From Caravaggio to Artemesia

A prominent scholar of Baroque painting, Richard Spear has explored a wide range of cultural, iconographic, connoisseurial, and conservation problems in his publications, many of which arose from two of his earliest research projects: organization of an international loan-exhibition, Caravaggio and His Followers, and his dissertation on the Bolognese painter, Domenichino, which resulted in a two-volume monograph with catalogue raisonne. His directorship of the Oberlin College museum strengthened his view that the work of art is the essential fact of inquiry, regardless of the approaches he has taken to interpreting the art of Domenichino, Guido Reni, Guercino, Artemisia Gentileschi, Georges de La Tour, and Poussin, among other 17th-century artists. As Editor-in-Chief of the Art Bulletin (1985-88) he commissioned essays on the state of research in Western art history, whose varied methodologies and interdisciplinarity underpin his recent writings, notably The Divine Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni. This volume brings together more than thirty of Richard Spear’s most important articles and selected chapters from his main books, organized in three sections, Caravaggio and Caravaggism, Italy and France, and Bolognese Painters. The author provides important addenda and retrospective critical reflections on each of the essays.