Federico Zuccari, [Journey through Italy]. Edited by Alessandra Ruffino

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Federico Zuccari
Il passaggio per Italia
[Journey through Italy]

Edited by Alessandra Ruffino
with a geographical lecture by Davide Papotti
and an essay by Franca Varallo

Lavis (Tn), La Finestra Publishing House, 2007

Federico Zuccari,  Selfportrait with his wife Francesca Genga (1593-1603), Rome, Palazzo Zuccari
Source: http://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/

I have seldom found myself in a more difficult situation while reviewing a book. Il Passaggio per Italia (Journey through Italy) by Federico Zuccari is, in fact, totally puzzling. The reality is that it lacks any supporting framework which would orient its interpretation and facilitate the reader. Forget any guide for foreigners, or any testimony on the art of the main centres visited by Federico. Journey through Italy is rather an account of a world (at the turn of Mannerism and Baroque) that is revealed in the life of the courts, in the experience of the convivial ceremonies, in the places of delights (or those places assumed to be such); it is a world described according to the canons of a literature that stands out for the absence of linearity, or - better said - shuns this aspect to prefer instead what is particular, strange, characteristic, ugly, and, of course, lovely and graceful. A literature that uses the superlative more than commas and that, in all honesty, arouses a sense of discomfort and rejection in the reader.

The title says it all: "Journey through Italy, from the staying of Parma, of Chevalier Federico Zuccari, where are narrated among many other things the festivities and royal triumphs made in Mantua by the respective majesty: for the Wedding of his Son, the Serene Prince Francesco Gonzaga, with the Most Serene Infant Margherita di Savoia. With the addition of a copious narration of various things passed, viewed, and made in his pleasure trips through Venice, Mantua, Milan, Pavia, Turin and other parts of the Piedmont.” The fact that – among the very few specimens come down to us – there is none exactly like the other shows, in my humble opinion, that the real object of the work is not the narration of the just mentioned world (to and from which one can add or remove pages without too much embarrassment), but the author's self-celebration: the "prince" of painters according to the title he acquired through the creation of the Academy of San Luke in Rome (1593). A prince among princes, a man who is not a chronicler of events, but experiences those events (however useless, anachronistic, insignificant, and tremendously hypocritical they may look like to us today) in a position of privilege which authorizes him to make friends and acquaintances aware of the honours he got. A man who would like to go back home, but is impeded to do so, because he is held from time to time by the "catene d’onori” (the chains of protocol honours) of this or that ruler, all constraints which he is unable (but obviously has also no desire) to rebuff.

Zuccari's Coat of Arms (a Sugarloaf)' in Palazzo Zuccari in Florence (The Italian word for 'sugar' is 'zucchero?)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

This edition

Also the publishing history of this work is anything but clear. We know it was reproduced in a very low number of copies, all different among each other. Usually, it is said that the work was published in Bologna by Simone Parlasca in July 1608. And yet, this is in sharp contrast with the contents of the text, at least of the text that we are examining, since the last letter (called the Arrivata a Ferrara. i.e. Arriving in Ferrara) closes by saying that Zuccari left the city in the direction of Urbino on April 22, 1609. Three months later, he died in Ancona. I do not feel at all excluded that the present edition is a kind of "posthumous" issue, published soon after his death. Although Zuccari was also called "the learned painter" or the "painter philosopher", it seems clear that, whether the "letters" were real or just a rhetorical device for the story, Zuccari’s text must have been revised and rearranged by some scholar for the occasion, as also Ms Ruffino, the curator, suggests. In fact, the difference with the (precarious) language shown on the copies of Vasari's Lives, which he certainly annotated in person, is too large [1].

Federico Zuccari, Winter (scenes form the life of the painter with his selfportrait. Florence, Palazzo Zuccari
Source: Wikimedia Commons

And again: this edition, which was released by a small and well-deserving editor of the province of Trento (La Finestra editrice in the small town of Lavis) in 2007 does not include the Dimora di Parma (Staying at Parma), "because it pertains more closely to documenting the history of spectacle" (p. XXIII). Nevertheless, the whole text is not affected. There is no feeling there is a break in time or storytelling; the whole report by Zuccari is, in fact, a running back and forth, a move from the sledge runs in Turin to the miniature castle of the Estes, governed by a toothless guardian lady that looks like a witch, and then back to talk about most decorous washerwomen and fashionable hairstyles among the ladies of the court. It is actually the second modern edition; a first one, published in the magazine Paragone N. 105, was curated by Detlef Heikamp in 1958 (an extract publication was made from it). We owe to Heikamp the publication (in a facsimile edition by Leo S. Olschki in 1961) of Federico Zuccari Scritti d’arte (Art Writings), i.e. a collection of his purely theoretical works, starting with the Origine e Progresso dell’Accademia del Disegno di Roma (Origin and Progress of the Academy of Design in Rome) in Pavia, 1604, to continue with the Lettera a Principi e Signori Amatori del Disegno con un Lamento della Pittura (Letter to Princes and Gentlemen Amateurs of Design with a Lament of Painting) (Mantua, 1605) and ending with the Idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Idea of painters, sculptors, and architects) (Turin, 1607). Remaining however within travel reports, to my knowledge the 1586 Relación de un viaje to the Escorial, Aranjuez y Toledo (Report of a journey to Escorial, Aranjuez and Toledo) has not yet been published in Italian. It was published in a modern Spanish translation by F.J. Sánchez-Cantón inside of the supplements to the four volumes of his Fuentes literaries para la historia del arte español (1933-1941) (Literary Sources for the history of Spanish art).

