Striving for Eternity: Material Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century Roman Painting

Laura Valterio

The project explores the history of seventeenth-century Italian painting from the perspective of raw materials. Focusing on the use of unconventional pictorial supports as an alternative to canvas (stone, copper, silk, glass), it examines how their production, working, ageing, and reuse generated meaning and transformed the historical understanding of the medium of painting. Special attention is paid to how the life cycle and circulation of materials encouraged processes of technical exchange and knowledge transfer between painting and other media (architecture, printmaking, optics). Thus, the study calls into question narratives that reduce artistic works to stable objects and develops an expanded notion of artistic production as the result of the collaboration of different actors across time.