A Thousand Words
The Marriage of Tobias and Sarah
by Carlo Dolci
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
Carlo Dolci? Isn't he the father of holy card art? Sappy Madonnas and weepy saints? I thought this was a serious column . . .
Poor Carlo Dolci. Though his paintings were highly prized (and priced) among the Medici and the connoisseurs of seventeenth-century Florence, the taste for them in later years has largely vanished. Recent exhibitions and new scholarship, however, have begun to spark appreciation for Dolci as an able artist and an eloquent spokesman for the doctrinal and pastoral concerns of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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