Art Historiography and Artist's Biography in the Seventeenth Century. Giovanni Pietro Bellori's Vite in their Context

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Valeska von Rosen
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 256837748

In his Vite of seventeenth-century painters, sculptors and architects, published in 1672, Giovanni Pietro Bellori combined the traditional biographical functions of mediating information and evoking a lively image of the personalities characterized, with an interest in art historiography. Inevitably, he grappled with and partially rejected Giorgio Vasari's teleologically constructed historical narrative which by means of chronologically arranged Lives, reinforced by value categories, reconstructs "the" history of "the art". With his Vite, Bellori formulates implicitly and explicitly a more open model for the descriptiveness of the development of the arts. Over the last eight years, the German group of editors of Bellori's Vite, situated in Mainz, has based its work on numerous new, more recent perceptions with regard to textual structure and its genesis from 1640 to 1672, as well as in reference to Bellori's art theoretical premises. In a close reading of the Vite, the accompanying framework texts and further writings by Bellori, the project investigates the Italian author's intellectual position in reference to the task of writing art history by means of artists' biographies after Vasari. On this basis, the group places the Vite in its different stages of conception since the 1640s in relation to current models of artists' biographies and generally to models of knowledge classification and representation as well as seventeenth-century historiography, which in view of the immense expansion of knowledge reassessed its premises for scientific writing while creating new forms of representation. The Vite of the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci (1624-1679) will constitute another focal point of the investigation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants