ENGLISH VERSION Brian Tovey (a cura di), The Pouncey Index of Baldinucci's 'Notizie', Centro Di, Firenze, 2005

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

The Pouncey Index of Baldinucci's Notizie

Edited by Brian Tovey

Centro Di, Firenze, 2005

Isbn 88-7038-428-4

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[N.B. On Filippo Baldinucci see also in this blog: Beginning and Progress of the Art of Engraving in Copper.]

[1] This book is a miracle of patience, passion and erudition. Philip Pouncey (1910-1990), in fact, had not even thought of it as a work to be published; and yet, now that it saw the light, the repertoire of Pouncey results so extraordinary that it sheds new light on the Notizie (Notes on the Teachers of Drawing) of Baldinucci, allowing a timely and effective consultation. Brian Tovey, who took care of the issue, tells the amazing story of this work in the introduction. We are just quoting some excerpts.

“This Index of Baldinucci’s seminal work was compiled by Pouncey for use as one of his working aids during his time at the British Museum (1945-1966) and subsequently at Sotheby’s (1966-1990). Over these two periods, Philip Pouncey set standards in the attributional study of Italian Old Master prints and drawings that have never been surpassed and are unlikely to be equalled... [note of the editor: Philip Pouncey is considered the greatest connoisseur of Italian design of 1400s and 1500s].

Following his death in 1990, the Baldinucci Index remained as part of Pouncey’s extensive working library at the family home in West London. A small number of individuals were aware of its existence, including some who following the end of the War, had assisted him in its continued compilation; further afield, Antonio Boschetto makes mention of the Pouncey/Baldinucci Index, evidently without ever having actually seen, in the Foreword to his own (less ample) index for the 1974 SPES edition of Baldinucci’s Notizie [note of the editor: see in particular the volume VII, p. 141]. Hardly anyone, however, knew where the Pouncey Index was to be found” (p. 11).

Only after much research, Tovey (helped by Ruth Rubinstein) managed to ascertain that the Index was not to be found at the British Museum where it had long been sought, but still in Pouncey’s family library. The magnitude of the discovery led to the decision to proceed to a publication.

“Philip Pouncey’s Index of Baldinucci’s Notizie comprises a total of some 8500 handwritten 127x76 mm cards: 6000 of these cover the names of artists, patrons and their subjects..., while the remaining 2500 deal with places, with separate cards for churches, palaces, etc., within each place. The entries under each heading provide a wealth of information, so that the task of identifying the volume and page from which one can learn what Baldinucci has to say about a particular work of a particular artist, or a specific item in a specific church, is rendered relatively simple. There can thus be no doubt as to the value of a published version of the Pouncey Index” (p. 12).

Front-page of one of the six volumes of Notizie de' Professori del Disegno

Of course, it should always kept in mind that Pouncey planned the work at his own personal use and not aiming for a final publication. Being aware of this caveat, “it is... not surprising that the process of editing his work for publication has inevitably necessitated a number of additions and (more rarely) amendments to his original text. The first problem encountered by the editorial team stemmed from the fact that the references given by Pouncey are to the first edition (1681-1728), which is now something of a rarity; thus the uselfulness of an Index which included only those references supplied by Pouncey would be minimal. To each and every entry, therefore, it has been necessary to add the appropriate reference to the more generally available 1974 SPES edition...

The second problem has arisen from the fact that Baldinucci, whose Notizie includes an impressively high proportion of non-Italian artists... in many instances gives their names in an Italianised form: Bernard Keil becames “Eberhart Keilhau detto fra noi Monsù Bernardo” and Justus Suttermans is referred to as “Giusto Sustermans”. These Italian versions of German, Flemish or Dutch names, which Pouncey, reasonably enough for his own purposes, often left in their Baldinuccian form, would have been at best irritating, and at worst confusing, to a wider audience; all names, therefore, have been checked against Thieme-Becker, that ultimate authority for art-historians, and amended accordingly. It should however be noted that... we have added (in single brackets) Baldinucci’s own version where this is significantly different. Double brackets denote those instances in which either Pouncey himself, or (exceptionally) the editorial team, have inserted informations not included by Baldinucci.

Thirdly we have been confronted by a problem which, once again, reflects the purely personal purpose of the Index from Pouncey’s own point of view. In the case of a number of the Notizie, especially but not exclusively those which are largely based on earlier sources, such as Vasari, Van Mander or Ridolfi, Pouncey has annotated the relevant Index card with some such entry as “Life of ...: all in (Vasari, etc.) – not indexed”; in a number of instances – both in the references dealing with artists, patrons and subjects, and in those covering places – there are omissions without any specific explanation, but which clearly reflect Pouncey’s own encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject-matter. It has seemed to the editorial team essential to make good, for the benefit of a wider readership, what might otherwise be thought (wrongly) to be inadvertent errors, any such additions being on the basis of Baldinucci’s own text and irrespective of any other source. Such editorial interventions have in each case been shown as “Editor’s Supplement” or “ES” for short” (pp. 12-13).

[2] This book allows me (Giovanni Mazzaferro) to devote a few lines to the cataloguing work of this library operated by my father, Luciano Mazzaferro (1928-2004). My father, mind you, was not Philip Pouncey, but an "expert amateur", who was, however, able to create a valuable collection of sources of art history in about fifty years. At the end of 2000, Dad decided to classify his volumes, compiling manually for each of these main and - if necessary - secondary fiches, which are still all preserved in the volumes. My father assigned every day to this work for three years. By the end of November 2003, only twenty days before he entered the hospital, the job could be considered substantially complete: 1,248 volumes had been catalogued (today, 15th May 2014, they are 2,000) and around 3,000 fiches compiled. I do not know the exact reason why my father decided to devote himself to this work, in the sense that, perhaps out of shyness, we never had a chance to talk about it, but I have a certainty (that he never thought of a publication of this material) and a suspicion: Dad knew he was suffering from a disease which, if he had granted him other years of life, would however had led him to loose memory. I sincerely believe that it has felt the need to fix on paper much of what he knew; it was a bit a race against time. From time to time - in this respect - I like to read again a sentence of Emilio Cecchi that appears in the strip of Bernard Berenson’s Tramonto e crepuscolo: ultimi diari 1947-1958 (Sunset and twilight: last diaries 1947-1958): "In the physical pain and with a slow decline of forces, the thoughts which he is able to put on paper day by day acquire something of a more valuable nature. Sad is the day that has not seen his work growing of a single line. More than anything else, now his work aims at preserving clarity of himself, as the ancients said. Somehow, it makes us witness the farewell of one of the last humanists." And in this race against time (and I think I can state that he somehow won that race) Dad behaved exactly like Pouncey: undoubtedly, the most comprehensive fiches are those dedicated to many "minor" texts; for the key works (e.g. for the Kunstliteratur of Schlosser, which was in Dad’s hand every day), there were virtually no notes (so much so they had to be added at a later time): there was no need, because the wealth of knowledge on the subject was considered incontrovertible.