Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Le voyage d'Italie de Charles-Nicolas Cochin ( 1758) [Charles-Nicolas Cochin's Journey to Italy]
École française de Rome, 1991
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| Alexander Roslin, Portrait of Charles-Nicolas Cochin, 1774 (Versailles) |
[1] Text of the cover flap :
"The Voyage d’Italie [Journey to Italy] by Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790) is one of the milestones in the history of European taste. The author has broken with the traditional formula of travel diary or of a simple list of admirable objects and locations to publish the first guide describing the works of art of the peninsula. He made his selection basing it strictly on artistic criteria, underpinned by his practice as a designer and engraver, at the expense of any consideration of the historical significance of the works. Cochin proposed his choices and comments to the great majority of passengers in the second half of the Eighteenth century, until the time of Goethe and Stendhal.
The critical edition of the text, in which the existing works are still localized and identified, provides a clear picture of paintings kept in 1750-1751, in the Italian churches and palaces from Turin to Naples. The reader has with this book the last important testimony of the influence of Italian Seicento, before that influence was sacrificed to the one for antiquity or for the art prior to Raphael."
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| Correggio. Assumption of the Virgin. Dome of the Cathedral of Parma (1524-1530) |
[2] The Journey of Charles-Nicolas Cochin in Italy took place between December 1749 and August 1751. It was, in fact, an official "mission". Cochin, designer and engraver, an artist already well known in France, accompanied in Italy Abel Francois Poisson, then Monsieur de Vandières, later Marquis of Marigny, but especially the brother of Louis XV's mistress, the famous Marquise de Pompadour. Thanks to the intercession of his sister, the lord of Vandières had been appointed in 1746, being only 21 years old as "détenteur... de la survivance de la place de Ordonnateur et Directeur général des Bâtiments du Roi"(p. 4). The trip to Italy was, therefore, on the one hand a moment of training of the young Abel in view of the tasks that would have awaited him at the return, and on the other hand a way to make Abel more acquainted both to the eyes of the French nobility as well as in the Italian courts and aristocracies (many of which were related in some way with the French monarchy). According to a not entirely new practice (and only thanks to generous funding), Vandières, preparing himself for the journey, surrounded himself with figures that could be of help in the examination of Italian works of art that would have seen a little later. One of these figures was precisely Cochin. It is true that initially Cochin was not instructed to keep a diary or otherwise make notes for future preparation of a résumé of the journey. However, it is very likely that, in the course of his stay in Italy (and in particular, according to Michel (see p. 17), during the Florentine stop - or rather beyond, in March 1751 -), the project gradually matured in the minds of the French. At any rate, once back in France, Cochin (who had been appointed Permanent Secretary and then First Painter of the Académie Royale de Peinture in January 1755), drafted in the first instance a manuscript (now lost) in multiple copies, one of which was without any doubt donated to Vandières; other copies were donated to friends and "amateurs" in the process of travelling to Italy. The first edition was printed in 1756. It was in fact, in this case, a private edition, for personal use (Michel says to know about just two copies); it probably became more convenient to have a quantity of prints to be supplied on demand, rather than having to copy the manuscript every time. The second edition, corrected and enlarged, was printed in three small volumes in Paris in 1758, this time aiming at a wider audience. The full title of the work was Voyage d'Italie, ou Recueil de notes sur les Ouvrages de Peinture et de Sculpture , qu'on voit dans les principales villes d'Italie. The success of the work was immediate, also for the reputation of the author, and many praises that were published in the French periodical press. In a relatively short time two later editions of the Voyage appeared, in 1769 first and then in 1773.
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| Correggio, The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, 1520 ca., Florence, Uffizi Gallery |
[3] This volume presents (in addition to the five chapters of the initial introduction to the text) the facsimile reproduction of the three volumes of the Voyage in the edition of 1758. Immediately below the original French, the notes are placed, with which the editor seeks to provide essential information on the location (or disappearance) and the attribution of the thousands of works cited in Cochin (Michel warns that in around ten per cent of cases it was not possible to identify those works). Important indexes of authors follow (in two sections: the first, much more full-bodied, it is that of the authors of the works cited from Cochin, regardless of the presence of an allocation - right or wrong - provided by the French; the real author's name appears in the index, according to the results achieved by modern historiography of art, with reference to the relevant footnote. The second index is instead one of the authors quoted from Cochin and for which it was not possible to establish any correspondence or identification of a work; they may therefore include wrong attributions). Afterwards, an index follows with the current location of the works identified and an extensive bibliography related to the book.
