Prof. Lorenzo Pericolo will be lecturing on "The Baroque Body: From Caravaggio to Bernini" as part of the "Caravaggio & Bernini: Discovery of emotions" exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

In the late 16th century, at the transition to the Baroque, artists in Italy became increasingly aware that the arts were decaying due to their exaggerated artificiality. In order to give the works more naturalness again, reform artists like the Carracci turned to the study of the human body: the main theme of painting and sculpture. Nude drawing not only played a central role in didactic training to recapture nature, it also offered the opportunity for artistic experimentation. The study of the human body, which was used to realign the arts and bring it to the canonical level it had achieved in the High Renaissance, triggered an artistic revolution as well as the emergence of a new aesthetic. This lecture aims to shed light on the conditions and effects of the baroque revision of the human body.