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History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Francesco Mazzaferro
From the Old to the New World:
the Anthologies by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves (1945) and by Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (1947)
Part Two
Part Two
[Original Version: May 2016 - New Version: April 2019]
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| Fig. 15) The title page of the anthology by Gilmore Holt, 1947 |
The two anthologies of 1945 and 1947:
similarities and differences
At their
appearance, the two anthologies of Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves on the one
hand and Elizabeth Gilmore Holt on the other hand experienced parallel, but
separate lives, although they came out almost at the same time and were the product
of a common tradition of studies at the New York Institute of Fine Arts, and more
specifically of the interaction between Friedländer and his disciple Panofsky.
The Goldwater/Treves anthology was prepared under the auspices of Professor Friedländer,
but also making use of Panofsky’s collaboration, as he translated the letters
of Dürer. Holt designed the anthology structure with Panofsky, but also felt
the need to remember Friedländer among the scholars wo had provided valuable
advice.
Certainly,
the authors of the two anthologies probably had no regular working relations
(Ms Gilmore Holt, moreover, lived abroad for decades): there was no mutual
citation in any of the subsequent writings of authors. In fact, the two
collections proposed two different interpretations of art literature, and this
may help to explain (in addition to objective phenomena, such as the increasing number of students in American universities after the war) why, in fact,
the success of one did not result in the failure of the other. They were, in
many ways, complementary texts.
We will
examine in this chapter their main features, and then separately consider some
main themes: Goldwater’s historicist approach and the study of art literature as a part of
a democratic education by Ms Gilmore Holt. Finally, we will reflect briefly on
the concepts of Literary sources, Documentary History and Primary sources. We will conclude with
some thoughts on the translation of the text Italians.
Artists on Art (1945)
If the
first anthology was co-signed by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, its overall
setting was due to Robert Goldwater, who was the only one to sign the
introduction.
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| Fig. 16) Robert Goldwater, Director at the Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) from 1956 to 1973, New York. Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/Images/Exhibitions/2013/Nelson%20Rockefeller/biographies3.jpg?la=en |
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| Fig. 17) Marco Treves Source: https://www.geni.com/people/Marco-Treves/6000000001482592394 |
Walter
Friedländer had in common with his teacher the taste for exploration of new
fields of research in art history: decades earlier, in a famous article of
1925, the German scholar had made headlines: he had rediscovered Mannerism
(until then regarded as a form of 'degenerate art', a disgrace-foreboding term
that would be later used by the Nazis against contemporary art) and exalted it as
an anti-classical art form and an anticipation of expressionism [37]. Goldwater
too liked to enter new territories. He was not only a well-established modern
art critic, but especially the first scholar of primitivism and of African art
in the world. He studied the impact or primitive art on modern art with the
famous 1938 essay "Primitivism in
Modern Painting" [38]. Since 1937 he was married with one of the most
important and most corrosive contemporary artists, the Parisian Louise
Bourgeois, from whom only death would separate him in 1973.
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| Fig. 18) Walter Friedländer Source: http://www.librarything.com/author/friedlaenderwalter |
He was indeed an expert in primitivism, but certainly not a marginal character: when the art critic Meyer Schapiro created a group of scholars around the Jerome Klein Art Gallery in New York in 1935, Goldwater belonged to it together with Lewis Mumford, Alfred Barr, Erwin Panofsky and James Johnson Sweeney. It was an outstanding group of scholars of innovative orientation, which developed the main guidelines of the American art criticism after war, particularly on abstract art.
Not
surprisingly, Goldwater (scholar of contemporary art primitivism) had a
conception of art literature as an expression of spontaneous, immediate and
natural creation, drafted by the artist outside of any theory. In the introduction,
he explained that for this reason he had excluded those texts from the
anthology, which had only a theoretical value (the Renaissance and Baroque
treatises, for example) or mainly a biographical focus (Vasari) and had always
preferred the ones that offered a very alive and real expression of artistic
activity, written in first person. "The
subject of this book is the artist on art. Our concern is not with the artist
as a writer, but with the painter and the sculptor as he deals with his own profession,
discussing the problems and the aspirations he knows because he is a creative
member of it" [39].
