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Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Pietro Toesca
Il Trecento
U.T.E.T., Torino, 1951
Storia dell’arte italiana; II
[1] We report the review on the work appeared in the April 3, 1951, at the signature of Emilio Cecchi, in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The original article is conserved in ‘Raccolta di articoli e altri ritagli di giornale di Luciano Mazzaferro’ (Collection of articles and other newspaper clippings of Luciano Mazzaferro), preserved at the Biblioteca Comunale Giulio Cesare Croce in San Giovanni in Persiceto.
Corriere della Sera
Il Trecento
By Emilio Cecchi
An entire generation of scholars sharpened their erudition and re-strengthened their critical faculties reading the Storia dell’Arte Italiana nel Medioevo (History of Italian Art in the Middle Ages), published in 1927, which had remained until now the main work of Pietro Toesca. After nearly twenty-five years of new research, another monumental book is published by the same author: Il Trecento (published by UTET publisher in Turin). This work picks up the history of Italian art from the spot where Toesca had left the previous discussion, i.e. the youth of Giotto and Duccio. The publication takes place at the time when, having reached age limits, Toesca had to leave his chair in the University of Rome. But in reality, with his new book, his teaching will be nothing else but further translated (and continued) in a much broader classroom, not only attended by specialists in art history, but by every kind of really educated people.
It is an amiable rule, in our best newspapers, to honour of at least a hint any novelette or collection of short stories that just come out of the ordinary, or any comedy that may not see more than two nights the nose of the prompter. Especially in relation to intellectual commitment and substantial contribution of culture to which they represent, it is painful that daily press reviews on works of high criticism and scholar research, are perhaps less lavish than those for minor products of bedside literature. But it would be impossible to pass over silence a publication like Il Trecento. And if Toesca’s name and the quality and amount of work are in themselves very solid arguments, the matter of the volume emanates directly an even more commanding authority.
The feeling of national artistic glories is certainly not lacking in us Italians. But, generally speaking, it is to be feared that this is more a matter of admiration and pride that really about awareness. Just this week, Roberto Longhi has revived the question of whether "in a country like ours, most "glory of language" would belong over the centuries to poetry, or rather figurative art" (Paragone, no. 13). In England, in Germany, in France itself, such a question would be inconceivable. In Italy it has its raison d'être, as much as it could have had in ancient Greece. And let us disregard the fundamental value of discovery and invention of a new quality of figurative language, so that, just to mention it, none would even think that the origins and basic principles of all modern painting can be found elsewhere as in Giotto. What a fabulous and uninterrupted procession of genes of the first magnitude, in a path that lasted almost five centuries, precisely from Giotto until the sunset of the Venetian school. What a succession of triumphal dynasties, which would transmit their shining achievements, along with the diplomas of the most rigorous legitimacy.
Of all this, again generally speaking, there is an enthusiastic but confused scent. And even most cultivated people, including those capable of genuinely get excited in front of the Madonna enthroned by Giotto, the Adam and Eve by Masaccio, the St. Anne and the Virgin of Leonardo, the sculptures of Michelangelo in the New Sacristy, or Europe or the Ecce homo by Titian, even they cannot then articulate and clarify their own emotions, if one just wants to understand the lyrical meanings of these formidable masterpieces, and of the formal values in which these meanings were expressed and materialised: those meanings, again, have nothing to envy to those of our highest poetry for originality and gravity.
The issue is that the figurative criticism, in the true sense of the term, is a relatively recent asset. Our old writers especially obeyed either a biographical or a strictly technical and craftsman criterion. And it is likely that the attempt to penetrate more deeply into a work would best take place in the live discourse between professionals, patrons and lovers of painting and sculpture, in those ways and those tones which perhaps surprisingly find some echo in certain letters by Aretino or in the Dialogue by Dolce. Nor must one forget that the vast majority of the critical work, organically undertaken from the second half of the last century, was consumed first of all to examine and reconstruct, piece by piece, the repertoire of individual authors. That repertoire was mostly mixed up, a combination of unsustainable attributions, often seemingly supported by the most valuable traditional canonic criteria. An even gigantic work, still far from being accomplished: and to which (such is the ideal strength of irradiation and charm of this art) minds from every most remote land collaborated: suffice it to mention the Japanese scholar Yashiro with his three volumes on Botticelli.
In Italy, the two real leading figures, in succession of time, have been the great Cavalcaselle, of whom occasionally some opinion that seemed expired comes back to dominate again, and Venturi the elder [Note of the editor: Adolfo Venturi]. The latter, in his Memoirs, left notes and sketches for a portrait of the bearded Cavalcaselle [Note of the editor: see also the text of the lecture given by Adolfo Venturi on 14th July 1907 in Legnago, in memory of Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle]: fearless patriot, a Consule of the Roman Republic; hanged in effigy by Austria, but later on decorated by Franz Joseph for certain criticism and estimates of paintings in the imperial galleries; re-discoverer of ancient Italian art, but unable to write in an acceptable Italian, and among so many other things, emeritus gourmand of snails in all ways , and obstinate, like Sarah Bernhardt to sleep with his own coffin under the bed. A profile of Venturi the elder would not present such varied and excessive traits of romanticism, although in turn he had his share of oddities. While his sharp eyes seemed to be dozing behind lenses that were always as massive as those of a bathysphere, his forward-looking critical insights - surprising and sometimes revolutionary – were running aground in his books in a syrupy prose, with sweetish adjectives randomly placed. Strong talent and character (and even acrid, as shown in the Memoirs), he liked to maybe look a bit bleating; between Father Christmas and the Nilus septemfluus [note of the editor: the old roman poet Ovid invented this epithet to refer to the seven mouths of the Nil river at its delta], with around a nest of cherubs. Meanwhile, the bulk of the work he has sketched is incalculable, and thus the impetus he gave to two generations.
Despite the very high aesthetic and historical traditions in other parts of the country, the third Archimandrite [note of the editor: title of honour used in the Orthodox church] or third evangelist is Toesca. He also comes from northern Italy (Venturi was from Modena, while Cavalcaselle was from Legnago). And with him we feel that we are already outside the pioneering era. Some finds him as a cold, pale, almost evasive writer. In fact, he never raises his voice. He never or almost never introduces theoretical statements. It is not to his taste to attempt any lyrical synthesis of this or that personality. And the places where the course of history figurative is eloquently reflected in that of poetry , literature , customs or religious sentiment , even in a book the size like ‘Il Trecento’ are reduced to very few pages, as an essential framing only.
But whoever harbours - while reading - a more seasoned and consummate practice with the various art works, and with the most intrinsic characters of one or of another style, has all the leisure to notice that the apparent poverty and numbness of Toesca’s writing is internally quite sensitive. In any incidents of a phrase, in any modulation of a sentence, he knows how to evoke, to state and to assess, with minimal wrinkles and sags. The quality of taste is severely Italic and avoids any brilliant, but less fruitful, contamination, like those frequent in French and especially Anglo-Saxon aestheticism. At the same time, on individual subjects, the best critical literature of every country is called upon to intervene in the debate (criticism, as Benedetto Croce says, must always be ‘criticism of criticism’), in a very different way than it was for example in the Venturi, who remained rougher and more random in that respect. For those who are interested in these topics, it is obvious that Il Trecento offers some chapters that their eyes will look with particular care. We do not believe that this specific interest may ever run the danger of being disappointed. Even limiting ourselves to the part devoted to painting: from Giotto to Lorenzo Monaco, from Duccio to Taddeo Bartoli, we would have to fill several columns, only to give a reasonable summary of the most relevant and debated issues, as well as of other ones which had been previously considered as resolved, and here have been rekindled and ignited again, perhaps with the onset of a mere footnote. The development of Pietro Lorenzetti’s art, for example, is one of these key issues around which for thirty years more densely critics contrasted, bumping into each other in chronological and stylistic doubts for which Il Trecento provides, if not an accomplished solution, at least some considerable clarification. Another problem of even greater prominence, for the enormous importance of the works involved, is that of the anonymous "Master of the Triumph of Death," in Pisa’s cemetery: an artist who was not from Siena, nor Florence, nor Emilia, nor could be confused with the Pisan Traini.
And just this newspaper, in 1943, commented on a new idea (that, for his part, Longhi was explaining) about the most valid Florentine painting after Giotto; in the group of artists traditionally referred to with the names of Maso, Stefano, Giottino. They rise to much higher pinnacles that the tired practice of the Gaddi and the dry symbolism of Bonaiuti. Only today (Paragone, no. 13) Longhi has published his study of 1943. Along with the beautiful pages of Il Trecento on the same issue, it will show the reader how much it is to be waited from these authors , though not especially in those fields that might seem more harvested. A comparison between Il Trecento by Toesca with similar studies, domestic and foreign, published twenty or thirty years ago, would reveal to everybody how, by breadth of experience, rigor of method, concreteness of style, balance and refinement of the results, Italian criticism of figurative art has not really lost any time in vain.
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