Mascia Cardelli. [Pietro Giordani as connoisseur]

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Mascia Cardelli

Pietro Giordani conoscitore d'arte
[Pietro Giordani as connoisseur]

Firenze, Mascia Cardelli editore, 2007

Book cover: Luigi Margotti, Antonio Costa, Paolo Toschi, S. Vitale,
Engraving after Parmigianino

[1] The following are excerpts from the Introduction of the authoress (pp. 17-32) on the art writings by the Italian writer and scholar Pietro Giordani (1774 –1848):

"Although several facets remain still poorly understood, (...) recent contributions have tried to do justice of the paradigm according to which Giordani’s work on fine art should be considered as extemporaneous. According to this prejudice, Giordani would have looked at art issues in a generic and discontinuous way, as a neophyte or simply as a follower of a trend which involved a large part of the literary milieu of the early nineteenth century. In fact, Giordani’s work in the area of arts is not only occasional nor it is comparable to the much more episodic interest of other literates, like Monti or Foscolo. Many pages on art originated from institutional obligations [note of the editor: Giordani was pro-secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna from 1808 until 1815], but others were born from more deliberate preferences. Although he almost always failed to complete his observations up to their ultimate consequences, the framework was solid. Giordani acknowledged the necessary skills for the understanding of art only to those scholars who would fully master humanities, and therefore tried to carve out for himself a professional role among artists...

Hereafter, we are endeavouring a definition of Giordani’s method, or at least of the attitude he had in front of artworks as a scholar with literary background, on the basis of writings of different nature: attempts of monographic essays, laudatory poems, official speeches, funeral declamations, to which must be added the heterogeneous complex allusions and references in the correspondence. A study of Giordani’s art literature has to be played without limiting ourselves to his major works but also valuing sketches and fragments in his writings. A first distinction can help us: on the one hand he may act as a man of letters (perhaps occasionally) viewing artworks and mainly describing them with rhetorical devices; on the other hand, he may work like a philologist who tries to apply a system of objective analysis. It would be naive to stick to a simple duality, a sort of double live under the name of Pietro Giordani...: in the art writings, literary needs substitute frequently philological notations and connoisseur abilities, and vice versa, but a complete separation of areas is never theorized... It can be said that where the question becomes more philological, the literary rhetoric loses centrality and vice versa. It is the germ of a specialist division....

Innocenzo da Imola, Enthroned Madonna and Child in gloria with Saints Michael Archangel, Peter and Benedictus,
Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Giordani manages to blend the methods of the new philology with the practices of the eighteenth-century connoisseur especially in the monograph on Innocenzo [Francucci da Imola, see below], in which the study of the paintings and the primary sources - the archival papers - is supported by the acquisitions of the traditional artistic literature and erudite local historiography. All things considered, Giordani’s attempts of attributions are in line with the model of traveling connoisseurs like Cavalcaselle or Morelli. And if Giordani was not able to visually check all paintings by Innocenzo, he tried to remedy with the help of correspondents and experts in local history, specialists, friends ...

Innocenzo da Imola, Enthroned Madonna and Child with Saints Michael Archangel, Peter and Benedictus (detail)
Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale
Source: Wikimedia Commons

We should therefore abandon once and for all the image which limited Giordani to a celebrator of Canova and an eminent critic of sculpture [note of the editor: also a trusted advisor of Cicognara for the latter’s Storia della scultura - History of sculpture]. Nevertheless, even anthologies (but not that by Chiarini...) focused on his writings on sculpture, in compliance with an ingrained stereotype. In fact, Giordani’s eclectic curiosity brought him to pay attention to painting and engravings to an extent that still needs to be reassessed; and if his eclecticism was perhaps a limit to his still incipient specialization as connoisseur, it was also the mark of his vital and up-to-date culture."

[2] It was already said that the work in which Giordani was closer to a more rigorous and less literary critical approach is the writing Sulle pitture d’Innocenzo Francucci da Imola (On the paintings by Innocenzo Francucci from Imola). The drafting of a veritable monograph on Innocenzo involved Giordani for many years (see in this volume, pp. 33-81 and 448-464) and originated from the speech that then-Secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts gave in 1812, because of the incipient danger to which were exposed the frescoes painted by Innocenzo in Bologna’s Casino della Viola.

Bologna, The 'Casino della Viola'

Innocenzo da Imola, Apollo and Marsia, fresco painted in the Loggia of the 'Casino della Viola'
Source: http://www.iconos.it/le-metamorfosi-di-ovidio/libro-vi/apollo-e-marsia/immagini/48-apollo-e-marsia/

The project became larger and larger, so that only in 1819 the first of the three parts that were to compose the monograph was printed (Discorso primo sopra tre poesie dipinte a fresco nel Casino della Viola - Speech above first three poems painted in fresco in the Casino della Viola). The remaining two parts, which had however reached an advanced stage of preparation, were published posthumously by Antonio Gussalli in 1856-1858. Ms Cardelli reconstructs the genesis of the script in great detail, drawing heavily from Giordani’s epistolary. If one really want to find a limit to her work (but we should realize that the size of the volume would have become unmanageable), we would claim that in our view at least the text of this work would have deserved to be displayed (the excerpts provided in the footnotes do not permit an overall judgment).