As for the
structure of the anthology, the quotes of the authors were often quite short (2-3
pages), and were marked by subtitles, introduced by Goldwater and Treves in the
text to make it easier to read. The English translations were also
characterised by an effort to modernize the style, so that the text could be
perceived as contemporary as possible by a reader of the forties. From a
temporal point of view, as it has already been said in this blog, the anthology
crossed all phases of art from Cennino to modern artists, with the only
specification that it excluded the artists born after 1890, mainly not to hurt
anyone. Goldwater did not neglect to also include American art literature,
choosing the main US authors since the eighteenth century.
Literary Sources of Art History (1947)
With Elizabeth
Gilmore Holt we come across with a great American scholar of international
experience and one having a particularly deep knowledge of Italian and German art.
As the historian Alicia Faxon explains [40], Ms. Holt dedicated much of her
life to the study of sources and documentary sources also for personal reasons:
she was married to a high ranking US diplomat, and followed him throughout his
life between one capital and the other. She was in London during World War II,
in Berlin immediately after the war end, but also in Greece, Lebanon, Israel,
Laos and India. The continuous transfers from country to country (she defined herself
'wife and mother of the Department of State') prevented her university career,
but enabled her to consult the libraries all over the world, making the
documentary research as a substitute of the normal academic career. "I’ve done my books wherever I happened to
be. I remember reading galleys for
Volume I of A Documentary History of Art in Athens, choosing the cover for Volume II in Beirut, and being
grateful for the University of Jerusalem’s art history library." [41]
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| Fig. 19) Elizabeth Gilmore Holt. Source: http://www.nationalwca.org/LTA/LTA1982.pdf |
During her
education, Ms Gilmore Holt studied for a few years in Europe: in Florence (at
the Kunsthistorisches Institut) in
the early thirties, and in Munich, where she obtained her PhD in 1934, just in
the months of the seizure of power by Hitler. She returned in the US because of
the pressure from the family, alarmed by what was happening in Europe, and
began a long series of transfers from one university to another in order to
follow the man he just married. Alicia Faxon explains that Ms Gilmore Holt
obtained in 1937 a scholarship by Professor Katherine Everett Gilbert (1856-1952)
for the Study of Literary Sources of Art
History at Cambridge. Therefore, it was after she had returned to the US
that the American art historian was confronted for the first time with the
intersection between art and literature, in a culturally very open environment.
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| Fig. 20) Katherine Everett Gilbert, Source: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/sites/default/files/rubenstein/users/MatthewSchaefer/Gilbert_P1_300px.jpg |
Ms Gilbert
[42], the very famous aesthetics philosopher, but also a scholar in pedagogics,
would sign ten years after the brief introduction to Gilmore Holt’s anthology
of 1947. She explained there that the anthology was prepared mainly for pedagogic
reasons: "The present volume has
been compiled in response to the ever increasing growing demand for the
original documents on the arts. Its aim is to add freshness and solidity to the
study of the history of art by making available the words of the artists
themselves and of other persons concerned [43]". These are common
needs to the US academic world of those years. Gilbert’s husband, Allan H.
Gilbert, authored one of the most successful anthologies on history of literary
criticism in the United States, published in 1940 [44].
The brief
introduction of Professor Gilbert was all centred on the study of the
personalities of the artists and their role in society. She wrote: "Many of the documents open windows on the
personal qualities and conditions of the artists themselves, and how society
dealt with them. It is not irrelevant to hear Dürer tell his ecstatic dream or
Michelangelo lament his backache, to get firsthand news of Grünewald’s
melancholy, Rembrandt’s unflattering way of painting portraits, Poussin’s ideas
on picture framing, and eagle-faced Bernini's bold jokes. The facts given in
their bareness may sometimes be trivial, but when clothed in the humor or
living verisimilitude of first-hand reports they bring genius and humanity
together on the stage.
