Giovanni Mazzaferro. The Town of Imola in Art Literature

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Giovanni Mazzaferro

The Town of Imola in Art Literature
Photographs by Elena Bacchilega

Imola, Sforza Fortress.
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Julius von Schlosser devoted an entire chapter of his Kunstliteratur to what he called 'the Italian local literature' (Die italienische Ortsliteratur, translated into Italian as “letteratura dei Ciceroni”, a literally not existing term in other languages). With this term he meant not only the guides for foreigners, but also the descriptions of individual cities and their artistic heritage, which experienced a genuine explosion in the eighteenth century. There were a few leading scholars in every town, almost always belonging to the religious or local aristocrat world; they dug up the documents from the archives, lined them up and made them public for the perusal of potential stakeholders. You should not believe that all these characters acted in a totally isolated way: almost always they remained in correspondence with the representatives of other towns and originated a fruitful exchange of data and information.

In Italy, moreover, the erudite collection of information on the local artistic heritage was strongly encouraged by the spirit of revenge triggered by the publication of (mainly French) foreign travel reports for the public of the Grand Tour, which brought in discussion art hierarchies which were consolidated for centuries and contained harsh judgments about some of the main Italian artists. This is the case, for example, of the guide by Charles Nicolas Cochin or that by de Lalande. It is known that some Italian historians (first of all Luigi Crespi, whose attitude was also highly questionable) planned the publication of a series of reports to be drafted by local scholars precisely to counter the French thesis [1].

This is the framework against which to assess the material dedicated to Imola, the small town in the Emilia-Romagna region. The documents were drafted at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and consisted of guides or travel notes, as well as biographies of artists. Nothing of it has however ever been published. It seems useful to me to examine all the writings in a single post, to highlight the importance of the work performed by the Associazione per Imola storico-artistica (Association for the art and history of Imola) that, in the space of fifteen years, has sponsored the publication of all these sources. This has allowed readers to appreciate the cultural richness of an area that has lived in administrative terms under the control of the Emilian town of Bologna since centuries (however always recognizing itself, in terms of identity, as part of Romagna). Despite the multiplicity of formats of the writings and the publication by two different publishers, the editorial project has been still held together by an apparatus of indices which ensures an optimal consultation of the works. To be taken into account are the writings of Marcello Oretti, Giovanni Nicolò Villa, Gaetano Giordani and Pietro Antonio Meloni. They are presented hereafter in the chronological order of their drafting.

Imola. Church of Santa Maria dei Servi
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Imola, Bell tower of the Church of Santa Maria in Regola
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Le pitture della città d’Imola
descritte da Marcello Oretti nell’anno 1777
[The Paintings of the Town of Imola Described by Marcello Oretti in the Year 1777]
Edited by Cristina Castellari

Imola, La Mandragora, 2009

The Bologna-born Marcello Oretti (1714-1787) fitted well with the classic figure of a scholar of the eighteenth century. The Archiginnasio Library hosts plenty of his manuscripts dedicated to the art world. In 1776 Oretti curated the publication of the new edition of the Pitture di Bologna (Bologna Paintings) by Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the first art guide published on Bologna (1686). His main project was the preparation of the Notizie de’ professori del disegno bolognesi e forestieri di sua scuola (News on the Bolognese drawing professors and the foreign ones belonging to the Bologna school), which he worked at for decades. He was however preceded by the above mentioned Crespi: as often it is the case in the scholar world, they had a difficult relationship and hated each other. In 1769 Crespi did not hesitate to release the Vite dei pittori bolognesi non descritte nella Felsina Pittrice (Lives of the Bolognese painters not being discussed in Felsina Pittrice), proclaiming himself as the direct heir of Malvasia, whose work Felsina Pittrice he even mentioned in the title. In the Archiginnasio Library of Bologna it is also preserved a manuscript (marked B. 165II) titled Notizie artistiche di diversi luoghi d’Italia raccolte da Marcello Oretti (News on art from different parts of Italy gathered by Marcello Oretti) which, in turn, contains a dozen pages with the name Le Pitture della Città d’Imola descritte da Marcello Oretti nell’anno 1777 (The Paintings of the town of Imola described by Marcello Oretti in the year 1777). It is, in essence, an account of a voyage to Imola in August 1777, then reworked with an index of places and names.

