William Beckford, Memorie biografiche di pittori straordinari [Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters], 1780

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

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William Beckford

Memorie biografiche di pittori straordinari
[Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters]

Translation and Afterword by Mirella Billi

With an essay by Gloria Fossi

Florence, Giunti, 1995

George Romney, Portrait of William Beckford, 1782.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[1] The Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) is the first work by William Beckford, author of famous novels like Vathek (1787). It is a hilarious mockery of the world of art collecting, and of the taste of collectors (who often paid real daubs as if they were masterpieces), merchants, scholars and, finally, of the credulity of the public. Visitors listened fascinated to the maid of the paternal house in Fonthill, where she told them about the made-up art endeavours of wholly imaginary painters. One thing should be immediately clarified, however: Beckford was not a fool. The father (who was also called William) had amassed huge fortunes from his plantations in Jamaica, had moved into the political life and had long been the Lord Mayor of London. He had also gathered a huge collection of art works. The pictures you will find in this post show some of them. William jr. also enamoured him to collecting, but he managed to dissipate the enormous fortune left to him by his father in a few years, so much so that, even during his lifetime, was forced to sell most of his collections. The fact remains that William knew very well the world that he was about to desecrate.

Raffaello, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1508, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[2] Text of the strip:

"In the ancestral home of Fonthill, the young Beckford is listening, in full exhilaration, to the rambling speech of a female housekeeper, who serves as an improvised guide for visitors to the prestigious collection of paintings belonging to the family, and explains them the lives of the artists in a hilarious mixture of mangled names, inaccurate dates, and invented anecdotes. This is the trigger for the Memoirs (anonymously published in 1780), which from a comical re-enactment are transformed into a mischievous roman à clef, a mocking pamphlet on art world and pictorial fashions, an irresistible parody of treaties and monographs on history of painting, and finally of the taste and eccentricity of that era; the author of Vathek looks at all of this with a critical and ironic, amused but also severe eye, as a refined and precocious connoisseur, a manic collector and a brilliant writer."

Cima da Conegliano, Saint Jerome in a Landscape, about 1500-1510, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[3] In one of his extraordinary Albums, released every month on the Sunday Edition of the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore, Giuseppe Pontiggia dwelt at length on this text. We are displaying below the relevant abstract: the Album in question was that of September 1998, published in Il Sole 24 Ore on October 4, 1998 (the text is taken from the Multimedia Library of Sole 24 Ore - Cd Rom Sunday editions 1983-2003 - Twenty years of ideas).

"September 28

The reading of Bolano’s book [editor's note: to which it was dedicated the immediately preceding text in the same article] has mobilized my curiosity about imaginary lives. I remembered having bought years ago a book by William Beckford, which I could not find in my library anymore. When people ask me what computer I am using to catalogue it, I answer: my memory [n.d.r. Pontiggia owned a library of about 45,000 books]. I am usually stirring a smile of admiration, but then it is up to me to solve the problem when I cannot remember the location of a book. To categorise the library would still cost me a longer time than the one needed for the sum of all my episodic, even exasperated investigations. Finally, I found it, behind a door that was hiding it to me from the bottom. It is titled Memorie biografiche di pittori straordinari and was published by Giunti Publishers in 1995; it was edited by Mirella Billi, with an essay by Gloria Fossi. It is the apotheosis of the fake because there Beckford mixes, like Bolano did, true and false. But the protagonists of the work, published in London in 1780, are duly non-existent Flemish and English artists.

Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Beckford had written it almost entirely at the age of eighteen. Heir to an immense fortune, he had developed at an early age, in the baronial splendour of Fonthill and during his trips to Europe, the taste for the perverse and the bizarre and an exceptional sense for literature and art. These qualities are confirmed by his prodigious intuition as a bibliophile and collector, which however eventually led him, with the help of some financial mishap, to bankruptcy, but also allowed him (with the partial sale of his assets, now scattered in museums and galleries of the planet) to survive it. And he delivered us a Gothic-Arabian tale, the Vathek, written at twenty-two, which managed to reconcile Voltaire and One Thousand and One Nights. Byron will define it his Bible; while we find it more difficult to associate it to the Old or the New Testament, it remains a lasting legacy.

The genesis of Beckford’s fantastic biographies (an author of whom also spoke Praz, in his treacherous and fascinating English studies and entertainments) is as unusual as funny. Beckford was inspired by the speeches of his impetuous and daring female housekeeper, who, guiding visitors in the gallery of the Fonthill Palace, invented, with admirable contempt of cultural inhibitions, names, dates, details on the composition of the pictures: and she especially found out from her own imagination those biographical details that usually astonish tourists and affect them much more than art. Beckford takes her up and mimics her, maiming names, falsifying attributions, making obvious the improbable and historic the impossible. However, unlike his model, he also spreads clues and traces for connoisseurs.

Fig. 5) Diego Velazquez, Portrait of Philip IV in brown and silver, 1631-2, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Beckford did not fail success among experts; however, that success was somewhat lower, for excitement, than the one which his housekeeper had with inexperienced visitors, who are overall a large majority. This also can teach us something. Art is a universal good enjoyed by a minority. To quantify what is this minority would be another form of racism, as well as a stupid gamble. Yet, recognizing numerical proportions is to accept statistics. Crowds falling into a swoon in front of Raphael do not know, in the table of Novello, that it was moved in the previous room. This does not mean that, wandering in the Sistine between the stiff neck for the vault and the fresco of Judgment, he does not feel similar emotions to those who love art. The difference is that he has some problems to grasp the difference between values. One can appreciate [the Italian pop singer] Lucio Battisti - as Alfredo Giuliani recently said - without naming the new Auditorium in Rome to him. Perhaps the person who proposed it has a more frequent familiarity with this pop artist, but a more irregular attendance with the music of Mozart and Mahler.

But the subtle and malicious intentions of Beckford were not only to unmask the credulity of the simple and the first misalignments of mass art markets. His amusement was also to expose - indirectly and by analogy - the misunderstandings of the experts, the fragility of their choices and the transience of their immortal hierarchies. Some of the artists then exalted by critics and ridiculed in code by Beckford, like John Hamilton Mortimer (here called Rouzinski Blunderbussiana, a name that could be translated as "the Huge Embellishment") have not actually stood the test of time and are waiting, perhaps eternally, for another canon rehabilitating them and returning them the supremacy they lost in the ferry to afterlife.

His criticism does not attack the ineffability of sublime landscapes, but the eloquence of those who make them emphatic and decorative. And the true serves to unmask the false as much as the false serves to unmask, if not the true, the eternal illusion of possessing it."

Gerard Dou, A poulterer's shop, about 1670, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[5] It is still worth mentioning, from the essay by Gloria Fossi, that "...the treatise on anatomy studied by Blunderbussiana is certainly the Treaty on Painting of Leonardo that Beckford must have well known (as suggested to me by Carlo Pedretti) in the English translation dated 1721 ... "(p. 158).