It is not the personalities of the artists
alone that are brought to full life in these letters and journals. The social
conditions within which they moved are here restored to them. The form of the
work of art must acknowledge as part of its cause the state and temper of
patronage and audience, the reigning ideal of beauty, the current esteem of
mathematics or mythology. We learn here how Bernini was cherished and
patronized by Popes and Cardinals from earlier charming, prodigious childhood,
and how, eagle that he was, he always had his safe and welcoming eyrie on the
Papal See. The journal and the biography convey to us the sense of intimacy
with princes – secular and religious, of the perils that surround such courts as
well as the magnificence, of the greatness thrust upon the artist together with
the danger, how even an old man was instructed in those days to consider the
beauty of risking his life for a monarch. These accounts help to build up
finally a realization of art as part of life.” [45] These words on the unity between art and
life identify the cultural framework around which Ms Gilmore Holt prepared and finalised
the anthology during ten years of co-operation with Professor Gilbert. Her
preface was considered by Ms Gilmore Holt still fully relevant in 1957-1958,
and was placed again in the preface of the expanded edition in two volumes of
the Documentary History of Arts.
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| Fig. 21) Erwin Panofsky Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/46/Erwin_Panofsky.jpg/220px-Erwin_Panofsky.jpg |
Gilmore
Holt benefited from an additional cultural cultural stimulus in 1939 when,
thanks to Erwin Panofsky, she got a second scholarship to continue working on
the same theme in Princeton. In the same year Panofsky published his famous
"Studies in Iconology. Humanistic
Themes in the Art of Renaissance", which assigned to literary sources
an important (although not essential, as we shall see) role as a tool to interpret
art.
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| Fig. 22) Panofsky's Studies in Iconology Source: http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Panofsky_iconology2.pdf |
In the
methodological note at the beginning of his anthology, Ms Gilmor Holt explained
that she had planned the structure of her anthology precisely with Panofsky
(but she also included Friedländer and obviously Ms Gilbert among the
personalities, whom she thanked for the good advice she received). Did perhaps
Panofsky counterbalance the original influence of Ms Gilbert, all geared to the
description of great personalities and social situations? I believe that there
there are a few hints suggesting it might have been the case, even if it would merit more study to be confirmed.
I think it is interesting to immediately point out that, in the edition of
1945, the last authors examined in the anthology – following a chronological
order – were Diderot, Lessing, Winckelmann, and Goethe: all non-artists. Ms
Gilmore Holt, in short, aimed not only at documenting the process of artistic
creation, but the maturation of taste and the interaction between art and culture.
Large space was assigned for example to the authors of treatises (such as
Alberti, with 33 pages). The extracts in the anthology were usually quite large
(at least 5-10 pages), and were selected for their ability to document the
trends and the aesthetic reasons of an era. The translation, in the authoress'
words, sought a middle solution between a literal conversion, which would often
risk to be simply incomprehensible, and a freer text: while the English must be
understandable, it should be characterized by the rhythm and intonation of the language
of the respective time, without the modernisation by Goldwater/Treves. Was this
Panofsky’s influence or was learnt with Professor Gilbert? It is one of the
open questions still to be resolved.
