Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bolognese Painting: 

Ideology, Practice, and Criticism

This book focuses on the unique nature of early modern Bolognese painting that found its expression in stylistic diversity. The flourishing of different stylistic approaches in the Mannerist paintings of the previous generation evolved, in the work of the Bolognese painters, at the turn of the seventeenth century into an approach that is characterized by the combination of two or more styles in a single work of art. This stylistic diversity was a major innovation and major contribution to the history of art. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Bolognese approach was defined as eclectic by Johann Winckelmann, and since then early modern Bolognese painting became associated with eclecticism. 

The book therefore is also about that concept—eclecticism—which had a tremendous impact on the historiography of seventeenth-century painting. It deals with the history of a concept that shaped the shifting attitudes toward Baroque art in general, and the Bolognese school of painting in particular. Eclecticism has been at the core of modern scholarship regarding the Bolognese school of painting from the time it was first applied to the Carracci by Winckelmann. The alternate acceptance and rejection of the Carracci, and the painters considered to be their followers in the last 250 years, was connected to and affected by the prevailing attitude toward this concept.

The purpose of the book is, thus, to reconsider the validity of eclecticism in early modern Bolognese painting, to demonstrate eclecticism, to assess its ideological purpose, and to elaborate on its usage as an assisting tool in the delivery of religious messages. It focuses on what motivated painters in their use of combined styles, it surveys the evolving perception of this word from a straightforward definition through its pejorative interpretation, until the attempt made in the twentieth century to dismiss it altogether. It aims to rehabilitate the term and to insert it into its proper place within the parameters of an iconography based on religious needs prevalent at the time of the Catholic Reformation. 

Chapter One traces different attitudes toward eclecticism and its conceptualization.

Chapter Two explores the ideological context of non-assimilated eclecticism i.e. the use of two or more styles in a single work of art, which is made evident in Paleotti’s book on religious painting. 

Chapter Three is devoted to the implementation of eclecticism in artistic practice.

Chapter Four centres on a cultural art history of eclecticism’s reception and rejection. 

The book contains also an epilogue that brings to the fore an example of non-assimilated eclecticism in a Roman altarpiece in the Cerasi Chapel.