The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439–1650: Italian Art and Theatre by Alessandra Buccheri (review)

This study addresses the representation of clouds in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, from the initial formulations in early fifteenth-century Florentine stage designs to the full development of cloud illusionism in Rome, in both theatre and fresco painting, during the first half of the seventeenth century. The author, Alessandra Buccheri, seeks to explain the origins of Roman Baroque cloud designs; at the crux of her main argument stands the relationship between the representation of clouds in religious stage designs and in Italian art. This is a study, therefore, that brings into dialogue histories of art and theatre.

The nine chronologically arranged chapters address the ways in which cloud machinery and the theatrical heaven informed the painted formations of cloud illusionism from the early fifteenth century and through the middle of the seventeenth century. Chapter 1 addresses the representations and functions of clouds in late medieval art and theatre, with a focus on cloud machinery as a theatrical device. The second chapter considers the development, in the fifteenth century, of ‘heaven machinery’ and its subsequent adaptation in paintings by artists, such as Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lipi. Chapter 3 engages with Raphael’s and Correggio’s painted cloud structures and their distinct designs of illusionistic space (platform-clouds vs. bubble-clouds), along with the relationships of their respective modes of representation with religious theatre.

Chapter 4’s discussion centres on the shift that took place in sixteenth-century Italy from religious plays to Vitruvian-inspired theatrical spaces. The intricate stage designs and props used in these spaces were designed through a series of working drawings and etchings that likely also served as inspiration for artists. The compositional and perspectival struggles of painting large-scale cloud formations in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the solutions Venetian artists, like Tintoretto, found in Florentine theatrical designs are addressed in Chapter 5. In the next chapter, Buccheri deals with the factors that contributed to the new cloud constructions seen in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century that combined Correggio’s cloud structures and approaches to spatial illusionism with foreshortenings and aerial perspectives. Chapter 7 addresses the role of Tuscan artists in the development of cloud illusionism in seventeenth-century Rome, with a focus on Lodovico Cardi di Cigoli’s innovative contributions to cloud composition, in which heaven appeared as a series of platform-clouds devoid of architectonic barriers. Chapter 8 focuses on the work of Giovanni da San Giovanni and Giovanni Lanfranco as pioneers of the Roman Baroque, although with distinct approaches to cloud illusionism. The last chapter serves as the conclusion.

The Appendix provides two excerpts from Vasari, and the Bibliography contains both primary and secondary sources mostly in English and Italian.