Andrea Vaccaro

This is the first scholarly monograph on one of the most important seventeenth-century painters of southern Italy. Although it is widely known that Vaccaro was one of the main protagonists in the artistic culture of Naples, modern scholars, particularly from the twentieth century, have often considered him to be a painter of second rank, perhaps due to numerous works of uneven quality that have been attributed to him. The aim of this book is to re-establish the historical role of Vaccaro, concentrating in particular on his secure and documented artistic production, by checking firsthand relevant literary and archival sources. The latter, including new documents found by the author, are gathered together for the first time and published in the appendix. Catalogue entries for Vaccaro's documented corpus, together with a re-examination of biographical data, allow for a better definition of the chronological development of Vaccaro's art.