Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Barbara Agosti
Paolo Giovio. Uno storico
lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecento.
[Paolo Giovio. A Lombard Historian in 1500 Artistic Culture]
[Paolo Giovio. A Lombard Historian in 1500 Artistic Culture]
Leo S. Olschki, 2008
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| Portrait of Paolo Giovio. Giovio Series. Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
About Barbara Agosti’s publications see in
this blog: Barbara
Agosti, Paolo Giovio. A Lombard Historian in 1500 Artistic Culture; Barbara
Agosti, Giorgio Vasari. Locations and Times of the Lives; Federico
Borromeo, Two Books on Sacred Painting, Edited by Barbara Agosti]
[1] The text of the summary note provided
by Olschki Editor to present the work is reproduced hereafter:
"The
book highlights the important role played by Paolo Giovio into the fabric of
Italian art culture between the Renaissance period and the age of the incipient
Counter-reformation, rebuilding its multiple and intense relationship with a geographically
diverse group of eminent artists, art customers and financers, writers and
writers on art (all of them contemporaries to him). Looking back from this
perspective the biographical history of this Como-based historian (from his training
to his prolonged activity in Rome at the court of the Medici Popes before, and
Farnese Popes later, until his withdrawal in his last years in the Florence of
Cosimo I), a new and more vivid picture of Giovio's personality emerges. The
same is true for his peculiar look on the arts and their
historical development. His involvement, often unsuspected, in many famous
episodes in the history of Italian art also appears. This also explains why
Giorgio Vasari recognised in the dense, durable exchanges entertained with his
friend from Lombardy a fundamental driving force for the historical project of
the Vite. The apparatus of tables is both constructed in function of the text
and as a stand-alone atlas, with the intention of evoking visual references,
interests and tastes of the writer, in their mutual intersections. The
consistency, with which the pages of the art historian Giovio accompany his
passionate activity as a collector of portraits of famous people, and his
remarkable creative engagement as artistic adviser to the service of some of
the most splendid art patrons of his days, is thereby re-established. "
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| Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, Giovio Series. Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[2]
A book of great depth and enjoyable reading. In general – as the author writes
(pp. 159-163) - the criticism misfortune of Giovio is the result of two basic
elements: the pro-imperial and pro-Medici spirit on which his
main work (i.e. the Histories, published by Torrentino in 1550) rests, and the
programmatic choice to write in the courtesan language par excellence, namely
in Latin. If these elements explain the sudden oblivion into which they his
works fell, they also were (for obvious political reasons) substantial grounds
for rejection on the part of writers and historians of the Italian Risorgimento,
at the time of Italy’s later political unification; all Giovio’s works were
generically labelled as mere stylistic exercises, including the writings of
art. It is known that the rediscovery of the figure of the bishop of Nocera dei
Pagani is up to Benedetto Croce (Conversazioni critiche. Serie terza-
Conversations on criticism. Third series, p. 296-308), and in the field of art
history to Schlosser (Raccolte d’arte e di meraviglie del tardo Rinascimento - Collections of art
and wonders of the late Renaissance, first; and Letteratura artistica, later
on). However, the revaluation of Giovio in the field of artistic literature
takes place, according to the author, under a lens that distorts the exact features.
Giovio becomes the forerunner of a world that does not belong to him. With his Elogia (praises), he is seen as the precursor of
the biographical medallions in Vasari’s Lives. Vasari himself is authorising such
a reading when - with the usual immodesty – refers in his Giuntina autobiography
to the scene of the dinner held at the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1546: Giovio
tells he wants to include in the Elogia a section devoted to art creators, but
then, conscious of his inadequacy in the art field, he ultimately urges Vasari
to compose the Lives. With his Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose (Dialogue on military and amorous endeavours), published posthumously in 1555,
Giovio is also seen as the creator of the genre of Imprese (Endeavours). Finally,
he asserts himself as the extensor of iconographic programs for the production
of pictorial cycles, paving the way for figures such as Annibale Caro and
Vincenzo Borghini. The thesis of this book, however, is that Giovio was not a
precursor, but a man of an earlier generation, which is an expression of the
culture of the early decades of the 1500s and not of the mid-Sixteenth century.
