This thesis seeks to broaden existing knowledge of the great Sicilian Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina whose work has in recent years been the subject of a growing corpus of research. The main objective is a reassessment of the available evidence of his legacy, in Sicily and Venice, perpetuated by the artistic activity of his immediate family circle, including his son Jacobello, his nephews Salvo d’Antonio, and Antonio and Pietro de Saliba and other close relatives. In this way, it provides precious insights into the workings of the family bottega which, there is reason to believe, Antonello and later his followers operated in both Messina and Venice. Special consideration is given to Antonio de Saliba whose works have survived better than those of the other artists. Moreover, he is the subject of many of the known documentary evidence. His artistic profile has, as a result, become better defined, but this study has also helped to clarify our understanding on the other antonelliani, and, to an extent, of Antonello himself. The thesis bases its arguments and conclusions on the functioning of artistic workshops, networks of patronage and the techniques used in structures and execution of altarpieces. The main argument is that Antonello revolutionised artistic production in eastern Sicily, and his legacy continued to be propagated without much change by his immediate circle for up to five decades from his demise. Furthermore, the thesis confirms how thanks to Antonello’s Venetian sojourn, his son and De Saliba nephews ventured to Venice, broadening their artistic horizons. Circumstantial evidence confirms that they came into contact with one of the greatest artists of the Venetian Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini, with whose bottega they were, it is here proposed, attached.

This thesis concerns a shift in the historiography of the Venetian painter Giorgione (c1477- 1510). In important ways, this change was caused by Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) in their A History of Painting in North Italy (1871). This text met seminal reactions from Walter Pater (1839-1894) in his essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877) and from Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) in his Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin (1880). Following a method of close reading, the analysis will concentrate on the intertextual relationship between these three works. This thesis contends that Crowe and Cavalcaselle comprehensively problematised scholarship on the artist, creating a “new” Giorgione; that Pater responded dialectally to scientific connoisseurship with aesthetic criticism, intellectually justifying and morally absolving his interpretation; that Morelli responded by offering a noticeably different catalogue of paintings, and by making Giorgione function within his anti-authoritarian rhetoric as a validation for his method; however, in so doing, Morelli was conducting an ironic problematisation of connoisseurship in general. The thesis begins with an introduction to the “old” Giorgione, before discussing the concepts of aestheticism and connoisseurship. It is then divided into three studies and a conclusion. The first part considers how the artist was understood in the nineteenth century prior to Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s research, before discussing the nature of the two connoisseurs’ enquiry. The second part focuses on Pater and his relationship with Giorgione, placing his essay in the context of The Renaissance (1873); after this the study follows Pater as he defines his theory of aesthetic criticism and responds to what he understands as scientific history, before analysing his interpretation of Giorgione. The third and final part of this thesis will seek to understand Morelli’s ambiguous text and the function of the artist within it; examining his method, rhetoric, and polemic with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, it will conclude by arguing that irony was an active concept in Morelli’s thinking. By attending to a specific artist’s historiography at a particular time, this thesis indirectly reveals the way art history on Italian painting operated in this period, when the discipline was undergoing the processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation.

My dissertation is an investigation of how early Renaissance paintings from Venice and Florence were discussed and appraised by authors and collectors writing in these cities between 1550 and 1800. The variety of source material I have consulted has enabled me to assess and to compare the different paths pursued by Venetian and Florentine writers, the type of question they addressed in their analyses of early works of art and, most importantly, their approaches to the re-evaluation of the art of the past. Among the types of writing on art I explore are guidebooks, biographies of artists, didactic poems, artistic dialogues, dictionaries and letters, paying particular attention in these different genres to passages about artists from Guariento to Giorgione in Venice and from Cimabue to Raphael in Florence. By focusing, within this framework, on primary sources and documents, as well as on the influence of art historical literature on the activity of collecting illustrated by the cases of the Venetian Giovanni Maria Sasso and the Florentine Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, I show that two principal approaches to writing about the past emerged during this period: the first, adopted by many Venetian authors, involved the aesthetic evaluation of early Renaissance works of art, often in comparison to later developments; the second, more frequent among Florentine writers, tended to document these works and place them in their historical context, without necessarily making artistic judgements about them. A parallel analysis of these two approaches offers a twofold perspective on how writers and collectors engaged with early Renaissance art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

This thesis examines the city of Rome as a primary context of British sociability and portrait identity during the period from 1740 to 1830. Part I considers the work of the portrait painter Pompeo Batoni. It examines the pictorial record of grand tourist sociability at Rome in the 1750s, questioning the complex articulation of nationality among British visitors, and the introduction of overt references to antiquity in the portraiture of Pompeo Batoni. It subsequently interrogates Batoni's use of the partially nude Vatican Ariadne sculpture in five portraits of male grand tourists, dating from Charles John Crowle in 1762, to Thomas William Coke in 1774. Part II of this thesis considers the realities of viewing the sculpted body at Rome, recreating the studios of sculptors Christopher Hewetson and Antonio Canova. It postis the studio space as a locus of sociability for British visitors to Rome, drawing on the feminine gaze in the form of the early nineteenth-century writings of Charlotte Eaton and Lady Murray. The final chapter moves from the focus on British sitters to examine sculpture by Antonio Canova, framing it within a wider discourse of masculinity and propriety. Thte reception of Canova's nude portrait sculpture of Napoleon Bonaparte and Pauline Borghese is considered as indicative of cultural anxieties stemming from new conceptions of gender.

Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Looking Glass is an ironic allusion to both the concave mirror and the biconvex lens. It was these simple objects, in colloquial terms a shaving mirror and a magnifying glass, which Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, learned from Caravaggio how to use to enhance the natural phenomenon of the camera obscura effect. Painting from a projection meant that Artemisia could achieve an extreme form of realism and detail in her work. This knowledge, which was of necessity kept hidden, spooked the Inquisition and also gave artists, who knew how to manipulate the technology, an extreme competitive edge over their rivals. This dissertation challenges the naive assumptions that have been made about Artemisia's working practices, effectively ignoring the strong causal links between art and science in Seicento Italian painting. Introducing the use of optical aids by Artemisia opens up her story to a whole new generation of scholarship. / Art History / M.A. (Art history)

Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Looking Glass is an ironic allusion to both the concave mirror and the biconvex lens. It was these simple objects, in colloquial terms a shaving mirror and a magnifying glass, which Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, learned from Caravaggio how to use to enhance the natural phenomenon of the camera obscura effect. Painting from a projection meant that Artemisia could achieve an extreme form of realism and detail in her work. This knowledge, which was of necessity kept hidden, spooked the Inquisition and also gave artists, who knew how to manipulate the technology, an extreme competitive edge over their rivals. This dissertation challenges the naive assumptions that have been made about Artemisia's working practices, effectively ignoring the strong causal links between art and science in Seicento Italian painting. Introducing the use of optical aids by Artemisia opens up her story to a whole new generation of scholarship. / Art History / M.A. (Art history)