Francesco Susinno, [The Lives of Painters in Messina]. Edited by Valentino Martinelli. Part One

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Francesco Susinno
Le Vite de’ Pittori Messinesi
[The Lives of Painters in Messina]. Part One

Text, introduction and bibliographical notes by Valentino Martinelli

Florence, Le Monnier, 1960

Antonello da Messina, Virgin Annunciate, about 1476, Palermo, Galleria regionale di Palazzo Abatellis
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I have a few certainties in life. One of these is that it is now finally time to publish a critical edition of the Vite de’ pittori messinesi (The Lives of the Painters in Messina) by Francesco Susinno, the "priest and painter". Consulted almost exclusively by experts, Susinno’s Lives are quoted at best because one among them is dedicated to Caravaggio; at times, it is presented along with the other ancient biographies written on Merisi [1]. The fact is that, for me, the Life of Caravaggio written by Susinno (in fact a plagiarism of the one of Bellori, at least in the first part) is weak, and it is not much of a service to publish it in isolation from all other Lives. A few comments to individual artists’ Lives were also printed [2], but at least two reasons show it is not enough. 

First, the work has an overall value that is greater than the sum of the individual parts; that value emerges having it in hand and reading it all. The biographies, in fact, are logically related to one another. The references to Polidoro’s style, to the one of Caravaggio, etc. assume in fact the reader knows the items discussed forty or fifty pages before or after. 

Second, beyond the thousand faults that it can show (and please take into account this caveat, because this review will probably appear a harsh criticism of a text that is, however, priceless) the Lives are a mine of invaluable information on the artistic life of Messina between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They enlighten the life of a city that at the height of splendour – we should not forget - was one of the top ten cities of Europe: it had a mercantile and seafaring tradition just like Venice (Antonello da Messina’ personal story is the most known illustration hereof), was the headquarter of the first Jesuit college in the world (the “Collegio Prototipo”, i.e. the Prototype College) and enjoyed a unique autonomy from the rest of the Kingdom of Sicily. When Susinno wrote his story in 1724, Messina as a city had already largely compromised his artistic heritage, not only because of the earthquake, but mainly due to the failed revolt against the Spanish and the contemporary alliance with the French. We were in the years between 1674 and 1678. At the end of the war, with the return of the Spaniards, the city was declared "civilly dead": the University was closed, the senate palace demolished, many works of art ended up in Spain. Nonetheless, Susinno gave us an overall picture that sought to (and had the air of) being a "truthful history" of the city's artistic events. But here comes the hard part. In fact, having a critical edition of a work would mean (as we said many times) to precisely record any information, to research the surviving material (in this regard we cannot ignore the damages caused by the tragic earthquakes of 1783 and 1908), and to timely verify the art attributions. A huge job that would coincide - in fact - with setting up a full inventory of assets.

Girolamo Alibrandi, Presentation at the Temple, Regional Museum of Messina,
Source: http://www.junglekey.it/

A 1724 Manuscript

Actually, Susinno’s Lives remained unknown until 1960, when Valentino Martinelli produced the current edition of the work, transcribing the text from a manuscript dated 1724 and fully ready to be printed. The manuscript was kept in the Kupferstichkabinett (gallery of prints) of the Kunstmuseum Basel with signature A 45. As said, the sample already had all necessary permissions for the publication. It consisted of nearly three hundred front / back cards and presented nineteen drawings by the author with the portraits of the major artists who were the subject of biographies. In his highly valuable introduction, Martinelli apologized for not being able to prepare a critical edition (because of the difficulties I mentioned earlier), but gave us nevertheless valuable information. We learn that the manuscript copy was owned by the Swiss Achille Ryhiner, who, in the second half of 1700, besides being a manufacturing entrepreneur, was interested in art. In fact, he entered in connection with Winckelmann and made several private trips to Italy. Very likely, the specimen held today in the archives of the Basel museum was purchased by him during one of these journeys.

In truth, the existence of Susinno’s manuscript had already been reported by Caio Domenico Gallo, the historian from Messina who authored the Annali della Città di Messina (Annals of the City of Messina) in four volumes. In the second volume of his work, he spoke of the Lives and told they were held by the Messina antiquarian Luciano Foti in 1756. Gallo then made use of Susinno’s work in different passages of his work, also mentioning the numbering of the manuscript papers from which the news were derived. The comparison between the page numbers he quoted and those of the Basel edition indeed suggests that there were two different manuscripts, and that the version used by the scholar from Messina was the earlier one (not forgetting that the version discovered in 1960 had the imprimatur for printing). Even more: the drawings that appear in the Basel manuscript report a further different and earlier numbering. It can be assumed that they were cut from a third version of the work [3].

