Giovanni Mazzaferro, The Fine Arts in Venice in the manuscripts of Pietro and Giovanni Edwards. Introduction

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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We are displaying below the introduction of  'Le Belle Arti a Venezia nei manoscritti di Pietro e Giovanni Edwards' ('The Fine Arts in Venice in the manuscripts of Pietro and Giovanni Edwards'), published by goWare Publishers and available on Amazon.com both as an e-book as well as a printed book since Monday April 20th.

On Wednesday 22 'The Fine Arts in Italy' was the best seller as printed book on Amazon.it in the section "History of Art, Theory and Criticism"

Giovanni Mazzaferro
Le Belle Arti a Venezia 
nei manoscritti di Pietro e Giovanni Edwards
[The Fine Arts in Venice 
in the manuscripts of Pietro and Giovanni Edwards]
goWare editore, 2015

Introduction

On 10 April 1836, the Department of Education of the Imperial Royal Austrian government sends to Antonio Diedo (then Secretary and acting President of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice) a long manuscript by Giovanni Edwards O'Kelles. Giovanni was the only son of Pietro Edwards, the veritable deus ex machina of the Venetian artistic circles in the years between 1770 and 1820 ca. Giovanni's text is accompanied by a letter [1], bearing the title of the work:

"Giovanni Eduardo O'Kelles [2] of this City has presented his manuscript book entitled General Repertoire of Venetian Fine Arts."

The manuscript consists of three parts: the first one is devoted to the history of painting of Venice, or, rather, to the history of the types of association between Venetian artists [3]; the second one deals with the 'Custody of Public Paintings', in which we can recognize three distinct phases: 'revision', 'restoration' and 'preservation' [4]; the last part contains a draft Regulatory Reform of the Academy, accompanied by measures recommended to contain the costs of administration. [5]

The manuscript is dated April 12, 1833, but, as seen, is transmitted to Mr Diedo on April 10, 1836 only, i.e. three years later. It is not known what happened during those three years: whether the manuscript was delivered immediately by Giovanni or only at a later date. There is however one certainty: no evidence exists in it of annotations subsequent to the date of April 1833. Diedo’s response [6] is sent on June 12, 1836. Along with it, he returns the original (of which there is no trace to date), not without first having ordered to produce a copy of the manuscript itself. Exactly this copy, which consists of 263 double-sided sheets, is preserved in the archives of the Academy. The transcript does not show the full title of the work, but we can infer it from the above-mentioned letter. [7]

The General Repertoire has substantially never been printed so far. Mary Philadelphia Merrifield publishes thirty sheets thereof (specifically, from the end of 107v. to the bottom of the 137v.) in her Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting, [8] an extraordinary anthology of manuscripts devoted to the artistic techniques of Italian Old Masters. It is just by following the verbatim text of Ms Merrifield’s notes (she is a fully reliable source in this kind of information) that it has been possible to trace the writing of Giovanni Edwards. [9]

The real ‘star’ of the first two parts of the manuscript is Pietro Edwards. He is explicitly the protagonist, when Giovanni provides instructions and literal quotes of his father’s writings, bringing information currently unknown and precious to us. [10] He is however the protagonist mainly because the first and the second part of the General Repertoire are, in fact, an anthology of the writings of Pietro. [11] An anthology of which Giovanni (the son) deliberately concealed the real authorship, assigning instead the paternity to himself: the only changes are those designed to remove any reference to the true writer of the text and to operate a few stylistic changes, probably deemed necessary to rejuvenate the terminology of writings, dating back to forty years before. Naturally, I am not hazarding such a statement without an accurate comparison with and examination of all the manuscripts of Edwards father, today preserved in the archives of Venice. It is only through this systematic scrutiny that I was not only able to mention - in the notes to the General Repertoire - which passages were taken from the now available (and sometimes still unpublished) documents of Pietro, but I could also identify with reasonable certainty the contents of the manuscripts that we know had been written by his father and are now lost. In one case, indeed, the reader will be able to directly operate the comparison: for his perusal, I am proposing the transcribed text of one of the manuscripts of Pietro, the Antichità dell’Unione dei Pittori in Vinezia (The Antiquity of the Union of Painters in Venice) [12] (see Appendix III). In essence, Giovanni Edwards appears to have at hand, in 1833, the entire ‘Edwards documentation’, which is preserved today at the Library of the Patriarchal Seminary, and many other texts by Pietro, whose fate is now unknown. The only part of the Repertoire of which Giovanni seems to be the real author is the third one (i.e. the one with the reform plan of the academic regulations).

