Cosimo Bartoli (1503-1572). Edited by Francesco Paolo Fiore and Daniela Lamberini. Part Two

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Cosimo Bartoli
(1503-1572)
Part Two

Proceedings of the International Conference

Mantua, November 18 to 19 and Florence, November 20, 2009

Edited by Francesco Paolo Fiore and Daniela Lamberini

Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2011

Cosimo Bartoli, Del modo di superare le distantie..., Venice, Francesco de Franceschi, 1564
Source: http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/mediciscienze/imed.asp?c=70035

Go back to Part One

N.B.: About Cosimo Bartoli see in this blog also: Giovanni Mazzaferro, Rare Books and a Great Discovery: a Specimen of Vitruvius' De Architectura Annotated by Cosimo Bartoli

About Daniela Lamberini see also: Daniela Lamberini, Giovan Battista Belluzzi, called the Sanmarino, as military architect and treatise author of the 16th century

Daniela Lamberini, 'Sic Virtus'. Cosimo Bartoli’s Code of machines 

With the name 'Code of machines' Lamberini means the manuscript E.B.16.5 5 vol. II, kept at the National Library of Florence and titled (with a name given probably in 1700), "Collection of various machines and drawings of ancient vases." The (anonymous) manuscript consists of 270 pages. Of these, in reality, only the last two sheets present a series of vases. The manuscript is a collection of machines: it includes 235 drawings, in very rare (notably, 26) cases accompanied by texts, words, and numbers. Three pages are written in full. To the contrary, 76 were pages left blank, since most likely were due to host the illustrative texts of the presented equipment. The existence of the manuscript has been known since 1980 and since 1991 Daniela Lamberini has attributed it to Bartoli on the basis of the comparison of the handwriting and drawings, which appear all done by one hand. According to Lamberini, the manuscript was a project, drawn up around 1567-1568 (then in the final period of Bartoli’s stay of in Venice and, above all, in the last years of his life), for a manual of applied mechanics. We should add one more element. The manuscript is kept at the National Library of Florence, but comes from the Palatine Library. It is extremely likely that it was delivered to Francesco de’ Medici after Bartoli's death (or immediately before). The fact is that, once in possession of the code, the Grand Duke gave an assignment to transfer it in a fair copy. Bernardo Puccini took care of the project; he was the author of the text comments to the machines included in a new manuscript, the Palatine 1077 of the National Library of Florence [9]. Ms Lamberini was able to check that as many 189 designs of the Palatine 1077 are actually copies from Bartoli’s manuscript. Also in this case, however, the project was not brought to completion because of the death of Puccini (1575).

I already mentioned that the Code of machines is an incomplete treatise of applied mechanics. So the authoress of the essay speaks of its function: "Although unfinished, this sumptuous collection of machines fully meets two requirements typical of the sixteenth century, i.e. to recreate the whole machinatio [note of the translator: engineering infrastructure] of the ancients, while including modern inventions next to the machines of the classical repertoire. The rich technical handbook was due to serve as a source of inspiration for scholars, above all mathematicians [...], and for all creators: artists, architects and engineers who, following the auctoritas [n.o.t. authority] of the ancients, were urged to emulate the exempla [n.o.t. examples]. But at the same time, and especially in our case, it served as a learned intellectual exercise for the monarch and his noblemen, i.e. the natural sponsors. To practice the virtues suited to ''noble people", they had an obligation to master, if not the production (a specific task of technicians), certainly at least the mechanical principles of these machines, and to fully understand the political and financial advantages which their use could offer in terms of economic investment "(p. 211).

Cosimo Bartoli, Code of machines
Source: http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/mediciscienze/imed.asp?c=70073