Polidoro da Caravaggio, Adoration of the Shepherds 1533, Regional Museum of Messina
Source: www.bdp.it

Biographical Notes

It goes without saying that the story of the manuscript is interwoven with the biographical events of its author. We know very little of his biography. A few biographical notes were reported by Gallo in his Annals; Susinno was described as a priest and a painter who had studied in Rome and Naples. The design that presents his self-portrait - writes Martinelli - suggests that he could have been fifty years old at the time of preparation of the work. And to corroborate this thesis, the curator noted a series of internal evidence of the manuscript from which it seems logical to infer that he must have been born between 1660 and 1670 (p. XXII) [4].

It remains to understand why the publication did not materialise. Basically, there may have been two reasons: economic problems (as already mentioned, the city was in a particularly difficult situation and it is very possible that there were difficulties related to the charges, allegedly to print the apparatus of images) or developments linked to health issues. We have no idea when Francesco Susinno died. Possibly, his death took place shortly after the conclusion of the manuscript version, so that, following the author's death, the whole project vanished. 

Caravaggio, Resurrection of Lazarus, 1609, Regional Museum of Messina
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The sources of the Lives

That said, Susinno proved in his manuscript to be very familiar with the sources of art literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such knowledge was probably the result of personal passion, but suggests the artist had received an academic training, received probably in Rome. He mastered Vasari, Baldinucci, Baglione, Malvasia (held up to public ridicule for having called Raffaello as the "boccalaio" from Urbino), but also not widely known sources such as the Flemish Dominicus Lampsonius, and to come to the seventeenth century, also Silos and the team formed by Ottonelli and Pietro da Cortona. Sometimes he copied other sources (as already mentioned, the beginning of Caravaggio’s Life was almost fully borrowed from Bellori). This weakness is however not always present. It is where he dissociated himself from the original source that Susinno showed his best qualities. A concrete example: in the first introductory chapter, the author reiterated Vasari's version of Antonello da Messina as the one who transferred oil painting from northern Europe to Italy. And yet, he signalled a particular situation, that of Cennini’s treatise, of which he obviously did not know the content, except what reported by Vasari and Baldinucci in the first book of his Notizie (News). At the time, in fact, Cennini’s manuscript copies, which would be rediscovered a century later, were not available. Baldinucci itself raised doubts about the consistency of the information on oil painting contained in Cennino’s treatise with Vasari’s wording and solved it by saying that the Libro dell'arte was dated 1437, and therefore followed the above mentioned "discovery". Susinno did not seem to be convinced and, seized with scruples, felt compelled to warn the reader to be on guard because of "rather obscure information" that can create "some difficulty, at least at first glance, on the above mentioned Antonello". It was, in essence, an intuition which I do not intend to stress too much, because it was then contradicted by many other considerations; in my opinion, nevertheless, it demonstrates the existence of a critical approach to the subject; it also proves, above all, that while Susinno was obviously proud to be a citizen of Messina, and wrote his book for the sake of his country and its young people, he was not affected by the same partisan domestic bias as previous scholars of other Italian areas.

The enormous amount of work carried out by Susinno becomes however evident when sources such as Vasari fail to exist. Rightly, the author states, with reference to the biographies of Messina painters, that he had to start virtually from scratch. The only aid (which was in fact limited to the indication of a series of names) came from the manuscripts of Father Placido Sampieri, dating back to the mid 1600's (see p. XLVIII). Everything else seems to be original from him and, above all, to be truthful. Susinno referred where possible to notarial deeds, documents, signatures in the altarpieces; in the absence of such proofs, he relied on oral tradition, and, as he got closer to the end of the seventeenth century, to personal knowledge combined with a capacity to attribute autorship of paintings which would be restrictive to simply define as "expertise": we are faced with a proto-connoisseur. I will not repeat that completing a critical edition could help to better define the reliability of the entire corpus of attributions by the author.

Caravaggio, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1609, Regional Museum of Messina
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Literary Theft of Susinno’s Lives 

In the latest edition of his 1822 Storia pittorica (Pictorial history), Lanzi put references to Messina’s art history arising from the Memorie de’ pittori messinesi (Memoirs of Messina painters) by Philipp Hackert (1792). In fact, the German artist had virtually written nothing hereof. At the request of  the King of Naples (he was his official painter) he had gone several times to Messina in Sicily and had commissioned a printed text to Gaetano Grano, a local scholar. Grano had accomplished the task on the sole condition that he not be cited as the author. And that is how it was done (nor it seems that Hackert was particularly disagreeing with it). Except that - Martinelli writes - after the rediscovery of Susino’s Lives, the truth became clear. The Hackert-Grain Memoirs were nothing but a plagiarism of the work of the priest from Messina, who had lived eighty years before; at best they were a summary, to put it more mildly. Obviously, at that time, Gallo’s exemplary manuscript, which had been described at Foti’s hand in mid '700, was still available. In sum, art literature in Messina developed acknowledging a false debt of gratitude towards a work which, in reality, was discovered fifty years ago as being not anything but an incomplete summary of Susinno’s Lives. Hence the importance that the mere transcription of the work, proposed by Martinelli in 1960, has taken to recalibrate the overall judgment on the historiography on Messina.

