Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Emanuele Pellegrini
Settecento di carta. L'epistolario di Innocenzo Ansaldi [XVIII Century on paper. Innocenzo Ansaldi's Epistolary]
Pisa, ETS, 2008
[1] Text of the back cover:
"Mengs, David and Batoni; Pollack, Lodoli and Piermarini; the San Severo Chapel in Naples and Milan's La Scala: these are just some of the names and monuments that are mentioned in the large epistulary of Innocenzo Ansaldi (1734-1816), a painter, poet and writer on art. Against the backdrop of the terrible eruption of Vesuvius in 1790, the transition of Napoleonic troops in Italy, the violent earthquake that devastated the South in 1805, the letters of Luigi Lanzi, Domenico Moreni, Luigi Crespi, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Sebastiano Ciampi, Francesco Bartoli, and Leopoldo Cicognara are exhibited. They discuss with Ansaldi the most various topics of history of art research of that period. Thus, in the pages of this epistolary (that illustrates and confirms the most lively picture of the Italian cultural situation at the turn of the century) names and attributions, severe critical judgments and favourable comments on paintings, sculptures, books, magazines, articles, drawings, projects, fashion and taste alternate themselves. Artists of the first order are part of this net: Anton Raphael Mengs, although praised, is reduced to a historically more balanced size than the view of those who recognised him as the best painter ever; Jacques Louis David is described as a "wicked and guilty person" perhaps for the only reason of being French. These are two examples, among many possible, of that whirlwind of contradictory and clashing opinions that enrich a debate in which there are a thousand paths and new perspectives are continuously added. There are no boundaries in the conversation between people who often knew each other only via correspondence: descriptions of churches, cities, palaces and villas stretch to cover the whole of Italy and for a chronological period of time that ranges from ancient Rome of Vitruvius to the present one of Winckelmann, passing through Deodato Orlandi, Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo and Bernini. It is the strength of a debate which is the basis of many of the current methodology. "
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[2] Announced since time (Pellegrini himself at p. 10 indicates that the printing of this book was delayed for at least three years), the epistolary of Innocenzo Ansaldi even better enriches the information on this scholar from Pescia, whose real stature has long been obscured by the very rare works which he managed to publish, as well as by the fact that the vast archive of Innocenzo remained in the family until the death of the last heir of the house in 1981, and was transferred to the Library of Pescia only in 1991. It is therefore necessary to signal here at least three publications of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that have drawn the attention of critics to him: first, the Descrizione delle sculture, pitture et architetture della città e sobborghi di Pescia nella Toscana (Description of the sculptures, paintings et architecture of the city and suburbs of Pescia in Tuscany), which was published in 1772 "upon betrayal" by Luigi Crespi and revived in a critical edition in 2001 after having been collated by Emanuele Pellegrini with other later, published or handwritten, versions); then second, Pistoia inedita. La descrizione di Pistoia nei manoscritti di Bernardino Vitoni e Innocenzo Ansaldi (Pistoia unpublished. The description of Pistoia in the manuscripts of Bernardino Vitoni and Innocenzo Ansaldi) which was edited by Lisa Zanni and Emanuele Pellegrini, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2003; and third and finally the collective work La Guida di Urbino di Innocenzo Ansaldi e altri inediti di periegetica marchigiana (The Guide of Urbino by Innocenzo Ansaldi and other unpublished periegetic texts on Marche) edited by Giovanna Perini and Giuseppe Cucco in 2004. Within this last volume it is important to remember the essay by Giovanna Perini on Innocenzo Ansaldi e la Guida inedita di Urbino (Innocenzo Ansaldi and the unpublished guide of Urbino), which remains in our opinion the most comprehensive and compelling biography on Ansaldi.
[3] The correspondence of Ansaldi is populated by figures with a diverse background and with varied objectives: "professors", "connoisseurs", "amateurs", collectors, noble or not, old friends or friends known only by letter. All are united by the reflection on art creation, in its most different forms; with all of them Innocenzo maintains a single and consistent approach over the decades: a maximum willingness to provide information to those who seek it, without any self-interest, in an apparent belief that this interchange would benefit all in their wealth of personal knowledge. Innocenzo Ansaldi, as far as these classifications are valid, fell into the category of "professors", i.e. those who had studied and practiced arts. Innocenzo’s life has a very special development: he studies and stays for several years in Florence and Rome, travels often and definitely visits many Italian cities, of greater or lesser importance, both for artistic commissions entrusted to him and for personal interest; thus, he gains a direct awareness on the field of the richness of Italian heritage. But a series of family misfortunes, between 1782 and 1783, force him to take up residence in his native Pescia, in order to take care of both the business of the mill that the family had owned there for more than a century and of the education of their nephews, orphaned at an early age. From Pescia and Valdinievole, Innocenzo will not move anymore and, from a certain point of view, it is a fortunate circumstance, because he remedied his sedentary live in the extreme periphery of Italy through feeding a dense epistolary correspondence with his correspondents until his death.
