Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era
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A01=Livio Pestilli
Albergo Dei Poveri
Alison Lapper Pregnant
Annibale Carracci
antiquity
Author_Livio Pestilli
Baroque
Beautiful Gate
beggars
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
Buonamico Buffalmacco
Category=AGA
Category=AGH
Christ
Christianity
classical era
crippled
deformity
Del Mondo
Di Ripetta
disabilities
disability studies
early modern
Emblematum Libellus
Enea Vico
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Esposizione Universale
Ferrovie Dello Stato
healing
Ideal Christianity
injury
Innocent Iii
Innocent XII
Italy
Kultur Und Geschichte
Lame Man
lameness
medieval
middle ages
miracle
Orthopedically Impaired
Parisinus Graecus
Piazza Della Vittoria
Pinacoteca Vaticana
Renaissance
San Saba
Sixtus II
the body
Verano Cemetery
visual arts
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780367200268
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 174 x 246mm
- Publication Date: 23 May 2019
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The presence of the orthopedically impaired body in art is so pervasive that, paradoxically, it has failed to attract the attention of most art historians. In Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era, Livio Pestilli investigates the changing meaning that images of individuals with limited mobility acquired through the centuries. This study evinces that in distinct opposition to the practice of classical artists, who manifested a lack of interest in the subject of lameness since it was considered 'a defect or a deformity' and deformity a 'want of measure, which is always unsightly,' their Early Christian counterparts depicted them profusely, because images of the miraculous healing of the lame became the reassuring sign of universal acceptance and the promise of a more equitable existence in this life or the next. In the Middle Ages, instead, when voluntary poverty came to be associated with the necessary condition of faithfulness to Christ, the indigent lame, along with others who were forced to beg for a living, became the image of the alter Christus. This view was to change in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, when, with the resurgence of classical and Pauline ideals that condemned the idle, representations of the orthopedically impaired became associated with swindlers, freeloaders and parasites. This fascinating story came basically to an end in the Eighteenth century when, with the revival of the Greek ideal of the Beautiful, the lame gradually left center stage to be relegated again to the margins of the visual arts.
Livio Pestilli is Director and Professor of Art History at Trinity College-Rome Campus, Italy. He is the author of Paolo de Matteis: Neapolitan Painting and Cultural History in Baroque Europe (Ashgate, 2013).