Rome, Palazzo Zuccari
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Turin

The Journey is marked in five parts, which are different and discontinuous, each corresponding to respective letters that the previously mentioned Simone Parlasca says had been "written by the Chevalier Zuccaro to his friends in Rome and outside" (p. 5). The letters (among whose recipients stand out the names of Giambologna and Federico Barocci) covers a period from 1603 to 1609 and take into account the time he spent in Venice, Mantua, Milan, Pavia and Turin. Of course, the title ‘Journey through Italy’ makes no reference to Italy as a united polity or even a common political aspiration. If there is a unifying element in the work, it just consists of the various courts of the Italian Lords, each focused on his focal social events, but each fundamentally equal to the other. Nothing strange: Zuccari is a courtier. His personal biography testifies trips to the nobles and the kings of France, England, Spain, and almost all artistic centres of Central and Northern Italy. There is no doubt that Federico is a cult painter of the time, an artist whom monarchs, counts and dukes must call to entrust works and commissions. Among the many cities mentioned in the Journey, Turin has no doubt the lion's share. Here Zuccari comes in 1605 and Charles Emmanuel I, in the effort to total rebuild the city and the palaces of power, entrusts him the decoration of the Great Gallery (now the Royal Armoury); an endeavour that Federico will leave incomplete, formally demanding the sovereign to take leave for health reasons in 1608. Probably, the basic reason for him to leave was that Carlo Emanuele failed to appreciate the work development. Turin is certainly described not with the eye of a compiler of a guide for the stranger, nor does the author intend to represent the every daily reality of the people; instead, he narrates in a kind of suspended time, which is rich of pleasant places, meetings of the nobles, games and parties, curiosities and anecdotes. It is perhaps no coincidence that, exactly for this, his pages in the Journey dedicated to Turin (a non-existent Turin, like in the glossy postcards of the early XX century) have been so successful in the modern local publishing; after all, it is amazing to know that Mirafiori, today universally known as the seat of the main car factory of Fiat, used instead to be the Miralfiori of gardens and "most lovely" woods at the time of the Zuccari. And there is no harm in imagining groups of graceful washerwomen happily going there to the river, to wash and dry clothes in a fairy-tale world.

Federico Zuccari, Boy with a dog, Lisbon, National Museum of Ancient Arts
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Anything to save in the work?

Is there anything to save, then, in this book by Zuccari? Of course, there is. Schlosser himself understood it and wrote in his Kunstliteratur (Art Literatur): "This important document displays us the typical biography of a virtuoso who travels with all his vanities, even not fully satisfied with the scrupulous enumeration of all honours attributed to him; therein lies its true significance, heightened by the descriptions, highly valuable for the history of culture and theatre of this time, which Zuccaro offers of the magnificent feasts given at the courts of Turin and Mantua, on the occasion of the wedding of Francesco Gonzaga with Margherita di Savoia" (pp. 364-365). We must, in short, be selective; this will give us the chance to positively appreciate the indications provided by Zuccari on the works he made like, for example, on the iconography of the Savoy Gallery (pp. 66 -68). It is fundamental, for the garden art, the accurate and analytical description of the Royal park initiated by Emanuele Filiberto in 1567-68 and still being completed during the years of the artist's visit. No coincidence that the passage in question is anthologized in L’arte dei giardini. Scritti teorici e pratici dal XIV al XIX secolo, (The Art of the gardens. Theoretical and practical writings from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century), a precious collection of sources on the subject, published by The Polifilo Publisher in 1999 and edited by Margherita Azzi Visentini. The topic is discussed as follows: "The natural character of this estate, destroyed in 1706, during the siege of Turin... was one of the elements on which the criticism of the late eighteenth century based itself to support the Italian primacy in the invention of landscaped garden ..." (p. 455). But I personally believe that it is also worthwhile to recall the appearance, as part of the alpine landscape, of typically Counterreformist developments, such as the reports on the Sacred Mountains, starting from that of Varallo, which is the first to be described, followed by those of Crea and Vicoforte (under construction on Zuccari’s arrival).

Federico Zuccari, Adoration of the Magi, Cathedral of Lucca
Source: Wikimedia Commons

An incident in the town of Correggio also deserves a very brief reference. It is an episode that could somehow be of interest to those who deal with the history of restoration. Zuccari went there to review a work that he had performed in Rome on behalf of Cardinal Felice Centini (an Assumption of the Virgin) and that years before he had just sent to Correggio on the instructions of the customer "and having found it in good conditions, I have instructed to wash it with great delicacy; so some other figures by Correggio, which were very dusty, came back to life" (p. 107). We find confirmation that (unfortunately unspecified) conservation procedures are also commonly practiced at the beginning of the seventeenth century; they are preferably assigned to the authors of the paintings themselves, or at least to renowned artists, since the professional profile of the restorer has not yet been developed.

NOTES

[1] I should like to refer to Giovanni Mazzaferro, The Annotated Specimens of Vasari's Lives: an Inventory, published in this blog.