Giovanna Perini Folesani
Sir Joshua Reynolds in Italia (1750-1752)
Passaggio in Toscana
Il taccuino 201 a 10 del British Museum
[Sir Joshua Reynolds in Italy (1750-1752).
Passage to Tuscany.
The 201 a 10 Notebook of the British Museum]
Leo S. Olschki editore, 2012
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
[1] Reading a book by Giovanna Perini Folesani is always a special experience. The reason might seem trivial: Perini is a monument of erudition and skill. However, the definition seems quite simplistic, and in the end even ominous, since in general monuments are mainly for dead. Let us try like this, then: Perini - among other things, it must be remembered, she is a leading expert in the art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries across the world – has all strength of a veritable tornado, in all senses. She is able to offer such a large amount of ideas and information, and attributions of stylistic analysis that one would even risk being overwhelmed. She, mind you, knows to be ingenious and allows to herself some attitudes that would not be forgiven to others. She is certainly not a model of modesty (cf. p. 6). Her prose is surely the triumph of a far too rich and varied phrasing, full of digressions, clarifications, brackets, and anything else you can imagine (the period that is present at pages 12 and 13 – with its 27 lines long without even a punctuation mark – would break the most resistant of the horses). She seems not really considering writing texts for a larger public as her main concern (an introduction of 169 pages without even a paragraph break is, frankly speaking, a bit too much). At times, she is blatantly opinionated. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Perini always gives the impression of having such a global view of art making in those ages, that she can take the cue from any object of her analysis to outline a broader fresco, giving us back the tastes and trends of an entire era.
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| Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait, 1749 ca. London, National Portrait Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[1] Reading a book by Giovanna Perini Folesani is always a special experience. The reason might seem trivial: Perini is a monument of erudition and skill. However, the definition seems quite simplistic, and in the end even ominous, since in general monuments are mainly for dead. Let us try like this, then: Perini - among other things, it must be remembered, she is a leading expert in the art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries across the world – has all strength of a veritable tornado, in all senses. She is able to offer such a large amount of ideas and information, and attributions of stylistic analysis that one would even risk being overwhelmed. She, mind you, knows to be ingenious and allows to herself some attitudes that would not be forgiven to others. She is certainly not a model of modesty (cf. p. 6). Her prose is surely the triumph of a far too rich and varied phrasing, full of digressions, clarifications, brackets, and anything else you can imagine (the period that is present at pages 12 and 13 – with its 27 lines long without even a punctuation mark – would break the most resistant of the horses). She seems not really considering writing texts for a larger public as her main concern (an introduction of 169 pages without even a paragraph break is, frankly speaking, a bit too much). At times, she is blatantly opinionated. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Perini always gives the impression of having such a global view of art making in those ages, that she can take the cue from any object of her analysis to outline a broader fresco, giving us back the tastes and trends of an entire era.
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| Joshua Reynolds, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, 1758, Derbyshire, Chatsworth House Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[2] Joshua Reynolds travelled to Italy between 1750 and 1752. Ten notebooks and three albums of original drawings, variously distributed between England and the United States (see p. 3 n), remain today, documenting his stay in the peninsula. On the historical events of the notebooks, the author had already largely focused in G. Perini, I taccuini di Sir Joshua Reynolds: storia, identificazione, circolazione, fortuna (The notebooks of Sir Joshua Reynolds: history, identification, movement, fortune) in Souvenir d’Italie. Il viaggio in Italia nelle memorie scritte e figurative tra il XVI secolo e l’età contemporanea (Souvenir d' Italie. Journey in Italy in the pleadings and figurative between the Sixteenth century and the contemporary age). The notebook examined in this volume is marked "201 a 10", and preserved in the British Museum. The purpose is to furnish a critical edition that sets the parameters for a future (impossible, I'm afraid, given the vastness of the task) examination of the remainder.
