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Baldassarre Orsini
Dell’Architettura Civile di Baldassarre Orsini - Parte Prima [About Civil Architecture - Part One]
Edited by Adriana Soletti and Paolo Belardi
Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1997
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| Fig. 1) Historic Villas near Perugia: Villa San Martinello. Source: www.dimorestoricheitaliane.it |
N.B. On Baldassarre Orsini see also in this post: Baldassarre Orsini between Art and Science (1732-1810), Edited by Cettina Lenza and Vincenzo Trombetta, Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), Silvana Publishing House, 2017
[1] Text of the back cover:
"The volume contains the transcript as well as the historical-critical analysis of the first volume of the treatise on civil architecture (Dell’Architettura Civile) a work of the eighteenth-century by the "painter-philosopher" Baldassare Orsini: a manuscript which, although designed with specific educational purposes (Orsini, a long-time director of the ancient Academy of Design in Perugia, is an advocate of the need for a sound scientific education) shows direct relationships with the cultural debate of his time and is sensitive to the profound theoretical and conceptual changes which proves the irreversible crisis of humanistic principles and opens up the doors of modernity, across Europe around the second half of the eighteenth century.
A favourite pupil of Mengs and a man of wide culture, Orsini goes an extraordinarily unusual way with the drafting of the treatise on civil architecture, challenging the ethical-utilitarian ideas of Milizia. In the manner of Pozzo, he recognises perspective not as a mere representation technique, but rather as the purpose of architecture itself. So much, that he theorizes a very personal perspective architecture that, duly supported by continuous references to both historical and contemporary manuals, is supported by a large body of autograph drawings in which the author explores - in a perceptual key - some of the main monuments of the classical heritage."
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| Fig. 2) Historic Villas near Perugia: Villa San Martinello Source: www.dimorestoricheitaliane.it |
[2] The manuscript of the Architettura Civica is preserved with the 1740 mark at the Library of the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, the direct heir of the Academy of Design where Orsini was appointed director in 1790, holding that position practically in an almost uninterrupted manner until 1810. The work is divided into four volumes; the first two volumes compose the First Part (text and drawings), of a purely theoretical nature, and are the ones that are presented on this occasion by Adriana Soletti and Paolo Belardi; the third and fourth ones consider more practical aspects and would be published only in 2008, this time by Paolo Belardi alone.
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| Fig. 3) Historic villas near Perugia: Villa Aureli Source: www.dimorestoricheitaliane.it |
[3] Baldassare Orsini was always considered - rightly or wrongly – as a second order figure in the art world of the late eighteenth century. If the assessment refers to his activity as a painter (Orsini as artist was born as a painter), there is no doubt that this judgement was accurate. Instead, it seems more simplistic to liquidate his literary production with a few lines only. That production – extended over more than thirty years - included issuing "modern" editions of the great classics of painting and architecture, as well as producing treaties and essays (sometimes he managed to publish them, sometimes not), as well as, finally, writing guides on the artistic heritage of towns. Indeed, just the Guida al forestiere per l’augusta città di Perugia (Guide to the foreigner on the august city of Perugia), published in 1784, is probably the most famous writing of him, and not so much for the (few) appreciations or the (much more numerous) censures which he received, but precisely because it was by using that guide (or perhaps thanks to its Abrégé (abridged version)) that Tinet first and Denon later on conducted their requisitions of art in Perugia (see about Cristina Galassi, Il Tesoro perduto: Le requisizioni napoleoniche a Perugia e la fortuna della “scuola” umbra in Francia tra 1797 e 1815 - The lost Treasure: Napoleon’s requisitions in Perugia and the fortune of the Umbrian "school" in France between 1797 and 1815). The fact is that, reserving ourselves the right to list at least the main titles authored by Orsini at the end of this note, it is good as of now to recall some of the results that Paolo Belardi drew in Baldassarre Orsini (1732-1810): profilo bio-bibliografico (Baldassare Orsini.1732-1810: A bio-bibliographical profile), one of the introductory essays presented in the comment of 2008 to the second part of the Treaty).