The influence of historicism: the analysis of
Robert Goldwater
It was said
that Goldwater studied the impact of primitive art on the most innovative forms
of contemporary creations. He did it, however, always maintaining, as a
reference point, a very traditional outline of the historical relationship
between art and literature. To every era - he claimed – corresponded indeed a
specific form of art literature. This was the central message of Goldwater’s
introduction, which offered an interesting historicist key to the phenomenon of
art literature, which “is more than a
footnote in a factual history of art: it is a primary and important document in
the history of taste, and in the formation of our own likes and judgments" [46]. And yet, we read in the introduction,
the judgment on the same art literature was not only a function of the times,
but also depended upon the interpretation by individuals of the creative
artistic fact: for example, some romantics were suspicious about writing artists
(think about Goethe and to his admonition: "Artist, creates, do not speak" [47]), because they believed
that art creation should be exclusively spiritual and therefore irrational;
other romantics, to the contrary, believed that the true artist must be a
universal genius, and as such can only express himself by using all tools,
including that of literature. These were often contradictory interpretations:
consider how the myth of the universal art genius was fed for example by
Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, which was however translated into German by
Goethe himself.
With
Michelangelo and neo-Platonism, only the last dimension was now seen as worthy
of discussion: practical purposes were abandoned and theory was given primacy
in art literature. The task of the artist's writing was not to teach the most
ingenious ways to imitate nature, but to describe the art as an ideal
construction: therefore art as governed by its own independent system of rules,
normalized by the Old Masters. Artists did not write for the community of
artists anymore, but they did it to spread those encoded ideals in their
audience [50]. It was a pattern that originated from Vasari and was perpetuated
well until into the nineteenth century, especially with the spread of treatises
(with the fundamental contribution by Lomazzo) [51]. In the seventeenth century
a new form of academic discourse spread from France, as an act of rhetoric with
a tendency to philosophical abstraction (Chantelou, De Piles). The tradition of
the formal discussion also continued in the early eighteenth century.
That's why,
when opening the introduction, Goldwater wrote: "The contemporary artist, asked to write about his art, hesitates. The
tradition of verbal shyness handed over to him by his craft has been reinforced
by his own experience, and he will tell you that “explanations” rarely explain.
His work, the best part of him, is there to speak for itself; those who do not
understand its language will profit little from an approximate translation into
the foreign tongue of words – even were this really possible" [53]. It
should be added that this prediction would not come true: contemporary artists
- including his wife Louise Bourgeois – turned to be among the most talkative
creators of the entire history of art.
Goldwater
still warned the reader that every historical reconstruction must still take
into account a selection bias: what has been preserved of art literature often
depended on the taste of the following times. Many of Gainsborough letters were
destroyed in the following centuries because his stilted writing style, typical
of the eighteenth century, proved unbearable hundred years later. Corot’s
notebooks were selectively written off by Moreau-Nélaton, his biographer, in the
1905 seminal work Histoire de Corot et de
ses œuvres, on the basis of the aesthetic interests of the biographer. It
is impossible to form an opinion, even very summary, he wrote, on how much of
art literature has come to our days compared to the original production. We
have almost nothing of the seventeenth century Dutch artists, but we also have no hint as to whether they - collectively - avoided resorting to writing or whether
their descendants were not been able to preserve it [54].
Art Literature and the Development of the Democratic
Spirit
If Ms
Gilmore Holt drafted one of the reference anthologies of the last century, she was
really frugal in adding general considerations, which in the volume of 1947 as
well as in the first two volumes of the Documentary
History of 1957 and 1958 (with the same introduction, as mentioned above), were
all signed by Professor Katherine Everett Gilbert. But it is clear that the
authoress agreed with those words, that merged art and life, and combined the
study of personality with the analysis of social developments. All of this was
perfectly aligned to her rebellious spirit and above all by to her sincere
spirit of democracy. Alicia Faxon explained it to us, citing Gilmore Holt and
the memories of her studies in Munich, while Nazis were taking power: "As an undergraduate and graduate student I
had found that survey texts did not provide enough source material so that
students could form their own judgments. The original documents should be
available to everyone, otherwise an exclusiveness can develop that excludes
many who might enjoy art. Unless a text is provided with source material,
beginning students are not encouraged to form their own opinions. When I was a
graduate student in Munich, somebody asked me: "How come you’re getting
through so fast?" I replied that I had’nt much respect for authorities and
I still don’t. I want to see for myself. One authority must be weighed against
another, but to do so you must have the sources" [55].
