Filippo Baldinucci. [Beginning and Progress of the Art of Engraving in Copper]

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

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Filippo Baldinucci
Cominciamento e progresso dell’arte dell’intagliare in rame
Colle vite di molti de’ più eccellenti maestri della stessa professione
[Beginning and Progress of the Art of Engraving in Copper]

Edited by Evelina Borea

Turin, Einaudi, 2013

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1515, wood-cut
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Cominciamento e progresso dell’arte dell’intagliare in rame (The Beginning and Progress of the Art of Engraving in Copper) was certainly not the most successful work of Filippo Baldinucci (1625-1696), the famous scholar, historian and collector at the service of the Medici in the second half of the seventeenth century. Filippo is remembered primarily for his monumental Notizie de’ Professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua (Notes on the Teachers of Drawing), published in part by Baldinucci himself (the first volume in 1681, the second volume in 1686, the fourth volume in 1688) and in part posthumously (the work in five volumes, was completed only in 1728). More and more importance is then attached, especially by lexicographers and historians of artistic techniques, to his Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (Tuscan vocabulary of drawing art) (1681), which earned him the appointment as Academician at the Accademia della Crusca. Despite two successive editions (1767 and 1808), the Beginning fell however into oblivion, the reason also being an explanation of a technical nature: among the 18 biographies presented in the work - explains the curator - as many as 15 were proposed again within the News, so much so that those interested in engraving could draw from this last work, without the need to even ask whether it was the original version of the text or whether there had been editorial interventions in the subsequent versions to the Tuscan scholar death (something that, at least in one case, is shown here). The biographies contained in the Beginning were therefore diluted among hundreds of other biographical notes accumulated and presented by Baldinucci in a bulimic attack of erudition. This also deprived the work of its deeper meaning, which was to explain the evolution of an art which was relatively modern compared to painting, sculpture and architecture, but at that time had such a success to constitute a veritable fashion. Baldinucci tried to investigate the specificity of the art of engraving, offering the reader an evolutionary line that opens with the early sixteenth century with Dürer and ends only around 1680 (the latest biography, ideal apex of the refinement of engraving, is that of François Spierre, the French engraver who had gathered great success in Italy and especially in Rome and Florence).

Lucas van Leyden, Conversion of St. Paul
Source: Sailko via Wikimedia Commons

Baldinucci and Bellori

The critical edition proposed by Evelina Borea is therefore greatly welcomed, nearly forty years after the other large endeavour by her, i.e. the comment she published to the Lives of Bellori. Are there similarities between the two comments? From a methodological point of view, I would say definitely yes: there is the same analytical approach to the text, the same will to write down and identify the cited works, the same search for the sources of both authors, the same desire to contextualize the two writings. From a content point of view, the question becomes more complicated. In both cases, it is clear the will by Bellori and Baldinucci to abandon a Vasari-conform coverage of all artifices, whether major or minor (Baldinucci however, stuck to this traditional type of work in the News), to identify key figures who act as key nodes of art developments. The problem, if anything, is to understand what are the criteria that led to the choice of this or that artist, and here again Borea proposes hypotheses which are anything but trivial. The curator also sees the same attitude of the two authors towards those artists who are most penalized (in terms of judgment) in the two works: Caravaggio in the case of Bellori and Rembrandt in the case of Baldinucci. Just like Bellori seems to refute Caravaggio, while understanding his art, "these little pages [editor's note: related to Rembrandt] are famous also because in a few lines the author (beside reporting of truthful things from reliable sources) also expresses the perception of the extraordinary nature of Rembrandt's style, whether in painting or carving, which, with a sort of an uncontrollable emotion from his deep soul and in spite of all theoretical rebuff, appears to him an unsurpassed achievement in history" (p. 190). It is no coincidence that Baldinucci wrote: "Where this artist really earned merit was the most peculiar way which he invented to produce copper etching, a way which was all his own, was no more used by others, nor more seen after him, i.e. with sometimes large and sometimes small scrubs and irregular features and without outlines, however making from all of it a deep and powerful chiaroscuro with a strong pictorial taste until the last mark." Common to the two authors is undeniably the same classical taste, even if characterised by different parochial shades, and a similar look, also in chronological terms, at what happens in France, where the cultural policy of Louis XIV had set new benchmarks, since the establishment of the Royal Academy of Painting (1648).