As it happens so often in these situations, the author's focus was almost exclusively on places of worship and on public buildings; there were only very rare references to the collections in the nobles’ palaces (also due to the difficulty to access them); moreover, there was no reference at all to medieval artworks. Another element to be mentioned is that the summary of Oretti’s writing made evident that all artists operating in the city were from Bologna, with exceptions like Innocenzo da Imola. This aspect shows, on the one hand, how the town on the Santerno river has suffered for centuries the cultural hegemony and the taste from Bologna; on the other hand, it gives more importance to the choice of the curator to include in the appendix the biographies of the artists written by Oretti and contained in the unpublished News. He included the biographies of all artists of whom at least one work was included in the scholar’s review on Imola. This made more than two hundred pages in the manuscript (about 288 in the book) of material that is substantially new to us. Overall stands the biography of Ludovico Carracci. According to a specific school of thought of the Bolognese classicism, Oretti believed that Ludovico was superior to Agostino, and above all to Annibale. A proof of this thinking is in the correspondence of Alessandro Maggiori (see: Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari, Una scoperta nel Fondo Ricci di Macerata: manoscritti e disegni di Alessandro Maggiori - A discovery in the Fund Ricci of Macerata: manuscripts and drawings by Alessandro Maggiori, published in “Dotti amici. Amico Ricci e la nascita della storia dell’arte nelle Marche" Learned friends'. Amico Ricci and the birth of art history in the Marche).

Imola, Cathedral of San Cassiano
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Imola. Bell Tower of the Cathedral of San Cassiano
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Giovanni Nicolò Villa
Pitture della Città d’Imola
[Paintings of the City of Imola]
Edited by Claudia Pedrini
Imola, La Mandragora, 2001

Compared to Oretti’s writing, there would scarcely be any othet which would be more dissimilar in quantitative terms, but substantially so similar in the scholar framework, as the Pitture della Città d’Imola (Paintings of the City of Imola) by the Imola-born priest Giovanni Nicolò Villa (1740-1814). It is a manuscript of 1400 pages, anonymous but clearly attributable to the cleric. It is dated 1794, but it contains material relating to the first decade of the nineteenth century; this implies it was regularly updated, expanded, and dramatically extended by the author. The manuscript by Villa was due to be the true guide of Imola, written not in three days by a Bolognese scholar, but in twenty years by a scholar from the town. However the real problem that prevented its publication is easy to understand when examining the really long title: "Paintings of the City of Imola, i.e. a patchwork of various pictorial, architectural and even more diverse things, whereby it becomes clear that even an amateur or a beginner may have an idea of the most beautiful, and if it finds it in the three fine arts he will imitate it in drawings, and also of the most horrid, in order to avoid it. First and only volume also for the convenience of the reader. In Imola in no printing house in 1794 ". Villa, in short, did not have the skill of synthesis, nor the ability to select information. I would even say that he had no intention of doing it. His guide was drafted (in his own words) for fun and to serve as a help to his (poor) schoolchildren, and also because "I also wanted to react to the stress of having been discomforted, due to the patriotic love for my own country, when I read the harsh criticism of a traveller asserting that this country can be crossed without finding anything to see" (Pedrini noted that it was the guide by the French Michel-Richard de Lalande). Starting from an examination of what is either beautiful or horrid, Villa drew up a guide that was indeed following a topographic path, but continuously widened its scope to treat in dozens and dozens of pages uncorrelated themes. They had strictly speaking nothing to do with Imola itself, but much with the author's intellectual formation and erudition. This is an example for all, and one of the most innocent ones: moving towards the conclusion (we are at p. 1268, and 150 pages are missing) Villa speaks of the Alidosi bridge in the village of Castel del Rio: "In our diocese we have a beautiful stone bridge; it is in Castel del Rio. It is said the building was built up by the Alidosi family once they were the masters of Imola and hence of the castle then. It has an oval shape with a single vault [...]. It will be perhaps possible to find several bridges with one arc, but I found only two of them cited by Chambers for now: namely the Rialto bridge in Venice, which will be discussed below; and the other in the city of Mostar in Bosnia, which is far more daring than that of Rialto". And from here begins a digression of several pages on the Rialto bridge, and then on the way of building bridges recommended by Vitruvius and so on.