To provide an
easy access to the sources is therefore a critical step to enable a democratic
society to enjoy art. The development of the relationship between art and the
public, or if you want the process through which arts were made public, is the
focus of the introduction, signed by Ms Gilmore Holt, to the third volume of
the Documentary History, the one
dedicated to the art literature of the nineteenth century in 1966. 1800 was a
breaking period. "During the
nineteenth century institutions and attitudes gave way to new forms and
relationships. Traditions in governmental and social institutions, traditions
in social behaviour and processes of production, traditions in methods and
materials of construction in architecture and in modes of representation in the
visual arts were discarded. The nineteenth-century artists were therefore
called upon to devise forms that would be expressive of European life, which
was transforming itself into the industrial and technological age of the
twentieth century. Throughout the century new expressions were sought for
cultural concepts, the products of a freedom unfettered by conventional
conformity. Architecture acquired new social functions in the changed society,
and the architect was called to meet the requirements of various groups of
citizens. Painters and sculptors reached behind the screen of traditional art
to bring forward new symbols and emblems to satisfy their own 'inner necessity'
and that of their culture. This search (...) produced a constant tension
between the academic, official, and conventional member of society and
society’s creative artists, who were compelled by their genius to be thus
engaged. The first group was determined to maintain a status quo. The second
was bound to discover means and methods to represent the concepts that were
emerging from the cultural heritage. These periods of transformation called for
the critic both to defend the accepted and the known and to explain the new
gestation to eyes fixed on traditional images. The patron, to whom both parties
addressed their case with the aid of the critic, was now the public, rather
than the connoisseur." [56]
The idea of
the use of art as a public service also justified the other major work of Ms Gilmore
Holt, the trilogy on the role of exhibitions and criticism in the art
affirmation in the nineteenth century. In 1979 she released The Triumph of Art for the Public,
1785-1848: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics [57]; in 1981 it
followed The Art of All Nations,
1850-1873: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics [58]; in 1988
the trilogy ended with The expanding
world of art, 1874-1902 [59].
From 'Literary Sources' to 'Documentary
History': an Attempt at Interpretation
We already
pointed out that, between 1947 to 1957, Ms Gilmore Holt decided to change the title
of her anthology. The reference to Literary
Sources disappeared, and was replaced by that of Documentary History. Unfortunately, the authoress did not explain
the reasons for the change in title.
The term Literary Sources expression was not
frequently used in art and literature criticism in the English language. For
example, it was not employed by Katherine Everett Gilbert in her History of Aesthetics in 1939. And yet,
the word was spread in other languages: for example, the first anthology of art
history sources in Spain was called Fuentes
literarias para la historia del arte español, and was published between
1923 and 1939. According to Alicia Faxon, it was Professor Gilbert to address Ms
Gilmore Holt to the study of literary
sources, even before she had met Panofsky. If this information is correct,
it would seem to suggest that the expression Literary sources had not been the result of guidance from Panofsky,
but was rather an attempt to create an American equivalent of the Spanish term
or of the German word Literarische
Zeugnisse, used by Schlosser in the introduction of its manual 1924 and
translated by Rossi in Italian as "Testimonianze
letterarie" in 1931. Schlosser defines them as following: "the written, secondary, indirect sources;
especially so in the historical sense, the literary evidence, that relate to
art in theoretical sense, according to the historical, aesthetic or technical
side, while the testimonies which are so to speak impersonal, like
inscriptions, documents and inventories, relate to other disciplines and can be
here treated only as an appendage" [60].
