Maryvelma Smith O’Neil’s Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome is the first monograph in English on this important but relatively unstudied artist. In five interpretive chapters accompanying a handlist of works, the author aims to raise the standing of Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643) in modern art history through a consideration of his artistic development—as painter and as draftsman—within a social and institutional context. In addition to this already ambitious project, O’Neil considers Baglione’s literary production: Le nove chiese (1639) and Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (1642). A book of this scope has long been awaited by scholars of Baroque art and is no small achievement, especially when the most extensive primary source concerning the artist’s production remains his autobiography, appended to the Vite. O’Neil’s important monograph compiles considerable information about Baglione and introduces many of the central artistic and historical issues of his professional life, though one wishes that these had been better formulated and more responsibly addressed.

O’Neil’s first chapter, “The Trial,” launches her reevaluation of Baglione with a new interpretation of his libel suit in 1603 against Caravaggio, Onorio Longhi, Orazio Gentileschi, and Filippo Trisegni for the two defamatory verses they circulated. This oft-told story is now recounted from Baglione’s point of view and is construed as a foiled “plot to inflict artistic death upon Baglione” (35), whose Resurrection (now lost; preparatory study, Paris, Louvre) for the Jesuits reportedly provoked the envy of his peers. Contrary to O’Neil’s reading, neither the self-contradictions in each of the defendants’ testimonies, nor Longhi’s assault of Baglione and his pupil Tommaso Salini less than two months after the trial, substantiates a concerted plot. Though the author asserts that Caravaggio and his cronies “dared [Baglione] to prepare for a public exhibition,” and that “they mutually vowed to lure the beast from his lair … so that he would be a public laughingstock whose unworthiness of the prized gold chain would be evident to everyone, especially Cardinal Giustiniani” (25), she provides no evidence of such intent. Furthermore, her claim that they staged the public paragone between Baglione’s Divine Love (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) and Gentileschi’s Saint Michael at San Giovanni Decollato in order to demonstrate the former’s shortcomings undermines her broader argument that Baglione was already well esteemed by Cardinal Giustiniani and other prominent patrons.

O’Neil sets her account of this “craftily devised but parlous plan” (9) within a “highly ritualized social context” (13), including both delinquency and a range of criminal behavior, such that it becomes difficult to judge whether this bitter competition between Baglione and Caravaggio was, in fact, representative of the seventeenth-century Roman art world as a whole. Readers will necessarily harbor some misgivings about her interpretation of the trial when she minimizes Baglione’s own culpability in the tug-of-war for artistic preeminence by casting doubt on the validity of Gentileschi’s testimony, which had presented Baglione as an artist arrogant enough to challenge with his Divine Love not one but two artists: Gentileschi and Caravaggio.

“The Trial” points to the complex dialectic between an artist’s position within or on the margins of the art-historical canon and his reputation during his own lifetime, a situation further complicated by the fact that Baglione’s standing was challenged by two contemporaries who are very much at the center of current scholarly inquiry. The blame for Baglione’s ongoing neglect is laid at the feet of Caravaggio scholars, who “assume the standard antagonistic position against Baglione” (1). This claim, however, turns out to be something of a straw-man argument, supported not with examples from scholarly studies but with a quotation from Derek Jarman’s script for his film Caravaggio (published as Caravaggio [London: Thames and Hudson, 1986, 94]) and with reference to Peter Robb’s sensationalized novel M (Sydney: Duffey and Snellgrove, 1998). As the growing attention to Baglione attests, a gradual surge of interest in the lesser lights in Caravaggio’s immediate circle is one of the by-products of the recent flood of scholarship on that artist, and it is no accident that it is to Caravaggio specialists in particular that O’Neil pitches her book by opening it with a reconsideration of the trial. The book’s structure nevertheless divorces this event from an examination of the artist’s development, implying that “Baglione’s intermezzo Caravaggesco” (3) was neither a serious artistic engagement nor one with lasting consequences. Yet as late as 1610–12, the lessons learned from Caravaggio’s Amor vincit omnia (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Rome, Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi) were still visible in Baglione’s paintings for the Cappella Paolina in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore, though he had by that time, as O’Neil correctly notes, developed his own personal manner.

The following two core chapters (2 and 3), “Making a Name” and “Fame and Fortune,” loosely trace Baglione’s artistic development as draftsman and painter in relationship to his artistic training, workshop practice, the fledgling Accademia di San Luca, the lives of his patrons, the reception of his paintings, contemporary art theory, and his theoretical revelations in the Vite. In particular, O’Neil’s study of Baglione’s preparatory studies, previously little investigated, is a major contribution. The breadth of her treatment, however, with its wealth of information about contemporary Roman culture, sometimes comes at the expense of a sustained consideration of his exchanges with and contributions to contemporary artistic culture or of a clear reconstruction of the artist’s stylistic development. Some essential information such as medium and dates for Baglione’s works is to be found in the handlist, which updates Renate Möller’s catalogue (Der römische Maler Giovanni Baglione [Munich: Tuduv, 1991]) without supplanting it.

