'La semplice imitazione del naturale' Lorenzo Lippi's poetics of naturalism in seventeenth-century Florence

This dissertation traces the interplay of painting and poetry in Lorenzo Lippi's oeuvre. It uses Lippi's barely-studied mock epic Il Malmantile Riacquistato as an indispensable source for reconstructing the painter's art-theoretical ideas and his aesthetic choices. In reassessing the painter's cultural outlook as an intentional and polemical revival of a concept of naturalezza, which informed Florentine art and literature during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it also offers a new key to our understanding of Florentine Seicento culture. The discussion of Lippi's activity as a poet, his membership in the literary academy, Accademia degli Apatisti, and his close friendship with the Florentine poet Antonio Malatesti, also shed light on the little-studied literary culture of seventeenth-century Florence.; The first chapter offers an in-depth discussion of Lippi's Malmantile by tracing the large number of intertextual references resulting from Lippi's wide reading included therein. It emends recent research, which has hastily reduced the Malmantile to being only a playful copy of Alessandro Tassoni's La Secchia Rapita. Instead, Lippi creates a distinctly Florentine version of the mock epic, harking back to earlier works, such as Luigi Pulci's Morgante or Francesco Berni's Rifacimento. Chapter 2 analyzes the Accademia degli Apatisti, of which Lippi was a member and which informed his literary ideas. Chapter 3 revises the artistic image of Lorenzo Lippi created by Filippo Baldinucci, the author of the artist's most influential life in the Notizie de' Professori del Disegno. Chapter 4 is devoted to a reconstruction of the paradigms informing Lippi's naturalism. It argues that the stylistic change in Lippi's art documents a Florentine preference for an aesthetic of simplicity and naturalness. Chapter 5 is a reconstruction of the art-theoretical foundation of Lippi's art, for which the most authentic source is the Malmantile. This chapter also includes a discussion of Lippi's friendship with Malatesti and the Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa. Chapter 6 traces the reciprocal influence between painting and poetry in Lippi's oeuvre, especially in what is Lippi's Self-Portrait (Florence, Uffizi) and his Erminia and the Shepherds (Pistoia, Collezione Rospigliosi). Moreover, Lippi conceives his Malmantile as a 'written painting.'...