Evidently,
ten years later, the authoress did not like any longer that term. It is not
excluded that she was not entirely satisfied with the ambiguity with which
Panofsky used it in his Studies in
iconology 1939 [61]. The German scholar, in fact, distinguished between
iconography and iconology: the first was a reading of a pictorial image that
tried to study its meaning on the basis of the factual interpretation of the
artist’s intention, while the second aimed to place the art work inside his way
of thinking and the aesthetic concepts of his time. Iconography was a tool to
understand the narrative meaning of artistic motives (for example, one could
explain the representation of a particular religious scene) in the sense of
images, stories and allegories. And yet, an iconographic analysis did not explain
the emotional and spiritual reasons that pushed the artist to describe the
story in the specified way of the image. In other words, iconography gave us a
less advanced form of knowledge about the art work than iconology: it did not
reveal the artist's personality and the civilization of his time. While
iconography was analytic, iconology was synthetic. If a proper iconographic
interpretation was always necessary, it was by no means sufficient to a full
understanding of the work: it was only iconology, in fact, to define its
intrinsic meaning. Well, for Panofsky literary sources were auxiliary
instruments to iconography, but not part of iconology. They helped understand
the stories, but not full explain their context, to interpret them according to
the taste of the time.
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| Fig. 23) The 1850 Documentary History of the State of New York |
Why then
continue to use a term that was not in common use in the United States and was
mostly associated with the idea of an incomplete understanding of the meaning
of art? With the transition to Documentary
History, Ms Gilmore Holt took over a well-known concept in American
historiography. The first Documentary
history of the State of New York was published by E.B. O'Callaghan in 1850
in four volumes, and included documentation of white settlers and indigenous Indians
from texts of the last two hundred years. Since then that formula had been in
constant use in American history, becoming the main tool for documentation and
dissemination. The American scholar, therefore, adopted a cultural model which
had been clearly successful among American historians. To 'document history' was
one of the basic principles of positivism in historiography, which had
characterized the birth of art literature since the time of Rudolf von Eitelberger Edelberg, the founder of the Vienna School of Art History. Those principles
had oriented the work of Schlosser in his youth, as he himself recalled: "Since I was a disciple of the great Sickel,
I could conceive history of art only as a historical discipline, essentially
combined (although different in tasks and partly in methods) with its sister,
the so-called classical archaeology, which owes above all to the philological
exercise its much more strictly scientific nature" [62].
According
to this interpretation, Ms Gilmore Holt would thus remain within the cultural
framework that characterized the positivist stream of art literature in Vienna or
the one strongly influenced by Ranke in Berlin, taking a step back compared to
Panofsky’s more idealistic positions and his attempt to draw a philosophy of art
history through iconology.
And yet, if
such a 'Eurocentric' reading is not impossible (since the authoress knew very
well the German and Italian cultures), it is unlikely that it represented the
only explanation. In fact, there is another element to keep in mind. Just in
the fifties, the sociological method was gaining ground in the United States.
An example was the manual on the sociological method of Pauline V. Young
(1896-1977), published for the first time in 1939 and periodically newly
published until the mid-sixties [63]. The text explained the role, for the
understanding of the social sciences, of "primary sources" (and therefore the sources that are
originated by the authors), identified as opposed to "secondary sources" (i.e. the opinion on the authors); it also
elaborated on "documentary sources"
(i.e. of the sources that can be taken from documents), as opposed to “field sources” (i.e. the information
that one collect empirically on the field). These were all empirical knowledge
tools of which social analysis would make extensive reference. To focus on the documentary
history of art thus meant, as we have seen, to read it as one of the real
components of social life, while still remaining within the framework of the written
sources of literary character. Using the new terminology, Ms. Gilmore Holt
signalled that the excerpts were not only theoretical texts bearing witness to the
history of taste and of technical knowledge, but also empirical tools to place
artists within their world. It also meant performing an educational operation,
putting students directly in contact with materials even before with opinions,
thus opening a wide interpretative space.
