Carlo Ridolfi. The Marvels of Art or the Lives of the Famous Painters of Venice and its State

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Carlo Ridolfi

Le maraviglie dell'arte

ovvero le vite degli illustri Pittori Veneti e dello Stato
[The Marvels of Art
or the Lives of the Famous Painters of Venice and its State]

Edited by Detlev Freiherrn von Hadeln

Roma, Multigrafica, 1965

Engraved portrait of Carlo Ridolfi by Giacomo Piccini, published in Le maraviglie dell'arte

[1] The original edition in two volumes was printed in Venice in 1648. A second edition was released in Padua in 1835-1837.

[2] The third edition was published in Berlin in 1914 (1° volume) and in 1924 (2nd volume), and edited by Detlev Freiherrn von Hadeln. The technical features of this third edition are not fully known; sure, it was a work of great complexity; just think that the negatives of the photographic reproduction of the first edition (that of 1648) have been used for a new layout that includes footnotes written by the editor and made with the usual printing systems. Thus, the work is presented in two languages. In German we find: the study by the curator, at the beginning of the work, the footnotes - which he compiled and are distributed across the various pages of text - and the correlation tables between this edition and that of the seventeenth century. In Italian is instead the writing by Ridolfi, which remains, of course, the bulk of the work.

[3] The issue thus obtained was reproduced as facsimile in 1965 by Multigrafica Publishers. This is the fourth edition, following those of 1648, of 1835-1837 and the one of Berlin of 1914-1924. To prevent trivial misunderstandings, it is worth reiterating that the reprinting by Multigrafica is not to be considered a facsimile of the Venetian text 1648, but of the German edition conducted across World War First.

[4] The judgement on Ridolfi’s work by Schlosser is certainly not enthusiastic (La letteratura artistica - Art literature, p. 531). For the Austrian scholar, the Lives of Ridolfi are "written in a quite clumsy style, are bombastic and full of anecdotes"; it is worth noting, too, that they "treat only painters (and this is very significant for Venice) not only from Venice but also from mainland." Substantially similar the judgment of Luigi Grassi in Teorici e storia della critica d’arte. L’Età Moderna: il Seicento (Theory and history of art criticism. The Modern Age: the seventeenth century). However, Grassi does not forget to point out that "The Lives of Ridolfi often represent a direct descriptive testimony of countless paintings, and a source for the closest artists of his time, as the two Tintorettos, the Bassanos, Palma the Younger, Aliense, etc. "(p. 38-39). Ridolfi’s Marvels have therefore certainly not enjoyed the benevolence of the critics; and there is no doubt that Ridolfi applies a well-known pattern (that of the progress of the arts already seen in Vasari's Lives), providing, if anything, to adapt it to the Venetian school, opposed in this way to that of Tuscany. The critical judgments that Ridolfi expressed are surely not revealing any particular vision (indeed, often you cannot find any vision), but the fact remains that the work of Ridolfi is a point of reference for the whole later Venetian history.

[5] For more information on Ridolfi, the Marvels and their genesis, please see Lionello Puppi, La fortuna delle Vite [n.d.r. vasariane] nel Veneto dal Ridolfi al Temanza (The fortune of Vasari’s Lives in Veneto from Ridolfi to Temanza) in Il Vasari storiografo e artista (Vasari as historian and artist) (Florence, National Institute of Renaissance Studies, 1976), and in particular pp. 408-427. In the essay, Puppi refers briefly to a forthcoming edition of the Marvels to be edited by him and at that time, i.e. in the mid-70's (see. P. 412 n. 21). To our knowledge, this issue has never been produced.