Early modern European art is in overall need of innovative scholarly publications and dynamic exhibitions in order to reaffirm its significance and relevance. In light of this need, The Medici’s Painter, a publication accompanying an exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, is a refreshing look at a widely unknown, but incredibly talented, Florentine Baroque painter. Throughout the book, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer leads a noble effort to reevaluate Dolci’s paintings, overshadowed for centuries by circulating copies of lesser quality. The Medici’s Painter includes a foreword and chronology of the artist’s life, as well as five chapters devoted to a careful analysis of Dolci’s unique stylistic traits, the cultural and political contexts in which he worked, and an overview of his reception by his contemporaries and later writers. Francesca Baldassari’s essay “Diligenza Pratica Pazienza: The Painting of Carlo Dolci” presents both the luxurious finish of Dolci’s works and his personal spiritual interest in religious subject matters as reasons why he served as a painter to the Medici family in Florence and why his works remain worthy of consideration today. Closely examining a range of paintings, including Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (ca. 1666–70, Royal Collection, London) and Saint Agatha (1664/65, private collection), Baldassari points out that the glazed surfaces with jewel-like colors painted by Dolci have long been admired as “impressive technical accomplishments—the result of his documented slowness and otherworldly calling to perfection” (22). The book’s numerous high-quality illustrations invite the reader to enter Dolci’s realm of impossibly tight brushstrokes and alluringly saturated hues. In “Looking at Carlo Dolci,” Edward Goldberg examines seventeenth-century criticism of Dolci, which could have perhaps been presented more clearly from the outset of the book as directly influencing Dolci’s later reception. The artist and biographer Filippo Baldinucci, for example, wrote of the “diligence” of Dolci in a way that suggested his works were lacking in invention. Goldberg makes the important point that most of Dolci’s works would have been placed in personal spaces within his patrons’ homes. It would be fascinating to hear more about how such domestic settings might have influenced the artist’s delicate style in works like the Christ Child with a Garland of Flowers (1663, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), where the Christ Child’s open gesture and gentle gaze invite the viewer’s devotion. While works by Dolci recall some stylistic aspects of paintings by Correggio and Bronzino, his style remains original, and perhaps most comparable to the brilliant effects created through the technique of pietre dure, as Scott Nethersole points out in “Carlo Dolci and the Art of the Past.” Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato’s essay “Doctor and Confratello: Antonio Lorenzi’s Patronage of Carlo Dolci” includes an unusual focus on Dolci’s bourgeois patron, Doctor Lorenzi, who also treated the artist for depression. The reader is left feeling that there is yet more to be discovered about Dolci, especially in examining his Self Portrait (1674, Uffizi, Florence), a simultaneously melancholic and playful self-representation.

Straussman-Pflanzer’s final essay is a fascinating presentation of widely varying reactions to the artist’s paintings, ranging from the praise of Thomas Jefferson, to John Ruskin’s utmost disdain. The few narrative paintings and drawings included in the book are not discussed in depth, even though Dolci’s use of chalk to softly model the features of his sitters, as in the Portrait of a Girl (1665, Getty, Los Angeles), is both exquisite and reminiscent of Rubens’s approach to depicting children. That the reader is left with a yearning to learn more about Dolci and his meticulous painting and drawing techniques is a testament to the authors’ success in arguing on behalf of the artist’s merits.