Becoming a Jesuit Artist in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy: Image, Normativity and Art Practice in an Unpublished Treatise on Painting

Elisa Spataro

This project, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, explores the complex interrelations and discrepancies between art theories and didactics during the first decades of the Jesuits’ global mission of conversion. The analysis focuses on the only surviving copy of Della Pittura, an unpublished treatise on painting written in the late sixteenth century by the Jesuit painter and architect Giuseppe Valeriano (1542–1596), which I recently rediscovered.
The rare manuscript, consisting of four books, is a textbook for artists who needed to learn how to paint sacred images. The first book defines painting as a medium and demonstrates its importance and its usefulness for religious and educational purposes. The second book is a treatise on anatomy for artists, with over ninety illustrations, now lost. The third book deals with composition according to the post-Tridentine norms of painting. The final book is an unfinished treatise on color and the use of pigments to represent different textures of human skin and clothing.
The text and its illustrations reveal the first laboratory for Jesuit teaching of painting after the establishment of the secular academies of art in Florence and Rome in the post-Tridentine era: chapters deal with theological issues underlying the making of sacred images and the process of painting. 
The main outcome of the project is to make accessible such a rare primary source through a complete transcription and annotated edition of the treatise, which will assess the role of artistic training in the visual agency of sacred images for the first generations of Jesuit artists, when the visual culture of the Society of Jesus was in the process of defining itself.