'Baroquemania: a counter-rationalist history of Italian art'. Review of: Laura Moure Cecchini, Baroquemania: Italian Visual Culture and The Construction of National Identity, 1898-1954, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 288 pp., 93 col. Plates, £ 80, ISBN 9781526153173.

Abstract

This review discussed the emergence of the Baroque in Italian visual arts as analysed in the book Baroquemania by Laura Moure Cecchini. In this book, the author shows how the baroque is a key element of the history of post-unification Italy which has been often neglected by the relevant scholarship on the matter. By reinscribing the Baroque within the Italian national paradigm, the book contributes to rewrite an important chapter of the history of Italian art in order to question its own foundational premises of an entirely rational strive to become a modern nation-state. In this way, Baroquemania represent an important addition to the existing scholarship on the relationship between the arts and the construction of national identity.