[4] Deliberately we did not use so far any term to better define the Voyage d'Italie. It is evident that the great success of the work (but also the particular harshness of the criticism voiced against it by Italian scholars, as discussed later) was linked to its use as a guide to the Grand Tour in Italy (French travellers, for example, before the work of Cochin could see only the French translation of Richardson’s work, widely unbalanced to the favour of Raphael). And surely Cochin inaugurated a fortunate genre that was prolonged for example a few years later by Lalande, in his account of his journey made between 1765 and 1766 (and published in 1769). However, speaking of the work of Cochin exclusively as a "tour guide" - as Michel demonstrates - is wrong and somehow restrictive. There is, in the Voyage, no claim to completeness or no interest in the historical development of painting (from now on we will speak only of painting, as the sections devoted to sculpture and architecture are largely secondary); the author's purpose is to teach the reader to "learn assessing the quality, not learn about the history of painting" (p. 19). The Voyage, therefore, is more a manual initiating to art than a guide. It is the firm opinion of the author that an "amateur" would not be able, alone, to judge about the calibre of a picture; the presence of a "professor", or an artist who can draw up an opinion on the works on purely technical basis is therefore needed. Every traveller in Italy, therefore, should have with him what Cochin was for Vandières. Given that this is, obviously, not possible, here is the résumé by Cochin, which in fact does not show any interest for the historical or iconographic importance of the image (and very little for the problems of attribution), but expresses qualitative judgments on the basis of purely technical evaluations.
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| Guido Reni, Samson Victorious, 1611, Bologna, National Gallery |
[5] An amateur, therefore, can and must be advised by an artist to evaluate the work of art; ultimately, we are here confronted with the problem, much debated at the time, of "taste". Drawing extensively on other writings of Cochin, Michel flag that according to the French artist there are two kinds of taste: a taste "of choice", which is what makes us instinctively prefer one style over another (and there is no doubt that the taste of choice in Cochin leads him to sympathize strongly for colorists) and an "acquired taste", or a capacity for discernment that can be acquired by educating the eye to grasp the technical aspects of the work (p. 23). These technical aspects are: the design (meaning purely drawing human figures), the composition (i.e. the study of the arrangement of figures in space and in relation to each other), the colour (it would be better to further distinguish between the general colouring of the overall work and the true colour of individual figures and objects) as well as the knowledge of the effects of light, called chiaroscuro by Cochin (p. 30). It is analysing these aspects one by one that anyone can achieve the "acquired" taste; such "acquired" taste allows you to appreciate the works that the taste "of choice" would otherwise averse. But the technical analysis of the work would not be complete if it did not take into account an additional element that distinguishes each artist, or its capacity to “faire" (pages 26 and 35), which, roughly speaking, can be identified with what we nowadays call "style". It is the style of an artist that, ultimately, allows us to express a final and comprehensive assessment; it is thanks to the "faire" that Cochin, for example, re-evaluates the Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, after having highlighted its inconsistencies, the lack of adherence to the nature, and the weakness in the drawing. An artist can be discreetly versatile into each of the technical aspects mentioned above and nevertheless come to perform poorly due to lack of style; on the other hand, it is much more useful to draw to the attention of the public works which, although deficient in many respects, are distinguished by the results achieved even in one of the judging criteria set forth herein. This leads Michel to introduce the concept of eclecticism in Cochin.
