by Jon Lackman | 25 April 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In CAA Reviews, John Beldon Scott considers Evonne Levy’s Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque: “Evonne Levy argues that art historians peremptorily dismiss totalitarian art because we judge it to be mere propaganda and therefore not worthy of consideration. Asserting that there is no such thing as ‘mere propaganda,’ her provocative and insightful book on the problem of art and propaganda focuses on the Jesuit Baroque in order to examine in detail the historical origins of this vast blind spot in our discipline … As Levy puts it, she aims to demonstrate ‘propaganda’s usefulness to art history.’ The by-product of this analysis is a critique of much art-historical writing, especially of the Early Modern period, which she sees as fetishizing the material object, its formal qualities, and its iconography to the exclusion of its ideological content and intended impact on the viewer … This is a risk-taking enterprise such as rarely occurs in the field of Early Modern Italian studies. In the scope of its intellectual effort and originality of insight, Levy’s study may suggest to some readers the mind-expanding impact of Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing.”