Rembrandt, Self-portrait, 1630, Stockholm, National Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The biographies

The Beginning contains 18 biographies, very different among them in the level of detail and reliability of contents. It is preceded by a brief Proemio (preface), written on the one hand to show that the author is well aware of the far wider group of the artists who dedicated to the carving, but also to best insert the biographies in a historical context which precisely encompasses the beginning of the engraving practice and the progress that have taken place for more than two centuries, to eventually reach the perfection of the times of Baldinucci, a perfection that allows the author to say that engraving and painting were at his epoch on the same level and competed against each other. The breath of the work ranges from the international to the purely parochial dimension. Among the eighteen cited authors, only four are Italian (Marcantonio Raimondi, Antonio Tempesta, Stefano Della Bella and Pietro Testa), while the others are foreigners (in the order: Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Hendrick Aldegraever, Hubert Goltzius, Jan Sadeler, Raphael Sadeler, Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Saenredam, Gillis Sadeler, Jacques Callot, Cornelis Bloemaert, Rembrandt, Robert Nanteuil and François Spierre). On one side, Baldinucci is more than proud of having learned Flemish to read, for example, the Lives of van Mander; on the other side, he is unable to free himself from the cliché of Tuscany as home to all the arts. It is so true that the first biography is dedicated to Dürer, but it is equally undeniable that, in the preface, the scholar argues that "this art [...] had its origin in the century of 1400 [...] in the city of Florence through the person of Masi Finiguerri, a goldsmith and silversmith, sculptor and engraver, who managed to be no less valiant in the shape of round and half-relief than in the niello work..." (p. 4). The "Beginning" is always a commencement from Florence; of the four Italian engravers, three operated in Florence. An exception is only Marcantonio Raimondi, who however does not come out well, as he is accused of knowingly falsifying works by Dürer. Florentine by adoption fact was also considered Jacques Callot, who worked for a long time in the city.

Jacques Callot, The big hunt, 1619, Houston, Fine Arts Museum

The "invention" in the art of engraving

It has been said that the purpose of Baldinucci is to define the specificity of engraving, in order to put in evidence its improvement in two centuries of history. Objectively, it is difficult to follow him, with contemporary eyes, given that he begins with Dürer and ends with Spierre, who was perhaps well-known at his times for the engravings from Pietro da Cortona and Bernini, but is certainly not comparable to Dürer in stature. We must therefore be clear: while not paying attention on the technical aspects, Baldinucci sees progress as "a growing craftsman's ability to ‘express’ the natural, as the eye sees things, from the most massive to the most evanescent ones, which are immersed in the air" (p. xxix). If ever there is a weakness, the author hardly manages to link the evolution of style to the improvement of the technical practices, merely judging on the basis of the final imitative result. And one should not forget that in his selection of authors, Baldinucci clearly (though not explicitly) operated a selection process between types of carvers. In the mass of artists who engaged in the discipline at least three types of artists could be distinguished: those who engraved art works of others, those who produced etchings from works of other draftsmen, and finally those (few) who drew and engraved works of their own invention. While keeping in mind the importance of printing for the diffusion of knowledge of art works, Baldinucci favours undoubtedly the last category. In fact, in a letter of 1681 he compares the so-called "d'après engravers" (i.e. those who were operating in the industry of translated prints) to those who produced gypsum copies of statues. He denied them, in short, any interpretative capacity, in the name of the predominance of the invention, which, ultimately, was a guarantee of the "nobility" of the discipline.

