Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis. Amanda Wunder. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. xviii + 210 pp. $84.95.
don) and Saint Agatha (1664/65, private collection), Baldassari points out that the glazed surfaces with jewel-like colors painted by Dolci have long been admired as “impressive technical accomplishments—the result of his documented slowness and otherworldly calling to perfection” (22). The book’s numerous high-quality illustrations invite the reader to enter Dolci’s realm of impossibly tight brushstrokes and alluringly saturated hues. In “Looking at Carlo Dolci,” Edward Goldberg examines seventeenthcentury criticism of Dolci, which could have perhaps been presented more clearly from the outset of the book as directly influencing Dolci’s later reception. The artist and biographer Filippo Baldinucci, for example, wrote of the “diligence” of Dolci in a way that suggested his works were lacking in invention. Goldberg makes the important point that most of Dolci’s works would have been placed in personal spaces within his patrons’ homes. It would be fascinating to hear more about how such domestic settings might have influenced the artist’s delicate style in works like the Christ Child with a Garland of Flowers (1663, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), where the Christ Child’s open gesture and gentle gaze invite the viewer’s devotion. While works by Dolci recall some stylistic aspects of paintings by Correggio and Bronzino, his style remains original, and perhaps most comparable to the brilliant effects created through the technique of pietre dure, as Scott Nethersole points out in “Carlo Dolci and the Art of the Past.” Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato’s essay “Doctor and Confratello: Antonio Lorenzi’s Patronage of Carlo Dolci” includes an unusual focus on Dolci’s bourgeois patron, Doctor Lorenzi, who also treated the artist for depression. The reader is left feeling that there is yet more to be discovered about Dolci, especially in examining his Self Portrait (1674, Uffizi, Florence), a simultaneously melancholic and playful self-representation. Straussman-Pflanzer’s final essay is a fascinating presentation of widely varying reactions to the artist’s paintings, ranging from the praise of Thomas Jefferson, to John Ruskin’s utmost disdain. The few narrative paintings and drawings included in the book are not discussed in depth, even though Dolci’s use of chalk to softly model the features of his sitters, as in the Portrait of a Girl (1665, Getty, Los Angeles), is both exquisite and reminiscent of Rubens’s approach to depicting children. That the reader is left with a yearning to learn more about Dolci and his meticulous painting and drawing techniques is a testament to the authors’ success in arguing on behalf of the artist’s merits.