri Fund at Trinity School, amid other establishments.