Carlo Dolci (1616-1686) was a Florentine painter whose reputation was high in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but whose work was little appreciated through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. Dolci had always been renowned for his piety and his melancholy, and for the slow work and painstaking technique which resulted in highly finished paintings. His earlier work included portraits, but most was devoted entirely to religious themes.
For Ruskin 'there is no entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century' ( Works, 5.400). In Ruskin's view the 'smoothness' and 'softness' (see the footnote on MP I:38, and Works, 12.300) of Dolci's language - and the pun on his name is presumably deliberate - as well as its 'polish' ( Works, 5.156) obscure the fact that Dolci has nothing to say. In the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) ( Works, 10.125) Ruskin suggests, without quite explicitly asserting, that Dolci, Guercino (1591-1666), Benjamin West (1738-1820), and John Martin are the four painters who, because of their 'theatrical commonplace' and 'false sentiment', have the 'most influence on the ordinary Protestant Christian mind'. A similar point about Protestant attitudes to art is made by Ruskin in Modern Painters IV:
The group calling themselves Evangelical ought no longer to render their religion an offence to men of the world by associating it only with the most vulgar forms of art. ( Works, 5.88)
Ruskin 's views were dominant at least until Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, p. 225, who refers to Dolci's 'languid devoutness', 'slick miniature technique' and 'false and even repulsive note of piety'. More recently McCorquodale called Dolci 'the most misjudged and abused artist of the seventeenth century ( McCorquodale, 'A Fresh Look at Carlo Dolci', p. 478)'. He writes of Dolci 'eliminating every detail which might detract from the image's value as a symbol', but he too makes the point that Dolci's work was 'the inspiration for every religious tract illustration, every third-rate representation of Christ from then on' (p. 485). See also McCorquodale, Painting in Florence 1600-1700 Exhibition Catalogue London: Royal Academy, and Langmuir, The National Gallery Companion Guide who writes positively of the 'poetic intensity' of The Adoration of the Kings bought by the National Gallery in 1990 (p. 189).
See Ruskin and the Italian School.