Mario Minniti, The Miracle of Naim's Widow, Regional Museum of Messina
Source: http://www.diocesisorrentocmare.it/

A History or a Book of Lives?

Susinno’s book is composed of 83 chapters. The first is an introduction to the work. The last contains the text of a letter which is called "responsive over how to adjust the worn boards or canvases". Since we do not know whether the letter was real or fiction, it showed the author's interest in restoration, on aspect which we will discuss below. In between there are more than 80 biographies on the creators from Messina or of those who worked in Messina, from Antonello until Filippo Tancredi, who died in 1722. By a not-unusual decision, living artists were excluded, to avoid hurting anyone. In just two occasions the artist spoke of artists using the present tense: Natalino Vanhoubrachen (p. 167) and Giulio Avellino (p. 180), but the reason is easily explained. Both were artists who had moved from Messina, the first going to Livorno and the second to Venice. Most likely Susinno had not heard anything on them anymore, and had assumed that, reasonably, they had meanwhile passed away (what was indeed true).

Yet the Lives of the priest from Messina had many oddities. The first appeared in the title. Martinelli proposed a front page of the manuscript in which clearly the choice of the title "Lives of painters in Messina " was made at the last minute. The decision was taken so late that strips of paper were added to cover the original title (which one reads equally well). The work was originally to be titled "History of Painters in Messina". Moreover, the introductory chapter was titled "the subject of the history explained to the reader." Convincingly, the curator explains the reason for such a sudden change of mind with the perceived need to "fit" into a genre, that of the artist medallions, which was known throughout Europe and was directly attributable to Vasari. Following the same logic we should think, however, that in the beginning Susinno wanted to break free just from that literary genre to inaugurate another, perhaps similar one, but with a greater scent of history, i.e. with a greater attention of the veracity of the proposed positive data, or with the need - repeatedly emphasized by Susinno - to be "truthful" and to distinguish for example between the works of the masters and those of disciples, which often were all generically traced as belonging to the more famous artist for commercial reasons. This is not my statement, but the one phrased by the author, who shows fully familiarity with the market mechanisms and the behaviour of the antique dealers (whom evidently he met frequently). The identification of a style, of a group of followers, of a set of pictures coming from the practices of a same workshop are constants running through the whole work. We do not know why, in the end, Susinno lacked courage. Or whether, by changing the name, he thought to ensure a greater commercial success to a work which, ironically, not only was eventually not printed, but appeared in the form of plagiarism signed by a famous German painter at the end of the eighteenth century. I felt this fact deserved to be remembered.

End of Part One
Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] See, for example, Vite di Caravaggio (The Lives of Caravaggio), CasadeiLibri publisher, 2010, with the transcription of the biographies of Caravaggio written by Van Mander, Mancini, Baglione, Bellori, Sandrart and Francesco Susinno. The presentation of the Susinno pages is by Francesca Valdinoci, who was also the curator of the entire work.

[2] I would like to quote, hoping not to forget anyone: Valter Pinto, In traccia della maniera moderna. La vita di Girolamo Alibrando di Francesco Susinno (In track of the modern manner. The life of Gerolamo Alibrando by Francesco Susinno) in Itinerari d'arte in Sicilia, 2012, pp. 179-184, available on Academia.edu; Salvo Pistone Nascone, «Agostino Scilla pittore, filosofo messinese» ne «Le vite de’ pittori messinesi (1724) di Francesco Susinno» («Agostino Scilla painter and philosopher from Messina» in «The Lives of Messina painters (1724) by Francesco Susinno»), also available online.

[3] Francesca Valdinoci noted that a second, fragmentary sample of the work would have been identified at the Library of San Gennaro in Naples and forwarded to the updated reprint of Stefania Macioce’s book Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: fonti e documenti: 1532-1724 (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: sources and documents: 1532-1724 (Rome, 2010). However, I do not own and could not consult it. See: Vite di Caravaggio, quoted, p. 148.https://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2017/01/giulio-mancini26.html