Innocenzo Ansaldi, Luigi Crespi. Description of [...] the City of Pescia in Tuscany, and of its Suburbs (1772). Edited by Emanuele Pellegrini

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Innocenzo Ansaldi, Luigi Crespi
Descrizione delle sculture, pitture et architetture
della città, e sobborghi 
di Pescia nella Toscana
[Description of the Sculptures, Paintings, and Buildings of the City of Pescia in Tuscany, and of its Suburbs]

Edited by Emanuele Pellegrini

Pisa, ETS Publishing House, 2001

Pescia, 'Porta Fiorentina' in a 1901 postcard (see p. 151)
Source: http://www.edizioniets.com/scheda.asp?n=9788846738080#tab2

[1] Text of the back cover:

"In 1769, the Pescia-born Innocenzo Ansaldi sent to Luigi Crespi, a Bolognese canon, a Description of the sculptures, paintings and buildings of the city of Pescia in Tuscany, and of its suburbs, which was published three years later, in 1772. Dissatisfied with the result, Mr Ansaldi continued to collect notes and news on the figurative heritage of his homeland. With this publication, we are offering the possibility to collate various editions of the Description of Pescia – whether handwritten or printed, completed between 1770 and 1816 – with the text of the 1772 edition, enriched by Ansaldi’s handwritten autograph notes, which are preserved in the University of Chicago Library. With the Description at hand, we have imaginarily gone along the same path through the town of Pescia and the other communities of its diocese that around two hundred years ago was accomplished by Innocenzo Ansaldi. To check the changes that have occurred in over two centuries of history, we annotated alterations, checked the attributions of art works, trying to capitalize on the more or less recent achievements on Pescia’s history. All, or at least many, of these conclusions owe to the first ‘artistic’ description of the territory, operated by Ansaldi."

Pescia, The façade of the Cathedral in an early XX century photo (see p. 154)
Source: http://www.edizioniets.com/scheda.asp?n=9788846738080#tab2

Pescia, The bell tower of the Cathedral
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[2] The work inaugurates the series Toscana descritta (Tuscany, as it has been described), edited by Roberto Paolo Ciardi. Probably, this work also marked the rediscovery of Innocenzo Ansaldi, then continued with other publications, beginning with Pistoia inedita. La descrizione di Pistoia nei manoscritti di Bernardino Vitoni e Innocenzo Ansaldi (Unknown Pistoia. The description of Pistoia in the manuscripts of Bernardino Vitoni and Innocenzo Ansaldi), edited by Lisa Zanni and Emanuele Pellegrini, and followed by La Guida di Urbino di Innocenzo Ansaldi e altri inediti di periegetica marchigiana (The Urbino Guide by Innocenzo Ansaldi and other unpublished travel accounts of the Marche), edited by Giovanna Perini and Giuseppe Cucco. See also Emanuele Pellegrini, Settecento di carta. L’epistolario di Innocenzo Ansaldi (Eighteenth century on paper. The correspondence of Innocenzo Ansaldi). To date, however, the most illustrative essay on the figure of the scholar, artist and writer from Pescia still seems to be: Innocenzo Ansaldi and the Unpublished Guide of Urbino, proposed by Giovanna Perini in The Urbino Guide by Innocenzo Ansaldi and other unpublished guides of the Marche (in particular, for the writings on art literature, see there pp. 38-53).

Pescia, Internal view of the Church of San Francesco
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[3] The Descrizione delle sculture, pitture et architetture della città, e sobborghi di Pescia nella Toscana was published by Luigi Crespi in 1772 in Bologna, at the Printing House of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was a somewhat treacherous decision. It is useful to briefly summarize the issues at stake, of course referring to the Genesis of a description (pp. 9-28) in which Emanuele Pellegrini precisely describes what happened. Upon the recommendation of Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, a Genoa scholar that was about to publish an important report on the Liguria artistic heritage a few years later, the name of Innocenzo Ansaldi had been proposed to the polygraph Luigi Crespi. At that time, the latter cultivated the intention to gather a series of writings in epistolary form that would counteract many derogatory opinions expressed by Charles Nicholas Cochin in his Voyage d'Italie (1756). Ansaldi already cultivated personal interests related to the literature documenting voyages. To this end, he prepared notebooks on art relating to journeys he personally made or purchased other people's manuscripts with the same contents. Crespi did not hesitate to write Ansaldi in 1768, asking him to work precisely to an artistic review of Pescia and Pistoia, to be written in epistolary form. On 9 April of the following year, Ansaldi sent him the Description of the sculptures, paintings and buildings of the city of Pescia in Tuscany, and of its suburbs, along with other material. Ansaldi, a humble person who was probably perpetually unhappy with his work, made very clear in the accompanying letter that it was still a largely incomplete manuscript, certainly not ready to be published. Crespi, however, was an unscrupulous man (one year after he would published the seventh volume of Giovanni Gaetano Bottari’s Raccolta di lettere sulla Pittura, Scultura ed Architettura scritte da più celebri personaggi dei secc. XV, XVI e XVII, i.e. the Collection of Letters on Painting, Sculpture and Architecture written by the most famous characters of the XV, XVI and XVII centuries, without having even informed him), and acting as Ansaldi hadn't said anything, published the work in 1772. On the cover page he did not show the name of the scholar from Pescia, although in the initial pages (in what, technically, it is called paratext) the work had been attributed to Innocenzo Ansaldi.