His published works (almost all in old age) and unpublished writings have therefore
to do with the early decades of the century, and this, far from being a limitation, increases
their standing. Giovio was able to express mature, thoughtful and above all
always well calibrated (on a non-purely local vision of art making), critical
judgments. Giovio was born as Lombard, and no doubt he was immersed in Lombard
culture, but he was also familiar in Roman and Florentine, Neapolitan and
Venetian circles, often demonstrating full awareness of the stylistic elements
that make them unique with respect to each other. All this makes of Giovio a
valuable source (one source, and not a precursor) to the literature of the
early Sixteenth-century Italian art.
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| Portrait of the Emperor Charles V, Giovio Series. Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[3]
Without any doubt the most significant artistic writings of Giovio are the
three biographies of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. They are flanked by some
passages in the Dialogus de viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus
(Dialogue on the men and women from our times in Florence). In all above cases,
these works were first published by Tiraboschi in 1781, and then reproduced by
Paola Barocchi first (Dialogus becomes Fragmentum trium Dialogorum – Fragment of three dialogues) and
then by Sonia Maffei. These are writings that go back - from internal sources –
to 1525 (biographies) and around 1528 (Dialogus). In all his works Giovio shows
an uncommon stylistic awareness, catching characteristic features of the creators
of which he talks: the focus on plastic and the difficulty to conclude the
works by Leonardo, the "supreme wisdom in glimpses and gradations of light
and shadow used to obtain a maximum of sculpture-like three-dimensionality"
(p. 61) by Michelangelo; the concept of
grazia in Raphael’s paintings, or even the " diligent repetition of
work by Perugino" (p. 83) and the chromatism of Titian (pp. 84-85 ). Very
stimulating are the pages where Agosti proposes the compilation of biographies
of art as a reaction to the Prose della vulgar lingua (Prose of vernacular
language) by Pietro Bembo (pp. 51 - 53). In short, Giovio is a keen witness of
his time, namely Italy art of the 1520s: we should not forget it, in view of the
time lag between the publication of many of his writings (mid-1500) and the earlier
actual drafting of the same. Once the figure of the Como-based humanist is recalibrated in this manner, Giovio’s role
of source for Vasari assumes even greater importance. For age reasons, Vasari could
not have any direct memories, for example, of the Rome of Leone X. So, Giovio’s
role is not any more just a precursor from a point of view of forms (the Elogia
that would refer to the biographies of the Vite, the idea of presenting the
same biographies, accompanying them with portraits of the authors, and so on),
but a far more content-based one. Also the ‘review’ work conducted by Giovio on
the Vite from the end of 1546 takes on a different meaning, at least as far as
the artists of the early sixteenth century are concerned (pp. 40-41).
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| Portrait of Soliman the Magnificent, Giovio Series. Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[4]
It remains to discuss at least two other faces of the artistic interests of
Giovio. On the one hand, the creation of iconographic programs to be
transmitted to the artist for the translation into pictorial decoration. On the
other hand, Giovio as the creator of Imprese (Endeavours) or, even better, the
genre of Imprese. Agosti dissects with extreme thoughtfulness both arguments,
only to prove (in our opinion convincingly ) that here we are dealing
with issues in which the artistic sensibility of the bishop of Como proves to
outweigh the – however existing - purely interests as a literate. Indeed, those
interests will instead be characteristic of successive generations. Giovio, in
short, is much more attentive than one might think to the style of the artist
in the execution of the iconographic program, or to the meaning of the
Endeavours as a decorative element).
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| Portrait of Dante Alighieri, Giovio Series. Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[5] Not really enthusiastic (again, in our view, rightly so) the opinion expressed by the author on the edition of the Elogia (Praises) published by Franco Minonzio for Einaudi’s Millenni.
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| Portrait of Alchitrof, King of Ethiopia, Giovio Series. Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[6]
An interesting fact (of no small importance): as known, Giovio published many
of his works (the Historiae, the second volume of the Praises) in the Florence
of Cosimo I, at the printing house of Lorenzo Torrentino which, in 1550 , also
published the first edition of Vasari's Lives. The author points out that the front
page of Vasari's Lives is identical to that of the first Italian translation (1551), made by Ludovico
Domenichi, of Giovio’s Histories (p. 42).
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