This does not exclude that the collection of Bartoli’s drawings was for good part a compilation of patterns of models from third sources. First of all, the manuscript can be divided in three parts: the first contains 43 drawings of mills and crushers; the second part deals with hydraulic machines designed to draw, lift and distribute water; the last 99 drawings include construction equipment. Most of the displayed machines are to be used with the aid of water or serve to lift hydraulic masses (p. 160). The first and the third part of Bartoli’s drawings have a very specific source, i.e. the Saluzziano code 148 by Francesco di Giorgio Martini. As known from the edition prepared in 1967 by Corrado Maltese [10], the manuscripts of Francesco di Giorgio testify a Treatise I and a Treatise II. The Treatise I, in turn, has come to us in two specimens (which are two copies of a lost original), the Saluzziano 148 and the Ashburnham 361. Ms Lamberini believes that Bartoli was precisely able to use a very similar model to Saluzziano 148. The source of Bartoli’s machines would therefore substantially be Siena. It should be added that the Code of Machines also displays twenty drawings that seem copied from the Zibaldone (Miscellany) by Bonaccorso Ghiberti (father of Lorenzo Ghiberti). Bartoli had received it from his own father, who in turn had received it as a gift from an heir of Ghiberti [11]. The Zibaldone was "a typical workshop notebook, drawn up over the last decades of the fifteenth century, in which, as the name indicates, projects and architectural drawings, sketches of funerary monuments and of construction machines, especially those used by Filippo Brunelleschi for the dome of Florence Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, were displayed without any order." (p. 169).

The second part of the code, the one on machinery designed to move and to lift water, is the one which shows the highest level of originality. Let me be clear: Bartoli did not "invent" any machine; but, in this case, he did not draw from the designs of Francesco di Giorgio or any other code known to us, thus executing personally a collection of models taken from life, ranging from devices of clear Florentine origins and others used definitely in Venice or in the Venetian hinterland. Ms Lamberini notes however (p. 194) that some machines designed by Cosimo correspond to the equipment described (but not drawn) by Giuseppe Ceredi in the treatise in Modo d’alzar acque da luoghi bassi (How to raise water from low places), published in Parma in 1567. From this observation she derives another reason for dating the drafting of Bartoli’s Code of machines to 1567-1568.

Part Three: The Academic Environment and the Courts

Cesare Vasoli, The 'ingratitude of the plebs' and the fall of princes in the Ragionamenti [sic] historici universali (Universal Historical Reasoning) by Cosimo Bartoli

Margaret Daly Davis, Carlo Lenzoni’s In difesa della lingua fiorentina, e di Dante and the literary and artistic world of Cosimo Bartoli and the Accademia Fiorentina

The frontespiece of the work (the same of Vasari's 1550 Lives)
Source: Google Books

In difesa della lingua fiorentina, e di Dante (In defense of the Florentine language, and Dante) is one of those cases where Bartoli played the role of editor, devoting himself to the publication of a work of others. The task, implemented in 1556, is actually determined by tragic circumstances. Lenzoni worked on it, but was not able to finish it before he died; on the deathbed, he entrusted Pierfrancesco Giambullari the task to publish it; however also Giambullari passed away in 1555 without having fulfilled the assignment. This is when the baton was taken by Bartoli, who let publish the text the year after. The publication was to be clearly seen as part of the "national question of language" and turned to support the Florentine party against the Padua fraction by Bembo. Lenzoni, Giambullari, Bartoli were all members of the Florentine Academy and they were all united by having carried out a review of the first edition of Vasari's Lives, published by Torrentino in 1550. In short, they were very close friends; in fact, Bartoli regretted their deceases in the dedication to Cosimo when printing the book in 1556. We do not know exactly to what extent the revision of Vasari’s Lives also involved the three [12]. One thing is certain: it cannot be a coincidence that the cover pages of the Lives and of the Defence of the Florentine language are identical [13].

Frontispiece of 1550 Vasari's Lives ('torrentiniana' edition)

The interest in the Defence does not end, however, in the vicissitudes of printing. There are only a few references to art in the work, but they appear to have been neglected. The Defence consists of three dialogues (or days, because they take place on different days) in which on the one hand supporters of the Florentine party (Lenzoni himself, Giambullari and Giambattista Gelli) and on the other hand figures from the world of Padua (i.e. from the world of Petrarch and Bembo) confront each other. In particular, the Padua perspective is supported by a generic “Signor Licentiado” who oddly takes a nickname derived from Spanish. When Lenzoni died, he was a little more than half the battle: he had written the first day and a half, while the last one (the third) was still in a state of a pure draft text. Giambullari made a flawless choice: he did not alter the text of Lenzoni, completed the second dialogue by making explicit the parts in which he had intervened and wrote the dedication. The latter was addressed to Michelangelo, as "many times" Lenzoni had expressed him orally the intention to do. Starting from the usual observation that painting is mute poetry and poetry is painting that speaks, i.e. that the two arts are substantially similar, Giambullari (but actually Lenzoni) believes that only Michelangelo, who was able to excel in both arts, merited the dedication of a work that was also the exaltation of a great literate like Dante. It was the myth of Michelangelo, which had materialized in Florence and which had already manifested itself in Vasari's Lives.