I am aware I am now asking a special effort from the reader. Not so much in trying to understand this or that passage, but in reading the General Repertoire along two different time frames. Initially, taking only the first and second parts of it into account, we will try to display the parable of Pietro Edwards at his peak in the years of the Venetian Republic, and not yet after his fall. Edwards is a man who, thanks to his unquestionable technical capabilities, dynamism, organizational skills and political vision is charged with all most important positions of the dying Republic, up to receive full powers (1792) for the complete overhaul of the Fine Arts system. He is closely and sincerely tied to tradition of the Serenissima, whose breakdown, however, is putting into question the whole Venetian administrative structure, and with it the role of Edwards himself. He tries in vain to resume the leadership he had enjoyed in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century. I will try to prove that, in addition to the art restoration activity and besides the attention for the organization of the world of the liberal arts, Edwards father also cultivates, for three decades, the ambitious project to create a Gallery of Venetians Painters, organized chronologically by complete sets of artists. This project led him to accept the position of Delegato ai Beni della Corona (Envoy for Crown Heritage) during the French occupation (1806): considered by many as the originator of the material dispersion of Venetian public heritage in France, Austria and Milan, Edwards actually counteracts this phenomenon and works to keep the public pictures in a museum that would represent (posthumously) a tribute to the Republic of Venice. Unfortunately for him, nothing will be implemented.

Later on, we are asking the reader to take a leap forward by thirty years, and - ideally - to move to 1833, when his son Giovanni writes the General Repertoire. We are taking the view that, by that date, the first and the second part of the manuscript have become only preliminary to the third one; and that this third one, in addition to point out to personal ambitions, is an attempt (a useless and anachronistic one, but still to be taken into account) to bring the Academy, which in the meantime had opened to the teaching of "foreigners", in the flow of an exquisitely Venetian tradition. One cannot overlook, in fact, that one of the proposals put forward by Giovanni is the replacement of the masters of painting, sculpture and architecture with members of the local art world.

In the next two chapters we will deal first with Pietro and later on with Giovanni.

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NOTES

[1] Letter No. 3663/206 Public Education of 10 April 1836. See Appendix I. The letter is kept in the ‘Diedo folder’, envelope 39, issue 13 Academic organization of the Historical Archive of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (henceforth AAV). The file contains 13 different documents, including the transcription of the manuscript, and the response to Government by Diedo. The entire dossier is inventoried under the heading “Proposte di riforma dell’Accademia di Giovanni Edwards O’Kelles, figlio di Pietro Edwards già conservatore delle Gallerie, e sua opera manoscritta Repertorio generale delle belle arti 1833” ("Proposals for Reform of the Academy of Giovanni Edwards O'Kelles, son of Pietro Edwards already curator of the Galleries, and his manuscript work entitled General Repertoire of Fine Arts 1833").

[2] The surname Edwards is often transformed to look like Italian and thereby altered in "Eduardo", however creating the misunderstanding that the latter would be a first name (and not a surname, like it is).

[3] “Storia della Organizzazione Civile delle Arti Belle in Venezia dall’Anno 1100, sino al 1808. Nella quale sono riposte le cagioni intime della fioritura e del decadimento loro”. (History of the Civil Organization of Fine Arts in Venice, from the Year 1100 until 1808. In which are pinned the intimate causes of their flowering and their decay).

[4] “Provvedimenti Governativi intorno alla Revisione, Ristaurazione, e Preservazione delle Pitture di Sovrana Appartenenza collocate testè Pubblici Palazzi, Fabbriche Erariali e Chiese di R. jus-patronato, sì prima che dopo le Revocazioni Demaniali o sia dall’anno 1686, sino a circa il 1819”. (Government measures around Revision, Restauration, and Preservation of Paintings of Sovereign Ownership, currently placed in Public Buildings, Public Production Plants and Churches under Royal patronage, both before and after ownership expropriations, and thereafter from the year 1686 up to about 1819).