[4] It is easy to imagine that Ansaldi was not enjoyed by the improper behaviour of Crespi. Emanuele Pellegrini suggests - rightly so, in our view - that, rather than because of the suffered injustice, Ansaldi was concerned by the state of inadequacy of the manuscript, which he could perceive in all its evidence. Certainly, he began almost immediately to work on a series of handwritten corrections which evidently summed up over the years and became particularly numerous after 1784, when the Lorraine government suppressed many ecclesiastical bodies, kicking off a series of physical moves of the works of art (especially paintings). Those transfers made the publication of 1772 obsolete. The annotations and additions by Innocenzo did not lead to a new edition until 1816, the year of his death. On that date, Antonio Ansaldi (his nephew ) published in Pescia a second "amended and increased" edition, of the description of the city and surrounding places.

Bonaventura Berlinghieri, St. Francis and stories of his life (1238), Church of San Francesco. See p. 171
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Pescia, Church of San Francesco, Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. See p. 174
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[5] The critical edition of the Description, prepared by Emanuele Pellegrini, is of particular interest, since it was not simply conducted on a sample of the first or the second edition, but on a version that could be called intermediate, and which therefore bears witness to the working method of Innocenzo Ansaldi. "We are here publishing a copy of the Description..., published in Bologna in 1772, which Innocenzo Ansaldi corrected at his own hand (with erasures, annotations, references) and enriched with a sort of appendix titled Additions and corrections, in which he pencilled all useful information to enhance the edition. The entire apparatus of interventions on the 1772 printed text is a hand-written autograph by Ansaldi. In essence, he took a copy of the Bologna edition and made direct corrections on the printed volume.... The last page of the Additions and corrections was not written by Innocenzo Ansaldi, but at the hand of his nephew Antonio, curator of the posthumous edition the Description of Pescia (1816) ... The original copy of this interesting hybrid between publication and manuscript is kept in the Berlin Collection of the University of Chicago Library" (pp. 22-23). It is hereby provided the facsimile reproduction of the volume, followed by the photographic reproduction of the manuscript with the Additions and corrections. It is impossible to establish in what year the handwritten notes were added, but surely we are in the period following 1784, i.e. the suppressions by the Lorraine government, since it is given account of them.

Pescia, Façade of the Church of Saints Stefano and Niccolao. See p. 178
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[6] A major merit of the curator is that his critical edition was conducted on the sample of Chicago, however collated with four other published or handwritten versions of the work. We are reporting them briefly, referring to pages 29-46 of the volume:

• Manuscript 3233 of the State Library of Lucca, titled Catalogo delle migliori pitture esposte al pubblico nella città di Pescia (Catalogue of the best paintings on public display in the town of Pescia): it is an autograph by Ansaldi. Pellegrini suggests that this was the exemplary he sent to Francesco Tommaso Bernardi, a Count from Lucca, substantially in parallel to his submission to Crespi of the 1769 manuscript;
• Manuscript 1-A-39 (Public Library of Pescia), with the title Descrizione delle sculture, pitture e architetture della città di Pescia, e di quelle che ancora meritano d’essere osservate nelle castella della provincia di Valdinievole compendiata dal signore Innocenzo Ansaldi pittore e data alle stampe in Bologna dal canonico Crespi l’anno 1772 (Description of the sculptures, paintings and buildings of the town of Pescia, and of those that still deserve to be observed in the castles of the province of Valdinievole, summarized by the painter Innocenzo Ansaldi and published in Bologna by Canon Crespi in the year 1772). It is not an autograph by Ansaldi. "This is... a kind of reworking with some slight modification, addition or clarification, which still does not settle a radical deepening of the research" (p. 40). It should be placed chronologically between 1772 (the year of publication in Bologna) and 1784 (the year of the suppressions by the Lorraine government).
• Nota delle pitture veramente più ragguardevoli esposte al pubblico nella città di Pescia e suo territorio (Note on the very most remarkable paintings displayed to the public in the town of Pescia and its territory), published by Prospero Omero Baldasseroni in the appendix to his History of the town of Pescia and Valdinievole (1784). It is, in itself, a compendium of Ansaldi’s work, but it shows the knowledge of some of the additions he made after the edition of 1772 (and then contained in the sample of Chicago);
• Descrizione delle sculture, pitture, ed architetture della città, e diogesi di Pescia d’Innocenzio Ansaldi: edizione seconda emendata, accresciuta dietro le ulteriori osservazioni dello stesso autore raccolte e corredate di notizie dal canonico Antonio Ansaldi (Description of the sculptures, paintings, and buildings of the city, and diocese of Pescia by Innocenzo Ansaldi. Second amended edition, increased with further observations by the same author, collected and accompanied by further information by the Canon Antonio Ansaldi) (Pescia, 1816). The second edition testifies to a further stage in the evolution (or, more accurately, in the stripping of heritage) of Pescia artistic heritage, in the years following the Napoleonic era.