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| Fig. 4) Historic Villas near Perugia: Villa Aureli (Acquerello del 1784) Source: www.dimorestoricheitaliane.it |
[4] Orsini was not the usual noble scholar of the XVIII century who dabbled in matters of art; he was a (modest) painter who discovered in the course of his life two great talents: an ease of writing and the vocation of teaching and disseminating; his literary production is surely to be framed within this "didactic" vocation. Orsini was a professor (in the most "bourgeois" sense and therefore - given the times - the most modern one) and his are the works of a painter who became a professor. At the age of twenty years he moved from the sleepy Perugia to Rome to study fine arts. There Orsini met some of the Roman artists most in vogue at the time and, of course, attended the Academy of St. Luke. But the most important acquaintance of his life was the one with Anton Raphael Mengs. It is not known with accuracy, even from his Memories (which, incidentally, have been discovered more than fifteen years ago and are still unpublished) in which circumstances Orsini and Mengs met; it seems hazardous to write (see text in the fourth cover) that Orsini was the "favourite pupil of Mengs"; the former definitely enjoyed the confidence of the latter, since he was appointed tutor to the children of the German painter, for geometry, perspective and architecture. And certainly Orsini draws good part of his thought from Mengs and his Pensieri sulla pittura (Thoughts on painting). This had already been noted with great lucidity by Bruno Toscano, in his introduction to the facsimile edition of the Guide of Perugia, published by the Editions Canova in 1973: "The lesson of Mengs had however great significance for Orsini mainly because it offered him an example of a sensible approach to artworks, which was able to be extended - with more or less explicit admission - even to those art pieces, which derogated from the professed norm. Orsini profited largely of these narrow passages marked by Mengs, by transforming them into generous openings through which he introduced into his unconquerable castle teams of mannerists and late mannerists, from Italy and Northern Europe, of decorators and baroque illusionists, of specialists of jokes and trompe-l'oeil" (p. XXI). Basing himself on Mengs, therefore - and this time we are mentioning the words of Belardi in the already quoted “Bio-bibliography profile” Orsini "matured the conviction of the need for rules and principles based on reason, bestowed a passionately analytical attention to the shape of the artwork and developed the propensity for a critical didactic approach" (p. 21). However, he also opened himself with curiosity and respect to all those who had gone beyond the rules, and yet had proved to be able to arrive to valuable results by different routes. If this applies a bit also 'to all the writings of Orsini, and in particular for the Guide to the foregneir (1784), it certainly applies a fortiori to the Treaty Of Civil Architecture, chronologically preceding it and which (as it appears from the Memories) was ready for printing in 1778 (the non-publication seems to be related to the decision to return to Perugia in 1779, after the death of Mengs, to devote himself to the duty of Director for the local theatre). Orsini writes in the preface to Part One: "In bringing together what is good and beautiful in the ancient specimens, and in the works of the already above-praised moderns, I did not account of the small flaws, of which works and human artefacts are unlikely to be free ... And I even made no commitment to necessarily express a judgment on the majority of the honourable professors whom I mentioned, nor I pleaded in favour of one more than another, as I consider all of them excellent and skilful ... For all teachers can be estimated, even if they may have reason for different motives ... What, then, I had intended to do was mainly to find the ways how each excellent teacher, while continuing in following the laws of nature, has formed his own taste of goodness and beauty, without bothering to propose vague systems. In fact, such systems, whatever their nature may be, are not universally embraced. Moreover, they are deemed to be very harmful to the enhancement of arts, since they are nothing but strains; because of their narrowness, they are more useful to sterilize wits, and remove from them that freedom of imitation, that must belong to the man of talent to overcome all the difficulties and obstacles of the invention .... In fact, even imitation, if it is done in a manner which is noble and full of freedom, gets the merit of invention; and the artist working in this manner, is not a slavish imitator of the works of others" (pp. 7-8). These are, in our opinion, the nodal passages of Orsini’s theoretical mind set. The discussion at this point risks getting even more complex. On the theoretical aspects on which the thought of Orsini rests (e.g. on the concept of taste, not intended as a random act of arbitrariness, but as the result of a rational process; on the conception of architecture as a perceptive process and therefore the importance of all visual aspects related to the design and use of the same, primarily the perspective) we are referring to the introductory essays. We refer also to the above mentioned (and beautiful) introduction by Bruno Toscano to the Guide to the foreigner (Baldassarre Orsini e la «critica degli artifizi» - Baldassare Orsini and the "critique of artifices"): almost everything there was written there - with reference to the painting, to the study of the composition of the picture, to taste, to the reception by Orsini of "all what … in Mengs was open, permissive or relativistic, compared to the dogmatic conception of neoclassicism" (p. XLIII) - fits perfectly with the Treaty of Civil Architecture. What interests us here is to highlight how this critical apparatus could not live together with (and was indeed destined to collide with) the ideas proposed by another - and far more orthodox, follower of the neo-classicism of Mengs, i.e. Francesco Milizia. Now, there is no doubt that the theoretical influence of Milizia’s treatises was infinitely superior than the one of Orsini, both with reference to the Principi di architettura civile (Principles of civil architecture) both to Dell’arte di vedere nelle belle arti del disegno secondo i principi di Sulzer e di Mengs (On the art to see in the fine arts of design according to principles of Sulzer and Mengs), both published in 1781. It is probable that when Orsini, here and there, rails against Milizia (in the writings chronologically following the two works just cited), a bit of envy may have been present; the fact remains that the vision of Orsini displays an alternative transposition of the thought of Mengs, different from the one of Milizia, a way that deserved to be better explored.