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| Raphael, Sixtine Madonna, 1513-14, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie |
[6] Cochin is firmly convinced that there is no perfect work (and of course that there are no perfect painters). There are works that can achieve outstanding results in some respects, being deficient in others. Hence the need (with no minor caveats that we will soon make) to know all the schools, or the infinite ways of representing reality that are typical of the painting (in this case to review all Italian schools). Of each of them then you will be able to better appreciate limits and strengths. This approach, of course, involves an immediate corollary: the questioning of the so-called ‘giants’ of Italian painting. Here we must explain: questioning Raphael, Correggio, the Carracci brothers, Guido Reni, does not mean, to Cochin, to demolish them for the benefit of French painting, like many Italian detractors accused him of doing, but rather it means to better understand their magnitude, because they - most than any other artists- came closer to what does not exist, or the perfection of the work. Mention was made, a little earlier, to the limits of the eclecticism of Cochin. The above mentioned may divert us completely from reality and let us see Cochin as one of the first enlightened that have revaluated the Italian primitives. In fact, he had a much more limited perspective: the primitive simply do not exist and are mentioned in the Journey only marginally if not at all: the painting of Giotto, Masaccio, Mantegna, Botticelli and all other Fifteenth century artists is simply not considered as painting. The absence of chiaroscuro highlights the flatness of their results, so disappointing to not even deserve any mention. Not even the Sixteenth century is treated in a particularly gentle manner; the great Raphael is widely questioned, about Michelangelo it has already been said. In fact, the painting begins to Cochin with Carracci and with the Seventeenth century; so its eclecticism moves horizontally on a chronological perspective of a little more than a century: "He often felt towards painting before Seicento a sense of distance: a Sixteenth-century artist is an artist he called ancient. Without too far a may be questionable comparison, the Carracci opened – in his views - the modern era of painting (similarly, some feel familiarity with pictures only as from Impressionists onwards), and he experienced a retrospective interest only for those who anticipated their manner, like those who have a retrospective interest for the past only to trace a liaison between Zurbaran and Monet or Cézanne and Poussin "(p. 41).
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| Raphael, Madonna della Seggiola, 1513-1514, Florence, Galleria Palatina |
[7] This book was bought (at half price) in July 2009. And it was bought when I became aware of the importance the work of Cochin played, ironically, in many circles of Italian scholars in the second half of the Eighteenth century. There is no doubt that one of the common denominators of what Emanuele Pellegrini calls"the paper Eighteenth century" was the total rejection of the Voyage d' Italie by Charles-Nicolas Cochin. Circles of scholars, professors and amateurs entered in close correspondence with each other to form a submerged ‘Republic of the arts’. Their derisive judgment finds its most obvious representative in the letters of canonical Crespi published in the Bottari - Ticozzi collection, but also in Ratti’s guide of Genoa, and in those guides published in Padua and Vicenza little later; more generally, the rejection characterises – either openly or implicitly - the letters of Innocenzo Ansaldi and the thought of a Baldassare Orsini, and reaches up to Lanzi 's History of Painting, to become almost commonplace in the Catalogo ragionato by Cicognara ("Opera full of errors not only in taste but also in fact, and serious ones") . There is no doubt that Cochin made many errors, but it is equally certain that the spirit of his work is totally misrepresented. It has already been said that it is not a history of painting in Italy, nor a guide with the slightest pretension to be exhaustive. Cochin’s judgments (often vehement judgements) expressed towards the "sacred cows" of Italian painting, as well as the absence of many works and often the lack of mention of artists of non-secondary level offended a blind world which lived in a rhetoric of "untouchability" and supremacy of the Italian artistic heritage. "The French presupposition that – since the creation of the Académie – the throne of arts has moved back to France cannot but irritate the Italians, which felt already misjudged in the area of science and general culture” (p. 57) . And there is no doubt that theses of this type had appeared in France: it is the case, for example, of the Reflexions critiques sur le différentes écoles de Peinture, published in Paris in 1752 by the Marquis d'Argens, which argues that training journeys to Italy of young French artists had now become useless. In the specific case, this has certainly not been the position of Cochin (and we hope our notes made it clear). However, what matters most is that, rightly or wrongly, the Voyage d' Italie became one (of many) catalysts that lead to the publication of new guides to the rediscovery of the individual artistic heritages of Italy, perhaps even to an initial re-evaluation of the primitives in a new historical perspective, in order to contrast the theoretical scaffolding of Cochin. And as such, his work should be taken into serious account today and properly evaluated.https://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2019/02/bottari.html
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