Design for a Thesis Print with an Allegory of Knowledge and Portrait of Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger (1607-1671) ca. 1635 Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) Italian As scholar Louise Rice has identified, this highly finished drawing was preparatory for the image portion of a thesis print of 1635, designed by Pietro da Cortona and engraved by the German printmaker Theodor Matham. Seventeenth-century thesis prints were published as part of a broadside, or booklet, which served to communicate and celebrate a student's public defense of a series of theses (or conclusions) on a philoso
Design for a Thesis Print with an Allegory of Knowledge and Portrait of Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger (1607-1671) ca. 1635 Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) Italian As scholar Louise Rice has identified, this highly finished drawing was preparatory for the image portion of a thesis print of 1635, designed by Pietro da Cortona and engraved by the German printmaker Theodor Matham. Seventeenth-century thesis prints were published as part of a broadside, or booklet, which served to communicate and celebrate a student's public defense of a series of theses (or conclusions) on a philosophical, theological, or legal subject, done in person in front of three examiners. The thesis broadsides consisted of three parts: an image, a preface or dedication, and the detailed text of the dissertation on the subject. The image portion often depicts a composition based on allegorical, emblematic, and heraldic elements, usually allusive to the patron or sponsor of the student. As Rice notes, the particular thesis print connected to Cortona's drawing was produced to commemorate the defense in Philosophy by Giovanni Battista Labia, a young Venetian nobleman, at the Collegio Clementino in Rome. Below the image, the text portion in the print bears a dedicatory preface to Labia's sponsor, the powerful Cardinal Antonio Barberini The Younger (1607-1671), while the long text of the dissertation in the following pages examines 140 conclusions on topics in Aristotelian philosophy. See Louise Rice, "Pietro da Cortona and the Roman Baroque Thesis Print," in Pietro da Cortona: Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma-Firenze, 12-15 novembre 1997, ed. by Christoph Luitpold Frommel and Sebastian Schutze, Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), 1998, pp. seen in Cortona's dynamic drawing, the image portion of a thesis print often depicts a composition based on allegorical, emblematic, or heraldic elements, usually allusive of the patron, or sponsor, of the student. Cardinal Barberini's portra
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