Felipe de Guevara. [Commentary on Painting and Ancient Painters], Edited by Elena Vázquez Dueñas

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Felipe de Guevara
Comentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos
[Commentary on Painting and Ancient Painters]
Edited by Elena Vázquez Dueñas

Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2016

Fig. 1) 

Felipe de Guevara (1500-1563) wrote his Commentary on painting and ancient painters at an advanced age (it was around sixty). Dedicated to King Philip II of Spain, the work remained in manuscript until it was traced again and came into possession of Antonio Ponz (1725-1792), a key figure in the world of Spanish Enlightenment. He published it under the title Comentarios de la Pintura (Commentaries on painting) in 1788 (fig. 2). The manuscript on which Ponz worked was however lost for a second time, so that from 1788 until recently it was only possible to work on the printed edition of the text. It should also be said that the fortune of the work was, as a whole, very modest: it counted only a new edition in Spanish, made in 1948 by Rafael Benet. In essence, Felipe’s work has long been considered as a not particularly brilliant reiteration of themes and arguments borrowed from Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia and by Vitruvius’ De Architectura. However, the pages in which Guevara spoke of the work of Hieronymous Bosch (1453-1516) have always been considered as particularly relevant, as they are considered as the first ones, in chronological terms, devoted to the Flemish artist. Therefore, many essays dedicated to Bosch contain Guevara’s words, while the rest of the treatise has not been given much attention [1].

In 2006, the manuscript that Antonio Ponz used for its printed edition was found in the Library of the Prado Museum. We are sure that this was really that copy. Ponz wrote that the specimen had been donated by a friend who had bought it in a store in Plasencia, in the Extremadura region; in fact, the manuscript bears the dedication on the first page of the donor to Ponz, dated 1787. What we did not know is that, obviously, it was not the original text by Felipe de Guevara, but a copy of the seventeenth century, still including sections (not many, in fact) that were omitted by Ponz without explaining why. It turns out, however, that the title of the work was not Commentaries on painting, but Commentary on painting and ancient painters, which is then used in the present volume.

Fig. 2) The frontispiece of the edition by Antonio Ponz (Madrid, 1788)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The critical edition by Elena Vazquez Dueñas, which has been released only recently, is not based on the Ponz edition, but has been run directly on the copy of the manuscript. The publication by Akal publishers is really excellent; herewith, the author is offering the results of archival research which have lasted for years and have been conducted mainly (but not exclusively) between Spain and Belgium. First, she analysed what is known on the Guevara family, and therefore not only on Felipe, but also on the father Diego and his son (also called Diego). The former was ambassador, first, to Philip the Fair and, later, to Charles V; the latter made university studies which were promising to include him fully into the world of Spanish erudition, but died prematurely.

Felipe de Guevara is then placed by the author within the Spanish cultural world and, in particular, the erudite circuit coming from the University of Alcalá de Henares (near Madrid). She analyses his interests, which went far beyond collecting art, and encompassed the collection of antiquities and numismatics. She reconsiders, in the light of these interests, the text of the work and its purposes, making evident that we are not facing a simple pastiche of ancient Roman works, but a work promoting a dual purpose: on the one hand, to promote the revival of the arts in Spain under the supporting influence of Philip II (crowned King only in 1556, after living in the Netherlands, he decided to move to Spain and to elect Madrid as capital. The result was a comprehensive building program that will lead to the construction and decoration of buildings like the Escorial and the Pardo Royal Palace and resettlement of today disappeared Alcázar of Madrid), in the following years; on the other hand, it is clear that the script also had self-promotional purposes and was intended to credit Felipe de Guevara as an art expert in Philip II’s court.

The Guevara family

Fig. 3) Michael Sittow, Portrait of Don Diego de Guevara, about 1515, Washington, National Gallery of Art
Source: Google Art Project

The Guevaras were a family of Spanish royal officials stationed in the Flemish territory in the service of Philip the Fair, Charles V and Philip II. In particular, Diego de Guevara carried a series of particularly delicate tasks for the benefit of Philip the Fair, especially in the difficult years when, after the death of Isabella of Castile, the Spanish sceptre (officially due to his wife Giovanna, then declared insane by both contenders) was disputed between Ferdinand of Aragon and Philip himself. We do not know when the Guevaras had moved to Flanders, but certainly they remained there for almost a century, absorbing and appreciating that culture. Diego, which benefited from a substantial income for his services, immediately acted as a great collector, widely informed of the main contemporary Flemish painters, as he owned the famous Arnolfini Portrait of Jan van Eyck (fig. 4), probably bought directly from the Arnolfini family and donated later on to Margaret of Austria (1480-1530), sister of Philip the Fair, before 1516. We do not know much of his collection. In the Commentary the son mentioned a portrait of the father painted by Michel Sittow, or Michael the Fleming, around 1515 (fig. 3). The latter was another prominent figure of the Flemish world at the start of the 1500s.