[5] “Prospetto di regolazione per la R. Veneta Accademia delle Arti Belle dedotto dalla Storia della loro Organizzazione Civile (…) da quella de’ Provvedimenti Pubblici delle R. Pitture (…) nonché dal sistema di fondazione 1808 e stato corrente delle cose”. (Proposal for a regulation of the Royal Venetian Academy of Fine Arts, based on the History of its Civic Organization (...), encompassing Public Measures on Royal pictures (...) as well as from the foundation system in 1808 up to the current state of things.)

[6] See Appendix II.

[7] The sheets of the copy are numbered in pencil at the top right, only in correspondence of even pages. Curiously, the numbering (which is progressive) is limited only to the first two parts, leaving the third one without page numbering. In this edition, trivially, we proceeded to the numbering of the latter section that however – I would like to stress it again – does not appear in the sample kept at the Academy.

[8] Mary P. Merrifield, Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to the XVIIIth Centuries on the Arts of Painting…, London, John Murray, 1849. Reprinted on several occasions by Dover Publications. See, in the 1967 two volumes facsimile reprint, Volume II, pp. 849-884. On the extraordinary figure of Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, I would refer to a series of writings of myself, of Caroline Palmer and my father, Luciano Mazzaferro, published online (in Italian and in English) in the blog Letteratura Artistica .

[9] “I saw this copy among the Edwards’ papers in the office of the secretary of the Academy” (Mary P. Merrifield, Original Treatises… quoted, Vol. II, pp. 846-847).

[10] Giovanni never mentions his father by name. He makes indirect reference to him, by either naming from time to time the various positions that he covered or by using periphrases. For example, in the sheet 56r: “E se la sollecita mediazione ed attività di chi qui per modestia non dee nominarsi, non avesse nel 1774 co’ sui uffici… etc.” (And if, in 1774, the prompt mediation and activities of that person, who for modesty ought not to be mentioned here, had not with his activity... etc.")

[11] The only scholar to have noticed it, as far as we know, is Alessandro Conti in Storia del restauro e della conservazione delle opere d’arte (History of the restoration and conservation of works of art), Milan, Electa Publishers, 1973 (consulted in the 1988 edition). We do not know whether Conti was able to see the copy of the Repertoire at the Academy (although it seems logical that, in such a case, he would have mentioned it). But, when comparing the pages translated by Merrifield with the documents preserved at the Library of the Patriarchal Seminary, he realizes that Edwards father is the author of excerpts of the proposed text in English and writes: "it is not surprising that in such circumstances the Accademia di Venezia (Venice Academy) denied consent to the publication of the implicitly critical paper, which Giovanni Edwards had compiled from various paternal manuscripts "(p. 187).

[12] Pietro Edwards, Antichità dell’Unione dei Pittori in Vinezia; Origine del loro Colleggio; prerogative costituzionali ed onorifiche di questo corpo; istituzione dell’Attual Accademia del disegno con alcuni riflessi sopra l’interno andamento d’essa. (Pietro Edwards, Antiquity of the Union of Painters in Venice; Origin of their College; constitutional and honorific prerogatives of this body; institution of the current Academy of drawing with some reflections on its internal developments.) The manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana in code miscellaneous It, VII, 1791 (=8978). The exemplary has already been mentioned by several scholars, but it is still unpublished. The first to indicate it might have been Antonio Dall’Acqua Giusti in: The Academy of Venice. History Report for the Exhibition of Vienna of 1873, Venice, Tipografia del Commercio owned by Marco Visentini, 1873. Moreover, see also Elena Bassi, La Regia Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Florence, Felice Le Monnier, 1941. Both Dall’Acqua as well as Bassi quote it as part of vol. XIV of the manuscript of Giovanni Rossi on Leggi e Costumi Veneziani (Venetians Laws and Customs) (p. 35). However, it is probably the old mark.