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La storia delle storie dell’arte
(The History of Art Histories)
A cura di Orietta Rossi Pinelli
Turin, Einaudi, 2014
Isbn 978-88-06-21461-6
[4] "storiedellarte. A blog of art historians "(http://storiedellarte.com/). The Facebook page of the blog, in December
2014, gathers about 207,000 fans.
Another one?
A history of art histories. Another one? I know
at least two other previous ones, written with the ambition to identify and
highlight the paths of this discipline from Vasari to reach (around) mid-1900.
The first is German, and is the work by Udo Kultermann. Originally published in
1966 (while a second revised edition appeared in 1981) under the title Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte. Der Weg
einer Wissenschaft (History of art history. The path of a science), it has
been translated into Italian in 1997, under the title Storia della storia dell'arte (History of Art History) [1]. The second attempt is French. The
author is Germain Bazin. It is the Histoire
de l'histoire de l'art. De Vasari à nos jours (History of the art history.
From Vasari until our days) of 1986, translated and published in Italian in
1993, once again under the title Storia della storia dell'arte (History
of art history). [2]
So, two things are immediately to be said: that
by Orietta Rossi Pinelli is the first historical reconstruction of this type born in Italy in the last 50 years (there is not no stupid patriotism in a similar
consideration: if anything, its nature of 'Italian' work is framed in a more
'neutral' international vision of the contribution of the individuals, with
greater attention to the evolution of the processes than to nationality). The
title is different: we are talking about "the history of art histories". Certainly not a coincidence,
if it is the curator herself to mention this circumstance in the introduction
[3], when justifying the decision to stop chronologically to the 80s of the
twentieth century. The history of art has literally exploded, becoming plural
and expanding (or getting lost?) in thousand streams, in front of which it is
objectively difficult to provide a well calibrated judgment. Speaking of
"histories of art" has now become customary. I will give just one
example, but not a random one: the most important Italian blog in this sector is
titled "Storie dell’arte"
(Art histories) [4]. The sample is not random, because it concerns indeed one
of the new ways with which (in different forms: from the publication of
academic writing in e-books to the popularization for a wide audience) the art historiography
was confronted in recent years.
As The Betrothed (I
Promessi Sposi)
Another thing must be said: for the breath of
the work, the synthesis capacity, for its clarity, and especially its completeness
and orderly structure, these "Art histories" impose themselves
clearly on the volumes of Kultermann and Bazin. Please excuse me if I will use
banal terms: the one edited by Ms Rossi Pinelli is an important book, which
will be quoted and used for decades. The first pleasantly surprising thing is
the orderly structure in a collective work. The book is in fact written by a
group of art historians, coordinated by Ms Rossi Pinelli, but, in effect, it does
not suffer from discontinuities or internal contradictions related to the
various authorship. Orietta Rossi Pinelli, Maria Beatrice Failla, Chiara Piva, and
Susanne Adina Meyer originate a dense and compact work, in which the parties
are formally distinct, but where you are assured that the end result is the
result of an intense confrontation and a fruitful exchange of expertise and viewpoints.
Unfortunately, I am afraid to know what will be
the fate of the book: it will be carefully dissected in search of who and what
is mentioned and who is not (an irresistible temptation; even I was not able to
refrain); it will be assiduously consulted; it will probably be adopted in several
university courses, where students will be told to study only a few chapters of
it. Nothing worse could happen to it. In due proportion, The history of art histories is like the Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni: it should be all read in one single
step, even though absorbing 500 pages requires constant intellectual
application. The considerations, then, will have to be made later on. It should
be read all in one go, because only then we can gather the historical
perspective, understand fully how, from Vasari’s time to now, things totally
changed. Only in this way it becomes possible to trace and recognize the leitmotifs
that hold together the whole narrative. About those speaks Ms Rossi Pinelli in
his introduction.
The leitmotifs
I do not think I could ever summarize things
better. For this reason, I am venturing to display below the page in question:
"Despite the myriad of open paths, of confluences,
of new branches that have marked this long story [note of the editor, the
evolution of the discipline], four prevailing directions remain recognizable,
especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (but not only), that from
time to time have managed to establish themselves successfully, were forced to retreat,
have been renewed and finally have imploded again to search later for new
fortune.