It's just obvious that to find a red line in this erudite magma is an impossible task. For this reason, the book edited by Claudia Pedrini is particularly valuable because the work does not display the transcript, but its indexes. I have been passing all Assumption festivities in Castel del Rio. Do you think I could ever be able to find the places of the manuscript in which the above issue was discussed without a reliable index at hand? It thus belongs to the category of pure heroism (to which the curator should be assigned de jure) to prepare a complete onomastic summary divided between the index of the artists and the index of the art writers index (writers from whom Villa drew liberally), as well as a topographic index. The text of the manuscript is still made available and searchable on CD-ROM, although one should point out here to a technological obsolescence problem, which is obviously totally independent from the publisher. In fact, consulting a CD-ROM published in 2001 is uncomfortable.

Imola. Church of the Suffragio
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Imola. Door of the Church dei Santi Niccolò e Domenico
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

There are of course limits and caveats: one has to be very cautious on the attributions, and take account that the pictures are only mentioned and not described; finally, the author definitely lacked any critical skill, which was however difficult to find in those days, all lined up on the very neoclassical concept of "ideal beauty". That said, the manuscript of Giovanni Nicolò Villa is essential for anyone studying the city's history, and is of particular interest on the substantially contemporaneous events to the author. Since the demolition and reconstruction of the cathedral of San Cassiano took place in the late eighteenth century, it is clear that the information it provides is substantial. Similarly, it is worth mentioning the attention which Villa shows towards the so-called minor arts. It is hard to say whether that attention was due to the consciousness and will (which would be very modern) to describe a "context" and not a single work of art, or was rather dictated by the compulsory need to tell everything, without missing anything; in any case, it is a still valuable source for the reader today.

The Paintings of the City of Imola are preserved at the Imola Municipal Library, with signature Manoscritti Imolesi, n. 43. In 1925 a strongly shortened version was published, which however disrupts the structure of the work, by splitting paintings, sculptures and architectures (G. Gambetti, Guida pittorica d’Imola dell’Abate Giovanni Villa (1794) - Pictorial guide of Imola by Abbot Giovanni Villa (1794), published in Documenti e Studi della R. Deputazione di Storia patria per le province di Romagna (Documents and Studies of the Royal Deputation of Homeland History for the Romagna provinces), V (1925)). For the impatient, it is available a (hand-written) abridged version titled Zibaldone artistico compilato e scritto dal fu Canonico Gian Nicolò Villa Imolese intelligente delle belle arti (An Artistic Universal Journal Compiled and Written by the Late Canon Gian Nicolò Villa from Imola, Expert of Fine Arts) (Imola Municipal Library, Imola Manuscripts, n. 167). The reader gets along with 700 pages. 

Imola. Sersanti Palace
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Imola. Loggia of the Courtyard of Monsignani Palace
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Memorie manoscritte intorno alle vite ed alle opere de’ pittori scultori architetti eccetera d’Imola
Raccolte da Gaetano Giordani nell’anno 1826
[Handwritten Memoirs on the Lives and the Works of the Imola Architects, Sculptors, Painters and so on, Gathered by Gaetano Giordani in the year 1826]
Edited by Matteo Bacci and Francesca Grandi
Scientific coordination and introduction by Donatella Biagi MainoImola, La Mandragora, 2006

The manuscript is preserved with mark B. 1809 at the Archiginnasio Library of Bologna. "It is a kind of encyclopaedia of the most important artists originating from Imola. Besides providing some meaningful biographical records on them, Giordani drew up a sort of list of works they produced. The list of processed artists does not always follow the alphabetical order and often the author, after analysing the works, described them a second time, assembling them by city ... Although the text, as written by Giordani himself, is dated 1826 [note of the editor: Giordani was 26], it can be said with certainty that it has been revised and updated at least until the sixties of the nineteenth century: in fact, there are news about the lives of artists and bibliographic citations of texts following 1826 as well as a number of white spaces or parts treated after the list of artists, which are revealing further investigation"(p. 17).

