Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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L’Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia
Il Settecento
Edited by Giuseppe Pavanello
3 volumes, Antiga Publishing House, 2015
(Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part Two)
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| Venice, The Hospital of the Incurables, currently seat of the Academy of Fine Arts Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Academy vs. College: financial conflict or
difference in taste?
I already
mentioned the conflict between the College of Painters (1679) and the Academy
(1750), stemming from the fact that the latter was founded as a public and
independent institution, free from any corporate influence. I also briefly cited
the economic rows: in a world in which public commands were progressively
dropping, everybody was fighting for the few available subsidies from
government (e.g. for the 130 ducats paid for the "custody" of the paintings
held at the Doge's Palace and the Rialto Courts). We can even go a little further
and say that the so-called mechanism of first
level contests (a mechanism that did almost never really work,
because of economic difficulties) aimed at the creation of a group of artists, to
be trained in the Academy, which would be self-legitimated through the
competition itself and would remain extraneous to the College (see the essay by
Denis Ton on p. 180).
The next
question is: did Academy and College (or, if we want to narrow the field,
Academy and Pietro Edwards, who was the deus
ex machina of the College from 1776 onwards) promote different artistic
tastes, beyond personal antipathies and economic interests? Was there, in
short, a more "noble" confrontation than the animosities described
above? I do not know. This seems to be a topic - in my view – which should be
considered and investigated with great attention. It was already said that, in the
timeframe of fifty years, the Academy testified a transformation of style in a
deeply neoclassical direction, even if with a Venetian specificity. What was
Edwards' attitude on it?
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| Main entrance of the Gallerie dell'Accademia, located in the School della Carità (seat of the Academy of Fine Arts from 1807 to 2010) Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Things in this regard are unclear. Originally a follower of Piazzetta (judging from the few works that make up his catalogue) [7], he soon converted himself into a connoisseur and restorer. In September 1807 Edwards wrote a Praise for Antonio Canova, a speech to be delivered in a re-funded Academy (but I am not sure that the speech was actually given; I hope to find it out in the upcoming volumes dedicated to the nineteenth century). His path seems, therefore, the same as all others. Yet, to read his manuscripts and the plagiarism of his son, the situation was much less defined. Specifically, the Venetian art parable, according to Edwards, reaches its climax with Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese and then suffers an irresistible decline, which is not followed by a recovery marked by Tiepolo and the other painters of the early eighteenth century. As Cristina Gambillara accurately highlighted, Edwards followed subdivisions and judgments on art as expressed by Antonio Maria Zanetti in his “Della pittura veneziana” (On Venetian painting) (Venice, Albrizzi, 1771), but diverged from it precisely in his judgment on modern art [8]. As for the neoclassicism, we have nothing except a praise for Canova, which - as such - seems like a circumstance writing, probably linked to commissions from third parties. This raises the question whether many reserves with which his son Giovanni spoke of Canova are also not attributable to the father: "The Academic direction should check that [young students] do not take copies from modern specimens of Canova, unless they are people who had benefited from a lot of studies, had given good evidence of a mature judgment on art, and never diverged from the advice of their preceptor. Otherwise, the study of this distinguished artist [editor's note "distinguished": the "divine" Canova becomes "distinguished"] is combined with much danger; since he missed several times that underlying reasoning that would be necessary to support the grandeur of his assumptions in every part, a failure which becomes evident from time to time.”[9].
It is not excluded,
after all, that Pietro Edwards did represent the most nostalgic taste of
Venetian art soul, exactly like he did on the governance issues of artistic policy.
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| Francesco Fontebasso, St. Michael expelling Lucifer (detail), Ceiling of the Church of the Angel Raphael, Venice Source: Didier Descouens via Wikimedia Commons |
For a strategy of enhancement of Venetian art
history sources
In
conclusion, an appeal. The ultimate thrust of the three volumes I mentioned is
twofold: first, the possibility given to the scholar to draw directly from the
sources and, second, the valorisation of the archival heritage of the
Institute. If we look at the current status of studies on Venetian art
literature, one should feel – let us talk about it in a frank and candid way -
totally disheartened. As for Michiel, the last critical edition still dates
back to the one of 1896 by Theodor Frimmel, revived by Cristina de Benedictis
in 2000 (but, fortunately, a new critical edition by Rosella Lauber seems to be
in the pipeline). With Ridolfi’s
Maraviglie dell’arte (Art Marvels) we have nothing later than the Berlin
edition in two volumes (1914 and 1924) by Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln. I would
like to praise the critical edition of Boschini’s Carta del navegar pittoresco (The map of navigating and painting) curated
by Anna Pallucchini (an edition which is of 1966 and is obviuosly impossible to
find nowadays). There is no critical edition of the Minere (Mines) nor of the Ricche
Minere (Rich Mines) always by Boschini, as well as the previous Venezia città nobilissima (The mostnoble city of Venice) by Sansovino. Finally, an edition of Zanetti’s Della pittura veneziana (On Venetian
painting) is completely missing (I understand that it is being prepared). To my
knowledge (and I would be happy to be proved wrong) there is no English
translation of any of these works. I read authoritative opinions on the
impossibility of translating Boschini’s Venetian into English; I would like to point
out however that it may refer only to the “The map of navigating and painting”,
which is written in Venetian language. I also take note that, as always, each
translation is a form of ‘betrayal’ of the original sense of the work. However,
it is also an indispensable element for the transmission of culture.
