'Il bello dal deforme': Caricature and comic drawings in seventeenth-century Italy

Filippo Baldinucci described caricature as a play between the beautiful and the ugly. This dialectic underlies my dissertation's approach to seventeenth-century Italian caricature and comic drawings. Early modern sources consistently point to Baroque Italy as the period when such drawings flourished, yet there exists no comprehensive art historical study of caricature. This dissertation explores the notion of play in the visual arts and the manipulation of cultural constructions of ugliness. The spirit of lusus gave rise to caricature--its sense of play, its graphic form, and the act of ugly drawing. Caricature emerged from the innovative curriculum of arts instruction in the Carracci Academy and was transformed into a visual form of social satire practiced by clever draftsmen, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, Guercino, and Pier Francesco Mola. Whether in the convivial atmosphere of the Carracci studio or Bernini's encounters with arrogant courtiers, "playfulness" determined the appearance, performance, and reception of these drawings.;As a display of intellectual wit, Seicento draftsmen appropriated ideas of the ugly that were manifest in academic and popular culture. Prints and publications on physiognomy and medical pathology, as well the more ephemeral broadsheet tradition fostered a fascination with monsters and monstrosity. Renaissance satirical writing produced verbal caricatures long before the emergence of a visual counterpart on the stage or on paper. The graphic economy of a seventeenth-century caricature belied the complexity of the drawing's cultural references, which demanded a sophisticated viewer to be fully appreciated. Play underlies the paradoxical nature of caricature, a paradox with strong ties to the poetics of concettismo, which ultimately provides a means to explore the discourse between beauty and ugliness in the seventeenth century.