Gaetano Giordani (1800-1873), was first curator (1838) and then Director of the Pinacoteca of Bologna (from 1842 to the death). He was a leading figure of Bolognese scholarship. His ample scholar production, sometimes criticized for his excessive eulogistic tones, encompassed first of all the Catalogo dei Quadri che si conservano nella Pinacoteca della Pontificia Accademia delle Belle Arti in Bologna (Catalogue of Pictures that are conserved in the Pinacoteca of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna), published in 1826 and then in several editions until his death. I would like also to mention that Giordani worked on the second edition of Malvasia’s Felsina Pittrice (1841-1844) and was responsible for the publication of the Graticola di Pietro Lamo (Bologna’s Grid - 1844), until then known only on the basis of manuscript circulation. It is also worth remembering his friendship with the Pesaro Baron Antaldo Antaldi, thanks to which, upon the death of the noble from the Marche (1847), Giordani came into possession of the manuscript concerning the Notizie di alcuni architetti, pittori, scultori di Urbino, Pesaro e de’ luoghi circonvicini (News of some architects, painters, sculptors of Urbino, Pesaro and surrounding locations).

Imola. Honour Staircase of Tozzoni Palace (detail)
Photo by Elena Bacchilega

Imola. Honour Staircase of  Tozzoni Palace (detail)
Photo: Elena Bacchilega

Pietro Antonio Meloni
Memorie delli pittori, scultori, ed architetti della città, e diocesi d’Imola (manoscritto del 1834)
[Memoirs of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of the City and Diocese of Imola (1834 manuscript)]
Bio-bibliographical appendix edited by Vittorio Canutis with the collaboration of Liliana Vivoli and Claudia Pedrini. Index name day by Giorgio Cassani. Toponymical index by Vittorio Canuti
Imola, Grafiche Galeati, 1992

Eight years after the Memoirs by Giordani, in 1834, the painter Pietro Antonio Meloni (Imola, 1761-1835) was about to publish his Memoirs on Imola artists, so as to prepare, as it was customary in those days, an "association and reservation" agreement, which was an instrument for financing the release of the book, in a nutshell. In fact the manuscript testifying to the hard work of Meloni has still some gaps. Some biographies of artists are lacking, as their names are only remembered. Shortly thereafter, the author's death led to the failure of the project. The exquisitely localist spirit of the manuscript (preserved in the Archive of Bagnara Parish) is actually its strength, providing completely new indications on authors and works. The work is divided into four sections: the first is dedicated to Imola artists, the second to those who proved close to the artistic world of the city because of their studies or as clients (therefore amply covering the aristocratic class), the third is dedicated to the figures of the artists which were assessed as minor and the fourth contains a "very interesting speech" that, in truth, is not that interesting, focusing on issues related to the teaching of drawing in the colleges. Frankly, it is an irrelevant text, including the personal experiences of Meloni as an art teacher.

I would not like to infer that the work of Meloni reveals a critical consciousness that frankly he did not have. Among the biographies, five pages are dedicated to Innocenzo Francucci or Innocenzo da Imola, whom also Pietro Giordani (the then secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna) had devoted years of study and the writing of a monograph of which only the first part had been published (in 1819). Nine pages are instead devoted to dwell on Michele Angelo Gottarelli, who certainly did not have a glittering career. But, perhaps unintentionally (basically, he was talking about his teacher), Meloni discovered a new aspect: Gottarelli was the one who imported the teaching methods of the Academy of Bologna to Imola, by establishing a school of the nude. Moreover, he also allows us to have an idea of the magnitude of the phenomenon, outlining figures of artists who were his pupils. Some pages containing his autobiography are also not missing. In essence, Meloni’s memoirs prove valuable when it comes to reconstruct an otherwise submerged world, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; when addressing however previous artists, he simply transposed facts already proposed by Villa. His text seems to be substantially independent of the writing of Gaetano Giordani, which was probably not known. 

NOTES

[1] See, in this blog, for example, the review of Innocenzo Ansaldi and Luigi Crespi, on the Description of the sculptures, paintings and architecture of the city, and the suburbs of Pescia in Tuscany.