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| Joshua Reynolds, Robert Clive and his family with an Indian maid, 1765. Munich, Staatliche Museen Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[3] It should be said at once that Reynolds’ notebooks are not like those, for example, by Lanzi. First of all, each of them is not a unique self-referential universe, which includes all notes relating to a particular stage of Reynolds’ stay in Italy (there is, strictly speaking, no Roman, Tuscan, Bologna notebook). It is almost certain that Reynolds used them in parallel, and moreover, it is not entirely clear under what criteria he chose to use one rather than another. This does not mean that, for example, the notebook under examination kept notes mainly about his stay in Florence (and, on this, it has to be said that it is very likely that there have been two stays: one at the beginning of the journey and the other one at its end; the material in this notebook should be relative just to the stay on the way back, in 1752). Always in “201 a 10” appear also notices on Roman and Umbrian tours, with visits to Ferrara; moreover, the Tuscans notes are not limited to only the notebook under review in this volume, so that Perini felt a need to present in the appendix the rest of the notes on Tuscany, which are present (and identified) in other notebooks.
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| Joshua Reynolds, Colonel Acland and Lord Sidney, the Archers, 1769. London, The Tate Gallery Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[4] We did not speak of "notes" just by chance. They are indeed just notes (verbal and visual). In fact, to be honest, the verbal notes are extremely succinct, while by far the most salient ones appear to be visual: drawings, sketches, that the English artist lays on the notebook with the clear intent to collect ideas to make their own and revise later on (according to an eclectic pattern representing one of the great outstanding features of the work of Reynolds). It is clear, then, that the great challenge of the curator is first of all to recognise the sources which correspond to the drawings (and this does not always appears to be possible) and second to understand how Reynolds made use of them in his artistic production. It is important to clarify just one issue: we are not talking about plagiarism, but of personal reworking of ideas found in Italy: "The trip to Italy was by then a must , a fashion to which the artist à la page could not escape, if he wanted to speak appreciably with the British commissioners who had made the Grand Tour [...], but nobody [note of the editor: among contemporary British artists to Reynolds] was able to gain as much artistically as Reynolds from the journey to Italy. The data sheets prepared for the drawings of this notebook indicate – even not too exhaustively – the opportunities (certainly not the effective modalities) for successive redeployments at home of what seen and learnt in Italy. Since (even beyond what Reynolds borrowed in terms of compositions, what helped him in the invention, and what influenced his style), contemporaries in the United Kingdom – whether colleagues or not - were aware immediately, already from his first paintings back in London [...] of a fact, namely that [... ] Reynolds had ... changed the way he thought about his own paintings, and even indeed the way he conceived them. From the Italians, in fact, he had not taken properly adopted the style, but rather the method of work, and specifically how to create, even managing to transpose a portrait from the natural and traditional descriptive level to a narrative one" (pp. 24-25).
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| Joshua Reynolds, The Ladies Waldegrave, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland Source: Wikimedia Commons |
[5] It was said that the author's challenge is to determine the subsequent redeployment of the models designed in Italy. From a methodological point of view, the volume contains a veritable ‘manifesto’, a programmatic message that it is appropriate to articulate with the words of Perini Folesani herself: "Of course, at first glance it may seem arrogant and even pretentious, and above all extremely subjective, to argue that a certain origination from a certain model is more right or more wrong than another one, or that one is correct and the other is wrong. There is, in fact, in the approach of traditional art historians (especially those who insist on the line - once a noble and pioneering one, but now too often worn and economically corrupt - of connoisseurship), an intrinsic inability to define the similarity if not in terms (forcibly subjectivist) of an individual apoditic anagnorisis, which is as unverifiable as indisputable, because it is based on an evidence of which their undeniable - or even closed to any question - experience is and wants to be the only guarantor. But, in spite of what they believe, the world has evolved and things have changed. Semiotic criteria are in the pipeline - in literature - for almost thirty years now. Around twenty years ago, they matured in Gérard Genette’s seminal work Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. I refer to the fundamental concepts… of interdiscursivity and intertextuality, and to the intermediate notions of hypotextuality, from which I draw – preferring it – the slightly different concept of infratextuality. These semiotic criteria’s application to the figurative field should allow everyone an objective, non-arbitrary verification of the possible similarity (and its degree) between two images, according to criteria that, as any unit of measure, are impersonal, extrinsic, immutable, abstract (in a word, objective), and are not easily subject to suggestive, as well as subjective manipulations." (pp. 44-45).
[6] Giovanna Perini or Giovanna Perini Folesani? It is the same author to clarify: Folesani is the surname of his mother, who passed away in 2010. Perini has requested and obtained from the Ministry of Interior to change her name, adding the one of the mother. Thus, the correct wording is indeed Giovanna Perini Folesani .
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