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| Frontispiece of Notizia d'opera del disegno by Marcantonio Michiel Source: https://archive.org/stream/notiziadoperedid00mich#page/n3/mode/2up |
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| Frontispiece of Le minere della pittura by Marco Boschini Source: http://marco-boschini-600.blogspot.it/2015/04/le-opere-letterarie.html |
It must be
clear that the price of all this is primarily the marginalization of a
civilization in a globalized world; but (far more important) it is also a risk
to which its assets are exposed. It is sufficient to think, just for a minute,
on what implication for an infinite number of works had to be mentioned or not in
Vasari’s Lives: it was the dividing
line between survival or destruction. When Edwards himself was forced, in
difficult years, to choose between thousands and thousands of pictures that had
come under his control due to the ecclesiastical suppression, he adopted as one
of the criteria for selecting them whether they were mentioned or not in the
previous art literature. With a few exceptions only, he advocated the
destruction of the non-quoted works.
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| Frontispiece of Della pittura veneziana by Anton Maria Zanetti http://www.onerarebook.com/a45dellapittura.html |
Anyone who
has ever been confronted with the critical edition of a text knows very well that
its most immediate result is the valorisation of the heritage. So, the very
simple question is: what is going on in Venice? Why, in the case of Edwards, no
one has ever tried to recover at least the inventory of 1808, testifying the
total range of saved works before the dispersion, which should be much broader
than the one drafted years after for the Academy? Yet, this last catalogue was
considered extremely important by Sandra Moschini Marconi in her work on the
Academy Galleries. It is most probable that the 1808 catalogue can be found in
Milan or even in Paris. Why nobody has ever tried to find him?
Who should
undertake this endeavour? It seems obvious: the University. I would like to
stress that I am speaking as an independent scholar and I do not take side for
any group of university professors. Precisely for this reason, however, I can
afford to say things and to report situations as they are. In Milan, for
decades, the school of Giovanni Agosti has been studying each individual source.
As a result, a number of critical issues have enriched the understanding of
Lombard painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Needless to say what
the experience of Paola Barocchi did for Tuscan sources. Why should Venice be
outdone? Are there no university students who could be entrusted master theses to
address the individual pieces of the puzzle, which might be subsequently reconsidered
on a unified way?
The Preamble to the three volumes dedicated
to the Academy is written by Sileno Salvagnini and is titled "Why a
History of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice?". In it, the author claims
that the Academy belongs to the category of university-level teaching, as a
place where the theoretical and technical aspects of artistic production are combined
profitably. The academy's history fully belongs to the theoretical dimension;
it is its most conscious part of it and, as outlined in the three volumes
relating to the eighteenth century, is the proof of the vitality of an
institution in its own right which has full awareness of the functions that it
should exercise, both from an academic point of view as well as for the
enhamcement, protection and conservation of heritage, where the term enhancement
is understood in the noble sense and not simply for the sake of supporting tourism.
To learn that there still those who believe in it was perhaps the most
rewarding feeling when I reached the last page of this work
NOTES
[7] Giorgio Panciera di Zoppola, Pietro Edwards pittore
(Pietro Edwards as painter) in ‘Arte in Friuli Arte a Trieste’ (Art in Friuli,
Art in Trieste), 1999, Nos. 18-19. To the catalogue are added now, thanks to
this publication, the four nude drawings presented to academic competitions between
1763 and 1766.
[8] Cristina Gambillara, Pietro
Edwards teorico e critico d’arte (Pietro Edwards as theorist and art critic)
in Verona Illustrata (Verona
Illustrated) 2002 No. 15 pp. 103-135.
[9] Giovanni Mazzaferro, The
Fine Arts in Venice ... quoted, p. 183.
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