Felipe was at the service of Charles V (1500-1558). We have news of his trip to Italy in the wake of Charles’ coronation as Emperor, which took place in Bologna in 1530; he returned to Italy when he was returning from the expedition of Tunis (1535). We can imagine that he followed the path of the imperial troops, but we have no precise information about it, if not a short reference in the Commentary, explaining that he visited Palermo. That said, Felipe apparently played a more modest role in the administrative machinery of Charles V and Philip II, after Charles’s abdication; in fact, he returned to Madrid a couple of decades before the transfer of the Habsburgs there. It was only with the decision of Philip II to set up the court in that town that Felipe de Guevara was quoted again in the documentation of the time. It seems that he had now left the active life, and we find him completely absorbed by the antiquarian studies, probably due to the attendance by his son Diego at the University of Alcalá de Henares, founded at the end of the fifteenth century, precisely to promote the antiquarian studies and the rediscovery of Greek and Roman classicism. Just to be clear: Felipe did not have a university education, which however was possible with his son, but he learned by himself, devoting the last years of his life to these topics. The most significant results of Felipe’s study were, on arts, the Comentario de la Pintura y pintores antiguos on the one hand and, in the beloved field of numismatics, the Veterum Nomismatum Interpretatio, on the other hand. That manuscript experienced even less success than the first, since it has been detected at the University of Copenhagen only in 2005, and it is still waiting to be studied. It is very likely that Felipe, aware of time passing (he died in 1563), hoped that the son Diego would play a major role in the scholar circles around Philip II, after the king had undertaken a new promotion policy of Spanish arts coinciding with his arrival in Madrid. He was not lucky. Diego died young, just three years after his father, and Philip II, more than in the ideas of the Guevaras, proved to be interested in their heritage as collectors, exerting moral suasion against the heirs, who allowed him to buy paintings like The Haywain Triptych (fig. 5) by Bosch at bargain prices. 

Fig. 4) Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini portrait, 1434, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The treatise of an amateur

The most unappreciated aspect of the treatise by Guevara is that it was the work of an amateur. Felipe was not an artist, but a man who knew the collecting circuits (even giving us a beautiful description of the Antwerp market and the trade in works of art that held there in 1540). If, on the one hand, the ambition was to provide a theoretical framework on painting, justifying its nobility and hoping that the information retrieved from Vitruvius and Pliny would be of benefit for the development of Spanish art, as it had occurred in Flanders and in Italy, on the other hand it is evident that he wanted to fully acknowledge - within that theoretical framework - also the public's right to judge independently art works. Moreover, in Guevara’s model, the assessment of the public (and thus, in the final analysis, its taste) should guide painters and therefore make sure that arts can move towards a prosperous path. For Felipe, therefore, painting was imitation of reality (and in itself this finding is common with any other writing on the art until 1900), and then of nature. But there were two kinds of imitation (p. 171), in his view: that which was given to the artists and that was done through their hands, and special techniques; and the imitation "de entendimiento" ('of understanding'), which was a prerogative of the public, and allowed to correctly judge painted things. Referring to this type of imitation, Felipe explicitly used the term "esta nuestra imitaçion imaginaria de los compradores" ('this imaginary imitation we have as buyers', see p. 175) making a clear choice of side. So, the first thing to say about the Comentario is that it was by far one of the earliest writings on art (not only in Spain) operated by an amateur, and not by an artist.

Elena Vazquez Dueñas argues that Felipe’s attempt was to establish himself as an art expert in the scholar entourage surrounding Philip II and from which he was effectively excluded. I do not know if it is really so. Ultimately, we do not know if the treatise was presented to the attention of the King. Surely, if it was, it turned to be a failure. It is legitimate to ask the reasons thereof.

Fig. 5) Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Tryptyck (open), about 1516,  Madrid, Prado Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 6) Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych (close), about 1516, Madrid, Prado Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Felipe's taste

If the Comentario is a treatise "on the buyer’s side", it is immediately worth wondering what the taste of Felipe was. We must say that, in this respect, the references are scarce, but also the silences are important. Speaking of the rebirth of the arts - as seen - Guevara said that it took place in Italy and Flanders, and this (i.e. the equalization of the importance of experience in Flemish and Italian) was already a eloquent factor by itself; moreover, he cited as examples Raphael and Michelangelo, as well as Roger van der Wayden, Jan van Eyck and Joachim Patinir. The references to Italian painting ended there; those relating to the Flemish art concerned the main artists of the fifteenth century in Flanders (to whom Hieronymus Bosch was added in the following pages); there was no reference, instead, to the so-called "romanisti", i.e. the very large group of Flemish and Spanish artists who decided to travel to Rome to "learn" the ancient and the modern manner [2]. Furthermore, while devoting a paragraph to the art of tapestry, he did not talk (and this is perhaps the most astonishing fact) of the cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles which Raphael sent to Brussels in 1516 to be translated into tapestries and who had an enormous influence on local artists, by orienting their stylistic choices. Felipe lived in Brussels. It is impossible he did not see them. The taste of Guevara appears in fact geared towards the great classics of Flemish painting and is little influenced by Italian "mannerism". This may perhaps be one of the reasons that caused the poor fortune of his manuscript because, although the Flemish primitives were always very popular in Spain, they did not constitute the primary choice of Philip and his entourage II in the mid '500, when it was decided to build and decorate the new places of power.