The more established direction over time, the most
useful to build up the warp on which to weave the minute history, was that of connoisseurship. Connoisseurs have begun
to present themselves in the seventeenth century, gaining ground in the
eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century,
they have further developed their methodologies with strong openings to
philology, historiography in the strict sense and also the aesthetics. For
them, the art work has always been considered as a whole, within which any specialist can identify all the keys
for its identification, location and understanding. The eye, the visual memory,
and the continuous exercise were the key instruments used by those who, over
several centuries, and with many variations, shared this type of research.
A similar self-sufficiency of languages was
shared by those scholars who sought another objective: to penetrate in the
"spirit" of artworks by analysing not only the style, but the
structure of the works, their similarities, their rhythms, in order to capture
their creative intent. An address associated with the formalist research, which came close, at times, to seek for
transcendence through an absolute empathy with the work. [...]
Antithetical to this address is the one anchoring
works to facts, documents and sources, to achieve a positive historiography. A methodology which, albeit among not rare
contrasts, interacted with connoisseurship helping to increase the
identification and the detailed knowledge of the heritage.
Finally, a fourth trend, dense of derivations.
Also this one subject to successes and implosions: art history as history of
culture in the broadest sense, with its many facets that include iconology,
iconography, the social history of art, art history as history of ideas and
more. For scholars who have fuelled this complex field of study, an
understanding of the works can be reached only by overcoming the disciplinary
borders, thanks to the confluence of different know-hows"(pp. X-XI).
Selected pages
Of course, it is impossible to even attempt a
summary of the topics discussed in a work that, by definition, is already the
result of a work of synthesis. I am quoting again, nevertheless, some of the
pages that, for my very personal taste, I found the most successful. This is
the case for example of seventeenth-century theory of selective imitation and the role of De Pictura veterum by Franciscus Junius; of the pages dedicated to Giulio Mancini, Marco Boschini, and Francesco Scannelli; of those page focusing on the first antiquarians/connoisseurs
of the eighteenth century and referring to Mariette, Crozat and Caylus. But I
cannot forget the attention to the German world and in particular to figures
such as Friedrich von Rumohr and Ludwig Schorn, who, in the early nineteenth
century, have helped to substantiate the essence of art history in a totally
new way. If I may, the section devoted to the first Vienna School of Art
History, with the highlight - within the same school – of the tensions aimed at
consolidating the supra-nationality of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the one
hand and individual nationalisms on the other one, is simply masterful. Just as
one is obliged to think about the sea change caused by the emigration of many
German scholars from Germany to the United States, in coincidence with the
years of the Nazi madness. The case of Erwin Panofsky is exemplary: a man who
is obliged to review all its certainty and learns to see things from a new
perspective. Panofsky emigrated to America and realized having to review all
his certainties: he understands that many of the discussions that had
previously exhausted European historians (mostly of a purely nationalist nature)
had little meaning in a world in which Europe appeared as an indistinct entity and
history begins in 1776; he realizes he has to renegotiate even the lexicon,
extremely specialized and substantially related to the German historiographical
tradition, that uses in his studies. Not only he adapts himself, but, starting
from new assumptions, he manages to leave an indelible mark in the history of
the discipline and to open new avenues of study and research.
These are just a few examples. The pleasure of
finding other ones is left to each reader.
NOTES
[1] Udo Kultermann. Storia della storia dell’arte, Vicenza,
Neri Pozza, 1997.
[2] Germain Bazin. Storia della storia dell’arte, Napoli,
Guida Publishers, 1993.
[3] "The fall of the walls, of ideologies,
the expansion of the" plurals "(the "histories" that
replace the "history"), the new paradigms imposed by the internet, the immaterial equivalence of scanned
images, the expansion of some strong models of research such as neuroscience,
cultural anthropology, the "science" of communication, sociology,
economy itself, all of this has created a liquidity of disciplinary boundaries
that interacted with the history of art, with some positive openings but also
not a few tensions".(p. X)
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