9/7/2017 Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art http://caareviews.org/admin/reviews/3066/preview#.WbGYIrJ96M8 1/3 Critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies Search About caa.reviews Book Reviews Exhibition Reviews Essays Recent Books in the Arts Dissertations Supporters View CAA Journals Visit the CAA Website August 16, 2017 Frances Gage Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. 248 pp.; 48 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271071039) Sheila Barker CrossRef DOI: Frances Gage’s Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art investigates the medical rationales for collecting art that are scattered throughout a well-known treatise by Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), Pope Urban VIII’s physician. Mancini’s medical thought was retardataire in the era of the Lincei, but his artistic connoisseurship was innovative. Thanks to Gage’s book, Mancini can now be appreciated for adding painters to Sandra Cavallo’s categories of “artisans of the body.” Following an introduction, biographical notes, and a chapter indicating the confluence of medicine and art in seicento Rome’s visual culture, three chapters analyze the medical applications of three categories of paintings: landscapes, paintings for the nuptial chamber, and histories. The physician’s observations on the bodily effects of these paintings are contextualized with reference to (mostly) earlier artworks; historical documents including family correspondence; and, above all, previous treatises on art, medicine, and customs. The chapter on landscapes, echoing Gage’s “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century” (Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 4 [Winter 2008]: 1167–1207), elaborates on Mancini’s claim that landscape painting comforts the eye with greenish hues and gentle incitement to ocular movement. Although Gage associates these ideas with the Italian Renaissance, they originated in classical thought and recrudescences can be found throughout history. For example, Carole Rawcliffe’s “‘Delectable Sightes and Fragrant Smelles’: Gardens and Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern England” (Garden History 36, no. 1 [Spring 2008]: 3–21) draws attention to such notions in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, and suggests that green walls and viriditas in tapestries were used in medieval England to replicate nature’s healthful qualities. Gage follows a well- trod path when associating Mancini’s passages on landscape painting with the longstanding medical commonplace that artworks, like music and fables, promoted health by affording distraction and delight. This medical rationale for art has been analyzed in relation to Renaissance collecting and villa culture by David Coffin, Arnold Witte, Elizabeth MacDougall, Claire Pace, Sandra Cavallo, and Tessa Storey, whose works serve as Gage’s compass. Surprisingly overlooked is the research that uncovers this medical rationale for art in explicitly medical contexts, including John Henderson’s The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (London: Yale University Press, 2006) and my article “The Making of a Plague Saint: Saint Sebastian’s Imagery and Cult before the Counter-Reformation” (in Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, eds., Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006, 90–131), which showed how pleasing imagery in Renaissance plague art served a prophylactic function. Wanting here is a deeper examination of the analogous interplay between music and health via theories of the nonnaturals. Gage mentions that Marsilio Ficino and Pedro Mexía endorsed music’s curative effects, but this is the tip of the iceberg (see e.g., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity, ed., Peregrine Horden, London: Routledge, 2000). Music occupied a central place at the Barberini court (documented by Frederick Hammond, Claudio Palisca, and Margaret Murata), and this was a missed opportunity to examine its medical applications, such as when Urban VIII entrusted his health to Tommaso Campanella’s planetary music after astrologers predicted he would die. This lacuna is all the more unfortunate since two of Rome’s premier landscape painters deeply understood music’s influence on the spirit: CAA News Subscribe to CAA News The newsletter of the College Art Association Review Categories