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Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli,
Antonio e Vincenzo Joppi
Chiese di Udine [Churches of Udine]
(ms. Joppi 682a della Biblioteca Civica di Udine)
Edited by Giuseppe Bergamini, Paolo Pastres e Francesca Tamburlini
Udine, Deputazione di Storia Patria per il Friuli, 2007
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| The façade of the Cathedral of Udine (S. Maria Annunziata) Source: Wikimedia commons |
[1] The transcription of the manuscript is preceded by three essays:
- Giuseppe Bergamini, Paolo Pastres. Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli e il suo manoscritto sulle chiese di Udine nella storiografia artistica friulana del Settecento (Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli and his manuscript on the churches of Udine in Friuli’s art historiography of the eighteenth century) (pp. ix-xxv);
- Paolo Pastres. Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli, una vita da erudito (Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli, a scholar's life) (pp. xxvii-xxxiii);
- Francesca Tamburlini. Il manoscritto “Chiese di Udine” di Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli, Antonio e Vincenzo Joppi (The manuscript "Churches of Udine" by Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli, Antonio and Vincenzo Joppi) (pp. xv-xliv).
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| St. Mark's Altarpiece (Cathedral of Udine) Source: Wikimedia commons |
[2] Herewith it is published for the first time the manuscript 682a (Chiese di Udine - Churches of Udine) of the Joppi fund, in the homonymous civic library in Udine. Actually, the manuscript is the result of a complex layering and multiple interventions that have followed from an original nucleus, whose author is Giovanni Tommaso Faccioli. It dates back from the late 1700s until the twentieth century. Let us try to retrace the history. All begins, it was said before, with the figure of the Dominican Father Giovanni Tommaso (but baptized Pietro Giacomo) Faccioli. It is, as Pastres writes (p. xxviii) "a typical exponent of the ecclesiastical scholarship of the eighteenth century, widespread in the Veneto area, equipped with a solid theological and antiquarian culture, ... who engaged in a tireless study of the history of Vicenza and Udine." And if the interest in the world of Vicenza is easily explained, since Faccioli was born and spent many years of his life there, that for Udine is due to a two-year stay that the Dominican father carried out between 1788 and 1790 for church assignments. Started in those years and still continued at least until 1793, thanks to the correspondence he had with the Count Filippo Florio, the studies on Udine led to the compilation of three manuscripts, now preserved at the Florio Fund of the State Archive of Udine (see. p. xxxix). The three manuscripts are in fact made up of a major work and two others, containing functional materials to the first one. The main work is entitled La città di Udine vieppiù illustrata colla storia della fondazion delle chiese, conventi, monasterj, luoghi pii ed oratorj e colla illustrazione di varie carte antiche e delle iscrizioni lapidarie e delle pitture (The city of Udine increasingly illustrated with the history of the foundation of its churches, convents, monasteries, charitable institutions and oratories and with the illustration of various antique maps and lapidary inscriptions and paintings). The title of the manuscript already describes the special attention Faccioli arises in the description of the ecclesiastical heritage in the town (but not only that, since the main public buildings are also considered), by retrieving, or if we want to identify the limits, simply accumulating the documentary sources, which can be literary (and about it, read the first paper signed by Bergamini and Pastres), but also epigraphic and iconographic ones. Thus, the paintings and sculptures are considered from a fundamentally descriptive angle only: "the method used by our author is essentially based on direct observation of the works, as he is costumed at autopsy from the antiquarian interests he developed through epigraphic studies. Such an autoptic custom finds expression in ... decidedly synthetic, but rather complete lists, where the main care is paid to the iconographic description" (Bergamini and Pastres, p. xxiii). There is no space for any critical interpretation of the art works or for problems of attribution; we are far away, in short, from art criticism or art history. But, after centuries, the erudite description is increasingly felt as important as a testimony of the consistency of the artistic heritage, before the downfall started with the Napoleonic pillage.
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| Pellegrino di San Daniele, St. Joseph and the infant Jesus (Cathedral of Udine) Source: Wikimedia commons |
[3] It is not exactly known through which passages Faccioli’s manuscripts ended up in the private archive of the Florio family (whether they were donated by Faccioli himself during his life or, for example, they passed through testamentary legacy). The fact is that they will be rediscovered there by the brothers Antonio and Vincenzo Joppi in the mid-1800s. They not only studied them, but also transcribed and integrated The city of Udine increasingly illustrated. Antonio, in 1857, wrote a Foreword to the transcript (which was then read to the Academy of Udine in 1870 and published in 1872) in which he better explains the terms of his intervention (Antonio always speaks in the singular, but in reality the involvement of brother appears constant): after giving news of the discovery of the three manuscripts, he reports that he transcribed only the most important one and that he integrated it, seeking not only to make it more clear and complete, but also to update it as much as possible, with an indication of what more than half a century of history had added. Another manuscript is born (ms. Joppi 682a of the Public Library of Udine), this time titled Chiese di Udine Volume I. It consists of the (incomplete) work by father Faccioli of Vicenza, with interpolations and additions by Antonio and Vincenzo Joppi). Incidentally, we must clarify that even the Joppis actually produced three manuscripts, of which the Churches of Udine Volume I is undoubtedly the most significant document, while the other two only collect materials used in the preparation of the first; see. p. xxxviii). The transcript of the two brothers is made in 1857 - as explained - with the aim to clarify the documentation by Faccioli and make it usable. The goal would have been reached, if they had succeeded to publish or anyway to achieve a final version that year. Actually Antonio and Vincenzo continued for decades to integrate, modify and intervene on the text, in a more or less explicit way; they wrote everywhere, between a line and the other or at the sides. In the manuscript, however, this time more limited interventions are also found from the first half of the twentieth century, due to Giovan Battista Corgnali, the municipal librarian in those decades. It is easy to understand, then, that one of the main problems of the curators of this edition has been to choose how and what to write down the text. "The text created by scholars in Udine is made available in final form as the authors wished, in decades of first orderly and then confused or even chaotic incremental additions (sometimes signed and dated by them), to the point that at times one may find himself confused on the path to follow. But the information provided by the manuscript makes of this work a primary source of historical and artistic information on the city of Udine. To overcome the problems posed by the stratification of the manuscript, due to frequent interruptions of the text for the insertion of new news - often written on cards of different sizes -, sketches, drawings, documents and clippings, articles and issues in the press, it has been decided to proceed in the transcript without altering the original structure of the Joppi manuscript. Thereby, we respected the sequencing of the cards, showing additions in shaded text... Insertions and completions of the text, which frequently occurred in the manuscript as messy additions (in the margin, footnotes etc.) were included next to the text to which they relate, between double slash // \\ "(p. xliii).
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| Vitale da Bologna, Histories of St. Nicholas (Cathedral of Udine) Source: YukioSanjo |
[4] It remains to be said that neither of the original manuscript of Faccioli nor the next one with the additions of Joppi are mentioned by Schlosser in his Letteratura artistica (Art Literature) . This absence clearly testifies a historically very limited awareness of the text’s existence. A brief mention of Faccioli is only made by Giuseppe Bergamini in La storiografia artistica in Friuli prima del di Maniago in Fabio di Maniago e la storiografia artistica in Italia e in Europa tra Sette e Ottocento (The art historiography in Friuli before Fabio of Maniago in Fabio di Maniago and art history in Italy and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century)
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