ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapter of this book. The book focuses on Sforza Pallavicino who has emerged as an important presence in papal Rome, a confidant of Urban VIII, Innocent X and especially Alexander VII. In fact, as the exchanges between Pallavicino and Bernini's biographies demonstrate, art literature too exists within a network of intertexts pertaining to different kinds of discourse. In other words, if the case for Pallavicino's direct involvement in contemporary artistic theory and practice is limited, his writings register some of the crucial theoretical issues of his times and indicate future developments. Art and human creativity exist because they provide access to God and furnish the appropriate means for worship. Once religion is removed as the central concern of humanity, innovation and relativism pose fundamental challenges to artistic theory, and human processes of observation and cognition have to find a new, equally elevated finality.