Stefano Della Bella, Temple of Concordia, 1656
Source: Sailko via Wikimedia Commons

The reasons for a book

Nobody knows the reasons that led Baldinucci to deviate from (and to temporarily suspend) the draft of the News, with a view to devote himself to the Beginning. The fact is that, in chronological order, the first volume of the News was released in 1681; while the second one was in an advanced stage of processing, the Tuscan scholar felt the need to take a break and to write the book about engravers. Evelina Borea makes a few assumptions. First of all she takes note that, throughout his literary work, Baldinucci’s activity is characterized by a series of sudden changes, which mark the birth of sudden enthusiasms and the fading of previous ones. In this sense, the negative critical assessment that the scholar received immediately after the publication of the first volume of his News may have played a role. Accused of being too favourable to Vasari (indeed, of having even exceeded Vasari in his pro-Tuscan partisanship), Baldinucci may have decided to let time pass and to enter into a new territory, by devoting himself to the history of engraving. But he could well also have done so in the full knowledge that there was no similar work in commerce (Giovanni Baglione had devoted the final section of his Lives to engravers, but this was not more than a list of authors). The truth is that we do not know the reasons. When talking about Baldinucci, to tell the truth, there is now a tendency to call into question psychologists, after the discovery of his personal diaries, which were rediscovered only in 1979 and show that the man was essentially a hypochondriac and depressed person. Without indulging in the controversy on methods (I remember the contemptuous judgment of my father, when the 1995 edition of the diaries was released by the Centre for the history of mental illness, at the University of Florence), I would just like to stress that explaining the unknown reasons of a choice with the onset of a mental illness (which, mind well, Evelina Borea did not) would be equivalent to the introduction of the deus ex machina in Greek tragedies, i.e. corresponds to solving a problem with a preconceived solution, giving up any attempt to investigate.

Robert Nanteuil, Portrait of King Louis XIV, 1664, Bibliothèque National de France
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The sources

What were the sources of Baldinucci? Ms Borea, rightly, feels the need to distinguish biographies in at least three groups: the first group (for which the sources are the easiest to find) is that of chronologically distant engravers, for which the weight of Vasari's Lives and of the Schilder-Boeck by Karel van Mander, presumably in the second edition of 1618 is evident (it is so obvious that often we can see a complete overlapping); this is particularly the case for the section of the Schilder-Boeck who was dedicated to the lives of Northern European painters. While we are come closer chronologically, other texts are coming into play, such as the Lives of Baglione, those of Bellori and Malvasia’s Felsina Pittrice. In general, it is obviously clear that Baldinucci mastered art literature, even that circulating in manuscript form, and consulted for example the Considerazioni sulla pittura (Considerations on paintings) by Giulio Mancini and the Lives of Passeri. For the Flemish world, since van Mander’s Lives stopped with 1604, he seemed to give a special weight to Het Gulden Cabinet by Cornelis de Bie, published in Antwerp in 1661. Then there was the Academia Todesca (Germany Academy) by van Sandrart. The latest biographies, instead, appear to be strongly indebted to oral or written contributions of contemporary authors and alternatively to be the obvious result of the personal acquaintance with the artists. Baldinucci himself mentions it: in the case of Nanteuil, for example, it was crucial the reporting by Domenico Tempesti, Florentine and his disciple in France over his last two years of life (not coincidentally, the live of Nanteuil is probably the biography in which the weight of the anecdotes is the greatest). One wonders, however, whether the selection criteria of the selected artists depended upon having or not enough available material. To be honest, this cannot be the only explanation we have. If this was the case, we would not explain, for example, the inclusion in the work of the lives of Hendrick Aldegraever, stretching (in the modern edition) only for exactly twenty lines. Even here, the selection mechanisms are not clear. One of these might be the preference for artists whose religiousness and morality were well proven. Baldinucci is a fervent Catholic and unsurprisingly highlights particularly significant situations, from his point of view: Dürer, for example, in total conformity with the artistic literature of the period, becomes an example of morality and religiosity; Cornelis Bloemaert's father is remembered for having been persecuted by the Calvinists in the city of Utrecht. It is no coincidence that the only quoted Protestant is the Mennonite Rembrandt, whose Protestantism is matched by the harsh criticism by Baldinucci on his moral qualities and behaviours.

The Commencement, in short, is not a masterpiece, as well as all works by Baldinucci probably were not masterpieces (unless of erudition). Nevertheless, it has a historical value, because it offers a first overall reflection on the history of engraving. Evelina Borea deserves merit for having unearthed if from the oblivion into which it had fallen.