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| Anton Raphael Mengs, Self-Portrait, 1744 |
[4] In the correspondence emerge naturally discussions on topics that deserve to be further developed. Pellegrini highlights some of them with great acuity. What we found most interesting is the apparent gap that exists on the one hand between the Mengs-based cultural background of Ansaldi, but also of Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, his dear friend from Genoa (and Baldassare Orsini, with whom, unfortunately, does not remain today any witnesses of a correspondence with Innocenzo, that still should have been there) and on the other hand developments that all these figures had in the concrete development of their research once returned to their "small homelands". "To reduce the issue to a schematic black and white discussion, it could be argued that this is a clash between the ideal beauty on the one hand - which, however, remained the yardstick of contemporary artistic production - and an incipient relativism. The consciousness itself of the stratified and widespread heritage - both geographically and chronologically - brought more and more clearly such relativism to the attention of the correspondents" (p.29). "The many ‘amateurs’ and ‘professors’ of the Ansaldi type, who concentrated their energy on surveying the local territory, lacked [note of the editor: like Mengs and Winckelmann] any a-priori-systematic theory but rather had the capability to command the history of a given urban centre, that took them to relate themselves to their figurative culture and to calibrate their research framework to the individual cases they studied" (p. 34). And it is clear that the fieldwork could not but conflict with the coordinates of Mengs, in whose Gedanken über die Schönheit und über den Geschmak in der Malerey (Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting) there was only room for Raphael, Correggio and Titian. It is indeed the presence of the works of the most disparate architects on the territory to forces them to "historicize" the research and to exit from any theoretical scheme. From this point of view, Pellegrini calls for better understanding of the influence of a Muratori or a Maffei on this type of scholarship. "We still lack a comprehensive study on the actual fortune of the writings of these two scholars in artistic literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. However, from preliminary surveys in this sense, that fortune appears to have been very consistent: the references in footnotes, especially in the description of the city, to the works of Muratori and Maffei are not at all marginal, so as to suggest a deliberate and constant reference which means also showing interest in past research projects, but nevertheless considered methodologically fundamental" (p. 21).
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| Charles Roslin, Portrait of Nicholas Cochin (1774) |
[5] The themes and interactions in the chart are endless. We highlight three of them: (1) the figure of Carlo Giuseppe Ratti as a major hub of this network of letter-based scholarship (Ratti is signalling the figure of Innocenzo Ansaldi to Luigi Crespi first and Luigi Lanzi afterwards, as a leading expert in the art scene of Pescia and puts him in contact with them), (2) the attempt by a in many ways unscrupulous person like Luigi Crespi to produce a series of reports on the artistic heritage of specific – including very small - Italian locations – in the form of "pictorial letters" in response to the Voyage d 'Italie (Italian Voyage) by Nicholas Cochin . On this the writings by Giovanna Perini are a point of reference; see, for example Giovanna Perini Michelarcangelo Dolci e Luigi Crespi: le vicende della guida urbinate del 1775 dietro le quinte (Michelarcangelo Dolci and Luigi Crespi: the development of the 1775 Urbin guide behind the scenes) in Guide e viaggiatori tra Marche e Liguria dal Sei all’Ottocento (Guides and travellers between the Marches and Liguria between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries). Finally, (3) the particular relevance of the correspondence between Luigi Lanzi and Ansaldi. Lanzi has been set in contact with Ansaldi by Ratti because he is looking for more information about some of the architects of Lucca in view of the preparation of the second edition of his History of painting. Now, there is no doubt that Ansaldi, although he was never stingy with compliments about the literature and the research of his correspondents, has right from the start a clear view that his History of painting emerges sharply from all preceding and contemporary production as the synthesis point of an entire era. Therefore; we believe that he behaves at best - giving the best of himself - in a totally disinterested manner, in the letters to the abbot from the Marche. His review is not limited to the painters of Lucca, Pescia, Pistoia, but reaches up to the painters of the Sicilian School and the few sources on them (Ansaldi knows indirectly Father Fedele da san Biagio, the author of the Dialoghi familiari sopra la pittura – Family dialogues over the painting, published in 1788); Innocenzo goes so far as to discuss with Lanzi about the controversy over the invention of oil painting, knowing, through the reading of literary journals, about the publication of the work of Theophilus by Lessing in 1774 (for a summary, see: Paola Del Vescovo, Il Trattato di Teofilo e il problema dell’origine della pittura ad olio - The Treaty of Theophilus and the problem of the origin of oil painting).
[6] As noted above, the correspondence of Ansaldi is not complete (see the warnings by Pellegrini at p. 129); the core is made by the Ansaldi Fund in the Library of Pescia; then the search of possible letters started at the correspondence funds of the recipients, when available. In many cases, the gaps in the epistolary are not trivial, as, unfortunately, in the case of the correspondence with Carlo Giuseppe Ratti; There are other situations in which it seems difficult (even for internal evidence in the rest of the chart) that Ansaldi did not maintain a correspondence with other friends (this is the case, already mentioned, of Baldassare Orsini); Finally, the correspondence is missing of Ansaldi with Tommaso Francesco Bernardi, that “I could not publish because it is the subject of the work of others." For those who examined the letters of Innocenzo, for those who learn to know him and see him acting for decades with absolute disinterest in the republic of the arts of the late eighteenth century, this forced absence, though perfectly legitimate under a copyright angle, really sounds like a discordant note and a missed opportunity.
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