Fig. 7) Hieronymus Bosch, Central panel of The Haywain Triptych. Sample preserved at El Escorial

Fig. 8) Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych  (detial): The Murder
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 9) Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych (detail): The brawl
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bosch and the ethical value of painting

The space dedicated to Bosch in the treatise (pp. 190-191) seems to respond to a debate evidently taking place about this artist, in Spain in those years. The author wondered whether the "monstrosities" painted by the artist were immoral and had to be avoided. On this Felipe (who owned several paintings by Bosch, including the Triptych of the haywain) had very clear views: first of all, he related the artist's work to that of the Greek-Egyptian painter Antiphilus (by itself, a bond with the noble tradition of antiquity) and then denied that Bosch had invented monsters and chimeras, arguing that in fact he always stuck to a type of painting linked to the imitation of nature, decency and morality. "I do not deny that he painted effigies of strange things, but only when he came to paint the Hell, in which case, wanting to paint devils, he figured compositions of admirable things. All of this, Bosch has done with prudence and decorum, while the others have done the same and did so without discernment and judgment, because they had seen in Flanders how well this kind of painting was accepted and therefore decided to imitate monstrous paintins and disarticulated fantastic images, signalling that in this consisted only the imitation of Bosch" (p. 190). Guevara, in short, witnessed the extraordinary success of the genre, but claimed that Bosch always consistently offered his monstrous creatures where they were used to show to the public the actual existence of monstrosities, i.e. in hell. On the basis of this line of morality (which the curator, in my view rightly so, keeps separate, in her commentary, from the Counterreformation’s censorship of the following decades) Guevara made a distinction between Bosch’s fantastic creatures and the growing phenomenon of grotesque (on which he spoke in a special chapter) which he severely condemned. Again referring to the morality of Bosch’s painting (which he distinguished from his followers), he pointed out an interesting phenomenon: the many fakes that had flooded the market, based on the success of the Flemish painter. With one exception: "It is however important to warn that, among these followers of Hieronymus Bosch, there is one that was his disciple and that wrote the name Bosch and not his own on his paintings because of devotion to his master, and to accredit Bosch’s works" (p. 191). The paintings of this unnamed disciple (possibly Pieter Brueghel the Elder or, more likely, Gielis Panhedel) were "to be held in high esteem, and those who own them should keep them in high regard, because [note of the editor: the anonymous artist] followed his master in terms of invention and morality... An example of this kind of painting is a circular panel owned by His Majesty, when the seven deadly sins are painted in circular form, and exemplified with figures and examples"(p. 191). This is the Table of the Seven Deadly Sins (fig. 10), now in the Prado, and one of the few works cited by Guevara. The words of Felipe pose, still today, a critical problem, since most historians tends to consider it an authentic work of Bosch.

Fig. 10) Hieronymus Bosch (attributed to), The Seven Deadly Sins, Madrid, El Prado
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Guevara’s Mannerism

As part of a no doubt particularly interesting work, there is however one aspect which honestly does not convince me. The way in which the curator placed Felipe de Guevara with reference to mannerism. She pointed out that Felipe had an underlying classical background, which not surprisingly led him to rediscover and revive the Roman sources (and in Spain it was the first opportunity to read the words of Pliny in the local language). However, she also took the view that he revealed an opening towards mannerism. This opening would consist of his appreciation of the taste of the rare, the extraordinary, the unusual, that Felipe cited often (one of the most famous reference is to the painting of feathers by the Indians of New Spain). But clearly, things may be seen differently. I presume that the author has attaches mostly a chronological meaning to the term "mannerism", identifying it (roughly) with paintings in the decades from 1530 onwards. In fact, the taste for the rare is not - in my humble opinion - a "mannerist" specificity (as it is not baroque either); it is rather an inherent element in being a collector (and, as we know, Felipe was a collector, both in the works of art, and - above all - with reference to numismatics). Anyone who has been or is a collector, and thus proves an antiquarian interest in any field of human production, cannot fail to feel that impulse. In this sense, my impression is that Felipe did not manifest a "mannerist" style with reference to rare, but if anything, proved once again to be a true collector [3]; he was a collector, as said before, who if anything, was seemingly tied to fashions and trends of the previous generation, compared to the one which imposed its taste with the settlement of Philip II in Madrid.

NOTES

[1] Among the few exceptions, one should remember Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, who in 1846, published a large excerpt in her The Art of Fresco Painting. Those are the pages where Felipe de Guevara explained the origins of fresco painting as written by Vitruvius.

[2] See in this blog the review of Nicole Dacos’ Viaggio a Roma. I pittori europei del '500.

[3] See in this blog the review of: The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg's Inscriptiones 1565.