Unfortunately,
Ms Gilmore Holt has been very sparing of words to explain the evolution of her art literature research, and has always stressed the practical nature of her
compilation, at the service of students. If she always stressed her interest in
the interpretation of art as empirically linked to the reality of facts,
biographies, and the social framework, she never wanted to offer a unified reading
of history of art literature (as Robert Goldwater had done in the preface of
the other anthology), like if such a comprehensive interpretation, beyond the specific
experience of individuals, were not possible. Whatever the correct
interpretation, it seems clear that, with the edition of 1957-1958, American
art literature emancipated itself from the influence of Panofsky’s aesthetics
(although he continued to be the first of the scholars mentioned by the
authoress to receive her thanks). Inevitably, other scholars, like Ernst
Gombrich, stood next to Panofsky in the list of scholars mentioned in the1966 introduction. Gombrich, a student
of Schlosser, had continued to look after art literature and iconology with
Otto Kurz at the Warburg Institute in London in the fifties. He gave classes on
art literature for a few years, but never wrote a theory of art literature. In
fact, he had a Popperian reading of history, based on the freedom of the
individual and not on collective or philosophical categorizations. Perhaps Ms
Gilmore Holt always avoided formulating an overarching theory of art literature
because she had some sympathy for Gombrich’s views: although art literature also
witnessed social life and culture of the time, individuals always had to be
given prominence over any theory. We are thinking loud on the basis of a pure intuition
and we are ready to think again. Anyone wishing to contribute to this debate is
welcome.
To conclude: the translation of Italian
classics in the US postwar anthologies
From an
Italian point of view, it is also interesting to analyse how and from which
editions the texts by Italian artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods were
translated and what problems they raised. Of course, the same problem arose for
the sources of French, German, Spanish and Dutch art, but we would like to
raise here specifically the issue of the Italian art literature. We are
examining the question of whether and how its knowledge across the Atlantic was
made possible by the existence of translations, at a time when the pendulum of
history was turning towards the new world. This is not a simple curiosity: immediately
after the second first world war, the world became progressively more and more anglophone,
in line with the political, military and economic strength of the US. The
ability to spread on a global level ideas and information originating in Europe
and in Italy became increasingly dependent upon the availability of English translations;
otherwise, historical texts only available in Italian ended up becoming accessible
to limited niches only. The two English anthologies of 1945 and 1947 led to an increase
of available texts in the leading world language (although it did only enlarging the scope of available quotes). This is the debt of gratitude we owe
to Goldwater, Treves and Gilmore Holt: they made available in the libraries of
English-speaking universities around the world two anthologies where
generations of students have found a selection of texts of our Italian artists.
Did enough
English translations of the classics of Italian art literature exist, to which the
authors of the anthologies could refer? It was the case only in a very limited
number of cases. In three circumstances they used old English translations:
Lomazzo (Haydock, 1598), Palladio (Leoni, 1742) and Serlio (Peake, 1610). In
six other cases they applied existing modern English translations: it was the case
of Cennini’s Book of the Art (Thompson, 1933), of the autobiography of Cellini
(Cust 1910; Macdonnell, 1910), of the writings of Leonardo (Richter, 1939) and
Michelangelo (Carden, 1913), and Vasari's Lives (Hinds, 1927). They were
obviously the best-known authors of Italian art literature; and, reversely, they
remained the most famous ones in the world, also thanks to the existing English
translation (and the versions in many other languages) as from the early
twentieth century.
In sum, the
number of Italian classics already available in English artistic literature in
the mid-forties was all in all quite limited, making it necessary to provide
for new translations. What are the difficulties that the authors met with the
translation? In the case of Artists on
Art, the Italian Marco Treves was obviously in a position to read the
original, and his problem was rather that of drafting the translation in a
sufficiently good English to permit Goldwater to beautify it [64]. As to the Literary Sources on Art, Ms Gilmore Holt
admitted that "the fifteenth century
Italian texts presented the greatest translation difficulties. It should be
born in mind that, as few of these texts have been revised or corrected since
they were published in the nineteenth century, there is a need for a
philological study of the different copies of the texts" [65]. From the tone, one understands that
this was just the most difficult moment of the whole endeavour. She would repeat
this comment in 1966, in the introduction to the third volume of the Documentary History, adding that some of
the nineteenth century texts were just as difficult as those of the Italian
Renaissance (probably, this remained one of the traumas of her scholar life).
