Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Lucia Simonato
Il "credulo Sandrart". La ricezione della Teutsche Academie (e le sue riedizioni) tra Sette e Novecento [The 'gullible' Sandrart. On the reception of the Teutsche Academie (and of the new reditions) between the XVIII and the XX centuries]
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Studi di Memofonte 3/2009
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Hugo Bürkner. Portrait of Joachim von Sandrart. 1854.
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[1] Writing on the Teutsche Academie by Joachim von Sandrart is highly complex, because rarely a text has seen interpretations which changed so radically over the centuries. The most striking example: even today, some write the Teutsche Academie is composed of two volumes (published respectively in 1675 and in 1679) and some of three volumes (in 1675, 1679 and 1680 respectively). This is not a small difference. Available since a few years, the Internet site www.sandrart.net has established itself as the most authoritative voice on the subject. Therefore, we will stick to the interpretation provided in that Internet site, the same as the interpretation provided by Simonato. The volumes of which the Academie Teutsche consists are three: the first dates back to 1675; a second one, much larger, is of 1679; and the third one dates back to 1680. The latter is titled Iconologia deorum, oder Abbildung der Götter, and is in fact the German translation of Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (The images of the gods of the ancients) by Vincenzo Cartari. The Iconologia deorum should be considered, in effect, as an integral appendix of the Teutsche Academie. It is well known, however - and here there are no conflicting versions - that soon after some Latin adaptations of the work appeared on the market, divided into three volumes: Sculpturae Veteris Admiranda (1680), Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae (1683) and the Romae antiquae et novae theatrum (1684). The success of these three versions, and in particular the Academia nobilissimae, was universal, but helped provide a somewhat distorted image of the work. In fact, these were three compendia that re-casted the Teutsche Academie according to a structure which was more markedly close to Vasari’s tradition (theories, lives and gallery of portraits.) To the contrary, it is certain that the spread of the original edition was extremely limited, especially in Italy (Cecilia Mazzetti di Pietralata. Fortuna e sfortuna della Teutsche Academie in Italia: dalla memoria obliterata nel 1675 alle recensioni del 1688). What went lost in the transition from the original to the Latin reductions? Ms Simonato tries an answer in these terms: the original function of the work went lost, and especially the primary role played by its illustrative apparatus: that of “valuable vehicle for the transmission of antiquarian iconographies and historical and theoretical sources of Italian and French ancestry" (pp. 2-3). A work with an original plant became therefore the German transposition of Vasari's Lives. "By nature exquisitely typical of regions north of the Alps, the confidence exhibited by Sandrart towards a teaching exclusively entrusted to prints allows us to measure the conceptual distance of the Teutsche Academie from (and not only its purely typographic difference with) Vasari's Lives. The Teutsche Academie is conceived as an academy based on paper documentation, for the processing of which the careful preparation of prints constituted an item of equal dignity next to the compilation of the notes. In this respect, it is still complex to decipher what Joachim’s merits are as an author, as a designer and finally as an editor of the work. Recent studies not only had the merit of having emphasised eye-catching collaborations by scholars and writers (both in their early German versions as well as in the subsequent Latin revisions). These studies even showed that some biographies of German artists, hitherto considered as autograph (because not related to sources which had already been published) had in fact been drafted by German collectors and scholars, who then had proceeded to send them to Sandrart" (pp. 5-6). In this light it should therefore be clear that it is not indifferent to consider the translation of Cartari as an integral part of Teutsche Academie to all effects, because Cartari was a preferred source of transmission of those antiquarian iconographies referred before.
[2] It is only by taking into account this perspective that we understand why in Germany Johann Jacob Volkmann proposed a second and even more sumptuous edition of the Teutsche Academie in 1768, this time divided into eight volumes. In this second edition the iconographic section appeared further enriched with modern "examples". Volkmann intervened instead on the text of Teutsche Academie, introducing “cuts and updates, however often according to questionable selection criteria. A significant valuable inserts of the Teutsche Academie. This happened because that part was perceived as not sufficiently anchored to internal illustrative references and as very far from the image that the curator wanted to convey to Sandrart, as a source of primary importance on antiques and Italian art. That part had been written by Joachim resorting mostly to personal memories and without the aid of other texts" (p. 11). At the end of the century, however, the attitude towards Sandrart began to change even in Germany. It was not possible anymore to propose him as a source for the ancient and Italian art, but rather for the German one; in this sense, this concept was a lot much closer to the way Sandrart had been used for example in Italy. In reality, however, no new German edition of the Teutsche Academie appeared throughout 1800; it was necessary to wait until 1925 (and in particular until the summary proposed by Arthur Rudolf Peltzer) before Sandrart turned again to the scholars’ attention. It will be a completely different Sandrart, where, for example, the iconographic apparatus has almost disappeared, while the textual inserts - deleted from Volkmann – have been retrieved. In light of the analytical debate in the previous decades, when Sandrart had passed the scrutiny of the positivist critique, the cuts made by Peltzer "betrayed the will of confirming Sandradt as the original source in the description not only of his age , but above all of the Northern European artistic production. To substantiate this thesis, Peltzer did not hesitate to publish the news on German and Flemish artists of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries, that Joachim had indeed not prepared autonomously... The main consequence of these choices was the complete curtailment of the... theoretical and antiquarian inserts and of a large part of the apparatus illustrating the three volumes on the Seventeenth century. The Frankfurt writer and painter was thereby transformed into a simple biographer, flattened on the figure of Vasari, of whom he forcibly ended to become the German alter ego" (pp. 4 -5). It remained understood that everything that did not fall under the scope of the biographies of German and Flemish artists was necessarily considered as plagiarism.
[3] Albeit in passing, it is worth noting that a modern edition of the Teutsche Academie never appeared in the famous series of Viennese Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance. Yet it is certain that such project had been somehow cultivated (p. 3). See also Andreas Dobslaw, Die Wiener »Quellenschriften« und ihr Herausgeber Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg (in particular p. 27).
[4] Overcoming this vision of the work of Sandrart, which was flattering on the one hand, but reductive on the other, is on the whole a fairly recent development. It had its central hub in the new publication (between 1994 and 1995) of the full facsimile edition of the Teutsche Academie, edited by Christian Klemm. Also broad reflections appeared on the theory underpinning the writing of the Frankfurt author (see all Michèle-Caroline Heck, Théorie et pratique de la peinture. Sandrart et la Teutsche Academie). The preparation of an electronic edition available on the web and hopefully an adequate critical edition on print will allow us to gain again a more comprehensive view of the figure of Sandrart, with an overall more attentive look to the dynamics and the thought of the age in which he lived.
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