CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION
Giovanni Previtali
[For the critical study of history of art sources]
Excerpt from:
Giovan Pietro Bellori
Le Vite de’ Pittori scultori e architetti moderni
Edited by Evelina Borea
Introduction by Giovanni Previtali
Torino, Einaudi Publisher (I Millenni), 1976
 |
| Giovanni Previtali (1983) Source: http://www3.unisi.it/v0/minisito2.html?fld=2200 |
Foreword (by Giovanni Mazzaferro)
In 1976, the publishing house Einaudi released Giovan
Pietro Bellori’s Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, curated by
Evelina Borea and with an introduction by Giovanni Previtali. I read again that
introduction a few days ago and discovered it is an extraordinary 'modern' text,
not only for the aspects dedicated to the analysis of Bellori’s work, but also
from a scientific and methodological point of view. Previtali wondered first of
all (a rhetorical question of course) why such a long time passed (the Lives were released in 1672) before a critical edition of Bellori’s text was
produced. He noted that the rediscovery of the fundamental texts of Italian Baroque
had led to the publication of numerous facsimile reprints, but drew a clear
distinction between them and the critical editions. Without doubt, he claimed
critical editions had to be preferred, i.e. editions which would be noted and
commented upon and that would allow the reader to understand the broader context.
Forty years after, the need to prepare accurate
critical editions of the major source of art literature is not anymore to be
contrasted with the publication of facsimile reprints, but with their availability
on the Internet. Let us be clear: we do not want to deny that the Internet has
allowed scholars to have access to originals with an unforeseeable ease at the
time of Previtali. What we are still convinced of is that (just as in 1976) an original
text without critical apparatus, when posted in the network, lends itself to
the same dangers as facsimile reprints.
We asked for permission from the publishing
house Einaudi to write down and reproduce the pages (from IX to XII) dedicated from Previtali to support the need to prepare modern critical editions of the
sources. We have given them an invented title, but we think one which is very faithful
to the author's thought. We display the pages below in an English translation,
which the reader will hopefully appreciate. It goes without saying that copyrights
belong entirely to the publishing house, which I would like to thank.
Giovanni Previtali
Introduction to Bellori's Lives: pages ix-xii
(copyright Einaudi Publishing House)
A modern
edition of the main work of one of the authors who is generally considered the
"most important historian of art not only in Rome but throughout Italy,
even in Europe, in the seventeenth century" (Schlosser) [note of the editor:
Bellori],and as "the greatest scholar and archaeologist of his time"
(Panofsky) [1] needs no special justification; if anything, it would seem that one
should raise the question, on the contrary, why our historic-artistic culture,
full of so much glorious traditions and so prodigal, since some time, of methodologically
'updated' essays, had to wait for the third centenary since the first printed
edition of the Vite (Lives)
(1672-1972) to fulfil this primary duty to one of its illustrious ancestors;
and whether this delay is substantially an additional sign of its weakness and the
inability not only to keep its position in the debate of ideas, but even to use
its resources to cope with the demands of the public, the school, the book
market.
As a matter
of fact, when forty years ago the increase of interest for the art of the
seventeenth century, with Messrs Voss and Longhi, Pevsner and Pollak [2] as pioneers
and auspices, made again necessary to have at hand the main "sources"
on the artistic life of the ''Baroque period" (Baglione, Bellori, Passeri,
Pascoli), then for the first time we resorted to that second best solution, which
is a facsimile reprint [3]. A solution that, precisely because “emergency
driven” and transient, was welcomed by so many scholars [4], but that does not
excuse us from the task of preparing modern editions of those texts: that is,
editions which are easy to read, philologically correct, and in which the text
is connected, through all available tools (most notably an updated apparatus of
footnotes), to the historical coordinates outside of which is likely to remain,
for the public today - also a "cultivated" if not "specialized one" -
largely incomprehensible. These are elementary considerations, which are
certainly valid for any text of ancient historiography (for Guicciardini or
Paolo Sarpi no less than for the Vasari and Bellori), but that are doubly true
for the texts of art criticism which (once the connection with specific figurative
facts is lost, against which were drafted) are more prone to involuntary
misunderstandings as well as to voluntary manipulation.