The English
translation was done both from the originals (many of which had been printed in
the nineteenth century) as well as from compilations and anthologies of the nineteenth
century, and often from the Viennese editions of the series "Quellenschriften zur Kunstgeschichte",
which offered both the original text in Italian and its German translation. In
the case of Ms Gilmore Holt it is impossible to know, if not checking archive
documents [66], whether she translated from the Italian original text or the
German translation (as she knew better the second language). In short, even in the
cases of the translation of Italian texts, the role that German culture played
in those years, as a link between the art culture of US and Europe, is
confirmed.
NOTES
[38] Goldwater, Robert - Primitivism in modern painting, New York, Harper, 1938, 210 pages.
[39] Goldwater, Robert and Treves, Marco - Artists on art: from the XIV to the XX century, New York, Pantheon Books, 1945, 497 pages. The original is available on internet at: https://archive.org/details/artistsonartfrom00gold. Quotation at page 10.
[40] Faxon, Alicia - Elizabeth Gilmore Holt: Art Historian and Maverick, in: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1981), pp. 45-48
[41] Faxon, Alicia (quoted), p. 47.
[42] Professor Gilbert was the co-author of a fortunate Manual of History of Aesthetics published in 1939 (Gilbert, Katharine Everett; Kuhn, Helmut - A History of Aesthetics, New York: Macmillan, 1939, 582 pages), also published in Russian and Chinese. The original text is available at https://archive.org/details/historyofestheti00gilb.
[43] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - Literary sources of art history (quoted), pag. vii
[44] Gilbert, Allan H - Literary criticism: Plato to Dryden, New York : American Book Company, 1940, 704 pages.
[45] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - Literary sources of art history: an anthology of texts from Theophilus to Goethe, Princeton, Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth Princeton University Press, 1947, 555 pages. Quotes at pages vii-viii.
[46] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), p. 8
[47] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (citato), p.16
[48] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), p.12
[49] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), p.13
[50] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), p.13
[51] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), p.14
[52] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), pp.15-16
[53] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), p.7
[54] Goldwater, Robert e Treves, Marco, (…) 1945 (quoted), pp.8-9
[55] Faxon, Alicia (quoted), p. 45
[56] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - Literary sources of art history: … (citato), p. v
[57] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - The Triumph of art for the public, 1785-1848: the emerging role of exhibitions and critics, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1979.
[58] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - The Art of all nations, 1850-73: the emerging role of exhibitions and critics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981.
[59] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - The Expanding world of art, 1874-1902, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
[60] Schlosser, Julius von e Rossi, Filippo - La letteratura artistica; manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna. Edizione emendata ed accresciuta dall'autore, Firenze, "La Nuova Italia" editrice, 1931, 647 pages. Quotation at page 1
[61] Panofsky, Erwin - Studies in iconology; humanistic themes in the art of the renaissance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1939, 262 pages. See introductory chapter un: http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Panofsky_iconology2.pdf
[62] Schlosser, Julius von e Rossi, Filippo … (quoted), pag. 1
[63] Young, Pauline Vislick - Scientific social surveys and research; an introduction to the background, content, methods and analysis of social studies; with chapters on statistics, scaling techniques, graphic presentation and human ecology by Calvin F. Schmid and a foreword by Stuart A. Rice, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1939, 619 pages.
[64] We assume that all the English translations from Italian were from Marco Treves. To check, one should look at the Goldwater papers in the Archives of American Art (http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/robert-john-goldwater-papers-8229/more#section_4).
[65] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - Literary sources of art history: … (quoted), p. v p. x.
[66] See: http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C0728/c02082
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