Operations of the Image: Painting, Medicine, and the Origin of Aesthetics in Baroque Rome and Naples

"Operations of the Image" considers the intersection of painterly and medical practices in early modern Southern Europe. This intersection occurred with new potency in the dawning of the surgical age, between 1604 and 1672, between Rome and Naples, and between Caravaggio (1571–1610) and his foremost conceptual inheritor, the Spanish-born Jusepe (or José) de Ribera (1591–1652). It would lay the groundwork for a radically modern conception of painting as an aesthetic and scientific object: an object which merited increasing scrutiny, invoked ethical judgements, called forth medicalized diagnoses, and produced an abundance of ‘knowledge’ (scientia). During this period painting would itself become an ‘operation’ (operazione), as Giulio Mancini described it. The materiality of the image would proffer the procedures of its own history; and, by extension, the resultant work would be opened to a new mode of historical scrutiny. Ale’s research recomposes a ‘diagnostic mediality’ – a typology of diagnosis across divergent media – from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, with the final chapter of their dissertation mapping the effects or ‘operations’ of certain works upon later artists and thinkers, such as Ribera’s Grotesques upon Gericault’s medicalized portraits and Murillo’s The Young Beggar upon Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik.

Sections of the present research have been delivered as public lectures (most recently, “Tending: Ribera’s ‘Pious Women’ and the Restoration of Art,” at the Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art) and have been variously published (“The Syphilitic Image”). Additional work on drawing and anatomy, specifically, has been presented at The Drawing Foundation and is forthcoming in the volume, Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions (Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2025).