To reconstruct
briefly the original consistency in a footnote, to provide the necessary
information to retrieve the current location and re-establish different
assessments of the fundamental framework, is not a task that a publisher of
literary sources can neglect as secondary, if he really wants to help us to understand its meaning (thereby making more effective its utilization). And not
so much with regard to the informative function, transmission of crude facts
(this is the aspect for which the sources are, in theory, more easily
"overcome", although it must be said, they still are only very rarely
"outdated"), but rather precisely for those aspects of controversy or
interpretation, that someone, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, would be
willing to overlook (considering them "subjective", "contingent"
and therefore "not scientific") in favour of the "permanent"
aspect of an "objective" information. In fact, if we deep dive to
understand the real basis of this editorial alternative (facsimile or similar editions
versus annotated editions), we will discover rather early, as the common
denominator of each choice, the alliance of an economic interest with an
ideological justification. The economic interest is evident: the labour cost and
the intellectual production times are reduced in the first case to minimum levels;
the "ideology" is, as I mentioned above, the preferred value of
"objective information", which has a logical corollary in two
aspects. First, in the distrust in every critical intervention (whether by a commentator
or editor – even one which is taking an humble view of things) which can alter
the original "objectivity"[5]. And, second, in the different use of
the texts, to be hoarded in view of occasional "consultations" to
draw from them "precious" and "factual elements”. The choice of a
fully-fledged "edition", albeit with all its risks, also aims at
reaffirming that sources are there to be read and reread, not only to be quoted
in references[6].
They should
be read, first of all, because it is only through the sources that it is
possible, by supporting and not forcing the (by its nature ambiguous) interpretation
of figurative texts [7], to find those relations between art world and world of
words, interest, ideas which can allow us to see a society of the past, in a
unified way and beyond any aestheticism. Thereby we can find again - this is
the essential - the organic unity through a real mediation; we will therefore
not be simply content of an abstract unity, presupposed a priori and built up through
the arbitrary conjugation of data which, while being "synchronous",
are not, by that fact alone, related to each other.
Sources
should be read also to rediscover the meaning of the "historiographical
tradition", whose function is not just to mark certain limits to the arbitrary
aspect of interpretative modernization. An old truth of the past (it is worth recalling it to some of our contemporary scholars, who seem to have inherited from
the Enlightenment age only schematic attitudes, but not erudition and courage)
never becomes false in the sense of absurd, unrelated to the historical facts,
not relevant, but can become simply partial, restricted, less relevant; it
should be "revived", as Hegel said, not ignored or schematically
overturned or rejected.
All this,
again, is twice true with regard to historic-artistic disciplines. In them, what
is found in written documents plays a secondary role in real debates; in those
interchanges between semi-analphabetic painters and often not less semi-literate
"users", the "oral tradition" has continued to have a preeminent
value also during the civilization of the printed paper. In our
"sources" are recorded directly or, more often, in the aspect of
polemical targets, also the tradition of heated discussions in front of the
"single texts" of visual art works, of oral 'reports' on what was
happening in other places of the art market, of invented arguments to convince on
the goodness of a purchase or on defects of the competing product. Such sources
are written by people who have been able to attend or participate in those
debates, suffered those struggles, and shared those interests. They were really
so much more cognisant than their posterity, that we can really not live with any
illusion we would be able to ignore their testimony and their judgments.
NOTES
[1] J. Von
Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur, Wien
1924, Italian translation La
letteratura artistica, Florence,
1964, pp. 463-64 (this is the "third updated Italian edition " of the
fundamental work of the great Italian-German [sic: note of the translator: in fact he was not Italian-German, but Austrian]
scholar; it is all the more surprising that nobody took action to correct those
factual errors which are inevitably rather frequent in a work of this size); E.
Panofsky, Idea. Ein Beitrag zur
Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie, Leipzig-Berlin in 1924, Italian
translation Florence 1952, p. 79.
[2] H.
Voss, Die Malerei des Barock in Rom,
Berlin 1924; N. Pevsner, Die italienische
Malerei vom Ende der Renaissance bis zum ausgehenden Rokoko,
Wildpark-Potsdam, 1928; O. Pollak, Die
Kunsttätigkeit unter Urban VIII, Wien, 1927, 1931; the writings of R.