Frontispiece of the Italian Translation of Paolo Giovio's Historiae  (1551)
identical with Vasari's Lives (1550) and Lenzoni's Defense. See footnote n. 13
Source: Google Books

I would like to point out another aspect that (perhaps) explained the influence that the Defence had, since it perhaps helped clarifying the historiography discourse in the second edition of Vasari's Lives. In the second dialogue, Signor Licentiado introduces a question that is halfway between a literary and artistic topic: as a writer, I care to imitate Petrarch rather than Dante. What would you say, if I was a painter and I did imitate Giotto, unusually praised by Vasari, rather than Raphael? [14] Vasari probably read this objection, and equally probably he remembered it when he drafted the Giuntina edition (1568) of his Lives, because he inserted a twenty-line notice to readers in the epilogue of the work, in which he explained his praises towards certain artists (and - one for all – he quoted Giotto) that some had found excessive. The answer of Vasari, in essence, is that one has to historicize everything, and that the praise spent for Giotto was addressed to an artist who lived in the fourteenth century; definitely, it would have not been such, if Giotto had lived in the days of Michelangelo. It could be a coincidence, but the impression that the writer from Arezzo was responding to Signor Licentiado, twelve years after, is really strong.

Alessandro Cecchi, Bartoli, Vasari and Borghini in the works of the Palazzo Vecchio

Fabian Jonietz, The semantics of recycling. Cosimo Bartoli's Inventions for Giovan Battista Ricasoli

Part Four: Bartoli, Arts and Artists

Thomas Frangenberg, Cosimo Bartoli as art theorist

Charles Davis, Cosimo Bartoli and Michelangelo: family, friends, academicians, art history, architecture

Henk Th. van Veen, A Response to Rome: Cosimo Bartoli’s Capriccio ‘The Life of Man’ and the façade of Palazzo Almeni

Alessandro Nova, Conclusion.

NOTES

[9] For the role of Puccini, see in this blog the review to Daniela Lamberini, Il principe difeso. Vita e opere di Bernardo Puccini, (The Defended Prince. Life and Work of Bernardo Puccini), Florence, The Giuntina Publishers, 1990.

[10] See in this blog Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare, (Treaties on architecture, engineering and military art), edited by Corrado Maltese, Milan, Il Polifilo Publishers, 1967.

[11] This is why Bartoli also owned a copy of the manuscript of the Commentaries by Lorenzo Ghiberti. See a review the work in this blog.

[12] For the publication of the Lives in the Torrentina edition, see in this blog Barbara Agosti, Giorgio Vasari. Luoghi e tempi delle Vite. (Giorgio Vasari. Places and times of the Lives), Milan, Workshop Libraria, 2013.

[13] In this regard, I would like to point out a circumstance that is not quoted by Daly Davis, but by Barbara Agosti in: Paolo Giovio. Uno storico lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecento (Paolo Giovio. A Lombard historian in the artistic culture of the sixteenth century), Leo S. Olschki Publishers, 2008. The first Italian translation (made by Ludovico Domenichi) of the Historiae (Histories) by Paolo Giovio, always published by Torrentino in 1551, also had a cover page identical to the one of Vasari’s Lives. Again, the same treatment was reserved to Giovio, another key figure for the publication of Vasari’s endeavour. There were therefore (at least) three publications with the same cover page: Vasari's Lives (1550), Giovio’s Histories (1551) and Lenzoni’s Defence (1556). In sum, it is worth questioning (and it is a suggestive question) whether there was a single guideline (by Vasari? By Bartoli?) behind this policy, or whether, quite simply, it was a commercial choice by the printer to cut costs.

[14] The question offers Daly Davis an opportunity to develop a discourse on the rhetorical figure of comparison applied to the arts of which - in all honesty - I am not fully convinced, but to which I am referring of course (pp. 274-275).

https://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2014/12/letter-to-pope-leo-x.html