Countering the conventional association of her subject with Caravaggio in chapter 4, “Man of the Arts,” O’Neil provides a more balanced view of Baglione’s career within his immediate context of the nascent Accademia di San Luca. This useful introduction to a period of the Academy’s history, still little understood but receiving growing scholarly attention, underscores Baglione’s commitment to the institution from its inception in 1593 until his death in 1642. O’Neil outlines the educational ideals of the organization and attributes to Baglione, who was president in 1606, a similar dedication to the instruction of young artists. The intermittent meetings of the early Academy and the relative absence of documentation attesting to its programs in the first decades of its existence leave open the questions of the extent to which a program of drawing after the nude was actually set in place and to which Baglione’s early drawing was informed by his Academic engagement, an influence that O’Neil takes for granted. This chapter’s potential (the author acknowledges, 5, it to be a “work in progress”) is diminished by her tendency to collapse the distinctions both between theory and practice and between documented fact and speculation, instead of teasing out each pair’s interworkings. Relying on the early histories of the Academy as well as the published statutes of 1609 setting forth its strictures on artistic production in Rome (such as the prohibition of private assemblies of artists and the sale of unauthorized work), the author concludes that these last “provide unwitting testimony of actual artistic practice in seventeenth-century Rome” (167). Given the relative absence of documentation concerning the institution’s programs and the tendency of extant sources to speak to its objectives, O’Neil’s more cautious assertion in another passage that the ordinances “display the Academy’s ‘serious will’ to exercise its jurisdiction over artistic production in Rome” (166–67) seems preferable.

O’Neil’s final chapter, “First Historian of the Roman Baroque,” describes the historical significance of Baglione’s literary projects, raising the question of his motivation for writing the Vite, which Giovan Pietro Bellori dismissed as a vendetta against another of the artist’s rivals, the painter Gaspare Celio, who had written a treatise on painting in 1638. O’Neil attempts to explain away Bellori’s criticism as no more than a means to establish his intellectual independence from two youthful associates: Baglione and his publisher, Ottavio Tronsarelli. In so doing she sidesteps the difficult question of why Bellori went so far as to note in his own copy of the Vite that neither Baglione nor his publisher were very knowledgeable about painting. Baglione’s view of the function of his literary works and his own perception of the relationship between his literary endeavors and his pictorial production would have been valuable avenues of inquiry.

The book is further marred at times by the author’s careless treatment of documentation and primary sources. Though asserting that “a diplomatic transcription of the court report [of the libel trial] … yields new insights into the real artistic issues at stake” (3), O’Neil provides only an English translation of Mia Cinotti’s publication of the original (Caravaggio e le sue grande opere di S. Luigi dei Francesi [Milan: Rizzoli, 1971], 153–57). O’Neil’s book will almost exclusively interest specialists, for whom the English serves little purpose, so the absence of the original text will be a source of frustration. Her definitions of Baglione’s critical terminology sometimes confuse more than clarify artistic issues as in, for example, her consideration of his application of the term “dal naturale” to Caravaggio’s painting. She argues that Baglione, on the one hand, did not wish to suggest “portrait-like verisimilitude,” nor “an exact similitude … on the surface of a canvas,” nor “Caravaggio’s objective relationship to a model” (36), but, on the other hand, that he intended to register “his impression at the remarkable semblance of presence that was attained by means of lifelike colors and chiaroscural modeling of figures” (37). One is unnerved to find O’Neil’s interpretation of the sources is sometimes driven by her desire to champion Baglione’s originality and to diminish Caravaggio’s. She incorrectly reads Baglione’s remark about Caravaggio’s three paintings in the Contarelli Chapel (“alcune pitture del [sic] naturale”) (37) as a comment on the figures within (my emphasis) his Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, from which she makes the claim that Baglione, unlike any other of Caravaggio’s biographers, recognized that the artist relied on artistic sources as well as on live models. Closer editing on the part of both author and publisher would have greatly enhanced this book. The production suffers in several places where inconsistencies in text references, captions, and plate numbers have gone unnoted, and the quality of the plates does not always do justice to the images.

History has not been kind to Giovanni Baglione, whose finest paintings—the two versions of Divine Love (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, and Rome, Museo nazionale d’arte antica, Palazzo Barberini), Judith and Holofernes (Rome, Galleria Borghese), and Saints Peter and Paul (Rome, Santa Cecilia)—and many of his drawings insistently call into question the grounds for such neglect. Maryvelma Smith O’Neil has justifiably challenged his marginalization in modern scholarship, amply demonstrating that both Baglione’s art and his critical fortunes are worthy of renewed attention. That 2002 also saw the publication of a group of essays on the artist by Italian scholars (Giovanni Baglione [1566–1644]: Pittore e biografo di artisti, ed. Stefania Macioce [Rome: Lithos, 2002]) is further evidence that the tide of Baglione studies is turning. It is a pity that in attempting to give due credit to Baglione’s manifold contributions to art history, O’Neil never completely lays to rest the question of his reputation to focus on the most interesting artistic problems, and at times she sinks into an apology. Yet if some of the valuable questions raised by Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome are answered only provisionally, this book will nevertheless serve as a stimulus to Baglione studies and to students of Baroque art.