Longhi on the seventeenth-century between 1913-1934 are now in Opere complete, vols. I, II and IV,
Florence, published in 1961, 1967 and 1968.
[3] Le vite de’
pittori, scultori et architetti moderni, scritte da Gio: Pietro Bellori, parte
prima. Facsimile edition of the Rome edition of 1672, Rome 1931; Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni scritte da Lione
Pascoli. Facsimile of the 1730 Rome edition, Rome,
1933; Le vite de’ pittori scultori et
architetti. Dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572 in fino a’ tempi di Papa
Urbano Ottavo nel 1642, scritte da Gio. Baglione Romano. Facsimile of
the 1642 Rome edition
with introduction and edited by Valerio Mariani, Rome 1935.
[4] See,
for example, E. Garin, Considerazioni
su una mostra, in Reprints. I ° international market-exhibition of facsimile
reprints, Circolo della Stampa, Milan, 4-12 February 1972.
[5] Such
fetishism of objectivity can lead to extreme cases of aberrations. We could mention on the one hand R. Spear's refusal to recognize the relationships between
Velázquez and Caravaggio as "undocumented" (communication at the
conference on Caravaggio, Cleveland, see also the catalogue of the exhibition Caravaggio and his Followers, Cleveland
1971, p. 19), and on the other hand, albeit on another level, the decision by E.
Battisti to stick religiously, in his reprint of the Lives of Bellori (Genoa 1967), to the same layout as the original
(it is so unusual that both Wittkower, Arte e Architettura in Italia 1600-1750, Turin 1972, p. 445, as well as
A. Pallucchini, Per una situazione stroica di Giovanni Bellori, in "Storia dell’Arte", n. 12,
1971, p. 285, believe it is a "facsimile edition", while the text was
reassembled, with the consequences that you can imagine; see. p. LXXVI).
[6] The
list of the seventeenth century’s sources which had the honour of an annotated
edition is easily finalised: after the pioneering endeavours by D. von Hadeln
for Ridolfi (Le meraviglie dell’arte o
vero le vite degli illustri pittori veneti e dello stato, Venice, 1648),
Berlin 1914, 1924 and by J. Hess for Passeri (Vite de' pittori scultori et architetti, quoted), Leipzig-Wien 1934, after World War II only the editions of Mancini (Considerazioni sulla pittura) by A. and L.
Marucchi Salerno (Rome 1956, 1957) and Boschini (La carta del navegar pitoresco, Venice 1660) by A. Pallucchini
(Venice-Rome 1966) were added. A compromise that avoids the problem of the treatment of
the (photographically reproduced) text but faces that of historical commentary
is the one adopted by L. Grassi in the series "Fonti per la storia dell'arte" (G. Celio by E. Zocca, B.Orsini by B. Toscano, Pietro da Cortona by V. Casala, P. Marullo by M. Zocca),
method used also in the edition, edited by A. Emiliani, C.C. Malvasia, Le pitture di Bologna in 1686, Bologna 1969. Much narrower is the portion of the
commentary in the historical series of Labor Editions in Milan (Scannelli, Scaramuccia).
[7] I have
already had occasion to emphasize this "natural" ambiguity of
figurative texts in my Introduction
to the volume on Art in the
Feltrinelli-Fischer Encyclopaedia, Milan, 1971, pp. 13-15. See now, for the
limits it sets to 'iconological' research, the important essay by EH Gombrich: Introduction:
Aims and Limits of Iconology, in Symbolic
Images. Studies in the Art of
the Renaissance, London
1972, pp. 1-22.
[8] As to right
refusal of this abstract unity, which has been a priori assumed at the
beginning and regularly found at the end of each research conducted with an idealistic
spirit, see especially E.H. Gombrich, In Search
of Cultural History, Oxford, 1969. On the need, however, to find a unified
vision, see my above mentioned Introduction
and also: E.H. Gombrich, conservatore viennese, in "Paragone", n. 221, July 1968, pp. 22-40; Un nuovo programma di lavoro del Warburg Institute. Alla ricerca di una storia della cultura, in "Rinascita", May 30, 1969,
pp. 26-27, and the Introduction to E.
Panofsky, Studi di Iconologia, Turin
1975, pp. XXVIII-XXXII.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento