Mancini, Giulio

(1588-1630)

   The private physician to Pope Urban VIII, Mancini was also an amateur art critic and patron. His Considerazioni sulla Pittura Thoughts on Painting, written largely between 1617 and 1621, is a guide for collectors on connoisseurship, conservation, and the proper display of art. For him, beauty in art had little to do with Neoplatonic concepts, as his contemporary theorists Giovanni Battista Agucchi and Giovan Pietro Bellori believed, and more with proportions, color, and expression. He felt that beauty exists in all things in nature and that even the deformed can be depicted in a pleasing manner as long as decorum is preserved. He severely criticized Caravaggio for using the corpse of a prostitute as his model for the Death of the Virgin he painted for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala, Rome (1605-1606). It was not Caravaggio's naturalism that bothered Mancini but rather the way he had disrespected the Virgin Mary in this particular work. Also interesting is the fact that Mancini was deeply opposed to censorship—this in an era when the Counter-Reformation Church was attempting to control art to use as weapon against the spread of Protestantism. Mancini specifically mentioned Girolamo Savonarola, who burned precious works of art in Florence, calling him an extremist. In his view, erotic art also had its place in collections, as long as they were covered and only shown by the owner to his wife or a person of confidence. Mancini's Considerazioni sulla Pittura reveals much about attitudes on art in the Baroque era and provides insight into patronage, collecting, and display practices.