Art Practice and Prelingual Deafness: Historical Observations and Forgotten Careers

This paper looks at the careers of a selected group of deaf painters active in early modern Italy. It is informed by a methodological approach rooted in Richard Goldthwaite and Michael Baxandall’s pioneering analyses on the functioning of the painting industry in early modern Italy and expanded in the past two decades by studies by Richard Spears, Philip Sohm, Renata Ago and Patrizia Cavazzini. The study highlights historical trends and retraces careers that have long been forgotten. Artists' journeys are analysed through the lenses of the radical changes in the early modern understanding of deafness that characterised early modern Europe from the second half of the sixteenth century.