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| Fig. 5) Historic Villas near Perugia: Palazzo Bourbon di Sorbello Source: www.dimorestoricheitaliane.it |
[5] Quickly, some notes on Orsini’s literary production, with the caveat that, apart from the present Treatise and the Guide to the stranger appeared in facsimile in 1973, there were no other modern editions of the copious writer from Perugia. The first written by Orsini to be released was Della Geometria e Prospettiva pratica (On Geometry and practice Perspective) in 1771, which is very positively reviewed by Comolli in his Bibliografia storico-critica dell’architettura civile (historical-critical readings of the civil architecture) (Vol. III, p. 91-97: I am recommending to read it; it also reports a letter by Orsini to Comolli in 1788, containing a partial catalogue of his works and discussing the inevitable controversy with Milizia). It just follows exactly Dell’architettura Civile (On the Civil Architecture) completed by 1778. Up to here we are in the years of long and almost uninterrupted stay in Rome. After moving to Perugia, the Antologia dell’arte pittorica (Anthology of painting) (1782-1783) and the Guida al forestiere per l’augusta città di Perugia (Guide to the stranger of the august city of Perugia) (1784), are published, both very attentive to the issue of composition in painting. Inside the Antology, Orsini publishes seven writings that I fell useful to list (see. Bio-bibliographical Profile of Orsini presented by Paolo Belardi in the second volume of the Civil Architecture, p. 37, n. 77):
- Saggio sulla Composizione della pittura (Essay on the composition of paintings);
- Il Trattato della Bellezza e del Gusto del Cavalier Don Antonio Raffaello Mengs (The Treaty of Beauty and Taste of Cavalier Don Antonio Raphael Mengs;
- Una Lettera del medesimo a don Antonio Ponz sopra il merito de' Quadri del Real Palazzo di Madrid (A Letter from myself to Don Antonio Ponz over the merit of 'pictures of the Royal Palace of Madrid”);
- Alcune Regole della Pittura di Gio. Paolo Lomazzo (Some Rules on Painting of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo);
- L’Arte del dipingere a fresco d’Andrea Pozzo (The Art of painting in fresco by Andrea Pozzo), to which also Mary P. Merrifield turned her attention in 1846);
- Lezioni pratiche sù del Colorito di Mengs (Practical lessons on the Colouring by Mengs);
- Appendice all’Antologia Pittorica (Appendix to the Pictorial anthology).
- Dizionario d’Architettura (Dictionary of Architecture) and Dizionario Vitruviano (Vitruvian Dictionary) (1801);
- translation of the De Architectura (On Architecture) of Vitruvius (1802) §00484§. Citing it as the sixth Italian translation, Vagnetti and Marcucci (p. 130) recognize themselves in the judgment that Cicognara (never appreciative of Orsini) gave in his Catalogo ragionato (Catalogue raisonné): "Twenty-three inelegant, engraved copper plates are found in Vitruvius. The issue is not commendable. Mr Orsini had a lot of knowledge, an inflexible criticism, and no taste [note of the editor: was this pure retaliation?]. The two Dictionaries are well drawn, and may be useful to all scholars of Art "(pp. 138-139);
- revision of the Idea dell’Architettura universale (Idea of Universal Architecture) by Vincenzo Scamozzi (1803);
- Compendium of De re aedificatoria (On Architecture) of Leon Battista Alberti (1804);
- abridged version of and commentary to the Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting) by Leonardo da Vinci (1805).
ADDENDA November 6th, 2017
See also the review of Baldassarre Orsini between Art and Science (1732-1810), edited by Cettina Lenza and Vincenzo Trombetta.
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