Barbara Tramelli
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura.
Color, Perspective and Anatomy
Color, Perspective and Anatomy
Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2017 (but 2016)
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Part Two
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| Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (attributed to), Allegory of Painting, Vienna, Albertina Source: https://it.pinterest.com/dr_marceloguerr/painters-italian-varallo-tanzio-dalomazzo-gian-pao/ |
Go back to Part One
Structure of the Treatise
Structure of the Treatise
The Treatise on Painting is divided into
seven books. In them, Lomazzo tries to outline a general system of visual arts,
which takes into account all aspects of art making (with particular reference
to painting). The first five books, according to the author's directions, belong
to the theoretical part and are dedicated to proportion, motion, colour, light
and perspective respectively. As he is aware that he has treated theoretical
arguments only, Lomazzo devotes the last two books to practical aspects, since
he is convinced that the artist's training should be a combination of theory
and practice: the sixth book is then devoted to the 'practice of painting' and the
sixth to the 'stories' of the same, i.e. to a series of recommendations on how
to represent certain characters or subjects in painting. So far, everything
seems clear. However, things are not at all in this way: certain topics can be
treated in several books, sometimes being repeated, sometimes being in manifest
contradiction with each other; the practice is mixed with the theory (for
instance, the recipes for making colours are included in the third book and not
in the sixth, as it might be expected) so that the scholars have sought to
better understand what the artist meant as practice and theory [9].
Things are
not easy at all, then. It should be added that Lomazzo himself complains of not
being able (because of his blindness) to present the iconographic apparatus he
has planned to accompany and clarify his writings (a drawing attributed to him,
and now preserved in the Albertina in Vienna, could be the cover page of the
work, and therefore demonstrate that the artist worked at the project before
1572). This gives an idea of the difficulties everyone is confronted when analysing
this text.
Perspective
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| Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, St. Peter and the Fall of Simon Magus. Church of St. Mark, Milan Source: Giovanni dall'Orto via Wikimedia Commons |
Barbara
Tramelli - as mentioned – analysed the work with the aim of identifying how and
from where Lomazzo gathered the wealth of knowledge that he conveys and in what
manner he "transformed" it in his work. To do it, she focuses in
particular on two of the five topics to which the theoretical part is
dedicated, that is perspective and colour, as well as on the reproduction of
the anatomy of the human body, which is not the subject of specific treatment,
but appears in various places inside the Treatise.
In
particular, with regard to perspective, she notes that "Lomazzo’s treatment of perspective is a
mixture of previous discourses by more traditional authors on art (Serlio,
Alberti, Leonardo) and optical contemporary theories (Vignola, Barbaro,
Benedetti)" (p. 172).
With reference to Benedetti, the mathematician and author of a Diversarum Speculationum Mathematicarum et
Physicarum Liber (Book
on different concepts in mathematics and physics) published in 1585 (the year
after the release of the Treatise),
which aims to investigate "the inner
and true causes of perspective" (p. 149), the author points out
that, most likely, Lomazzo was acquainted with the mathematician, since the
artist dedicated a poem to him in the Rime. If however they did not know each other, surely they had in common the
friendship with the architect Giacomo Soldati, a member of the Academy of the
Blenio Valley under the name Compà
Soldarogn. Thus, the
Academy reveals itself as a potential centre of transmission of knowledge.
Ms Tramelli
also notes that Lomazzo "embeds
practical suggestions for painters on “how to make the right perspective” into
an exhaustive theoretical discussion on the role and the function of the eye"
(p. 172). I would personally suggest that his particular attention to the
operation of the eye (which, for example, is absent in Piero della Francesca’s De prospectiva pingendi) has somehow to
do with Giovan Paolo’s disease. It seems logical, in other words, that the
artist was reasoning about what he had lost and how blindness has compromised
his sensory abilities.
It should
be said that Lomazzo described prospective from a theoretical approach, without
the use of practical tools, such as telari or graticole. However, realizing that he
was probably barely comprehensible to the layman, in the book on the practice
(and this is actually one of the few times when things are where should really
be) addresses the issue, referring among others to the “telaro and the graticola of Albrecht Dürer and of Giovanni di Frisia di
Graminge [editor's note:
Vredeman Hans de Vries], whose
instruments I have seen together with many other figures drawn by others with
the perspective of Gio. Lenclaer [editor's note: Hans Lencker]" (p. 167). The trip to Germany,
Holland and the Low Countries (which has sometimes been questioned, but must be
placed before 1572), therefore, leaves a deep impression on Giovan Paolo and
affects his wealth of technical knowledge.
There is
one aspect of the talks on perspective of Lomazzo that should not be
underestimated: the claim of the studies on the same as a Lombard cultural
heritage. The artist writes: "Such as
ancients and modern prospettivi
state, especially artists from Lombardy: perspective is to them what drawing is
to Romans, color to Venetians, and bizarre inventions to Germans" (p.
135). The tradition of prospective studies is therefore experienced by Lomazzo
(and presumably by all other artists in the area) as an element of identity. As
such, it distinguishes them from the 'drawing' of the Romans (the Florentine
tradition of drawing has been absorbed, in a very early stage, by the Roman art
world) and the 'colour' of the Venetians. As part of this tradition, Lomazzo
recalls the writings of Vincenzo Foppa, Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo and Bernardo
Zenale, saying he had seen their manuscripts. The fact that these documents (with
the exception of those by Leonardo) have not reached us leads to doubt their
existence: Lomazzo, it was said, is not always reliable and could therefore
have 'over-praised' the merits of local artists. Nothing is excluded, but the
quote seems too circumstantial to disregard it and, above all expresses a
collective consciousness, which feeds the Lombard artists since the late
fifteenth century. It is sufficient to recall that the anonymous author of the Antiquarie prospetiche romane, devoted to
the friend Leonardo da Vinci at the end of the fifteenth century, was a 'prospectivo Melanese depictore'
(Milanese prospective painter).
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| Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A sybil, Church of St. Mark, Milan Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The Study of Human Body
As
mentioned, no book of the Treatise is
specifically dedicated to the study of the human body. The materials are
scattered, even if they are more concentrated in the first section, the one
reserved to proportion. Moreover, it does not help that - as already said – Lomazzo’s
work does not include the planned drawings. Inside the Treatise, taking into consideration the individual parts of the
body, the author presents long lists of synonyms, which Ms Tramelli compares
with the lexicon in another valuable and famous document, the Codex Huygens, once attributed to
Leonardo and today to Carlo Urbino. What emerges is Lomazzo’s will to be
understood by all, also drawing on clearly dialectal terms, which once again
reminds the Academy of Blenio. Ms Tramelli also suggests that the artist's
anatomical knowledge may have been enhanced by the personal acquaintance with
the Cardano brothers and does not exclude at all that Lomazzo may have first-hand
witnessed some of dissections famously performed by Giovanni Battista Cardano at the military hospital of
Milan. To better contextualize the general interest for the study of the human
body, she also refers to a series of panels executed (in the wake of Leonardo's
examples) by Annibale Fontana, the Milanese sculptor and jeweller, and his
disciples. Fontana too was of course a member of the Academy of the Blenio
Valley.
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| Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Our Lady with Child and Saints, Church of St. Mark, Milan Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Colour
The chapter
on colour is the one on which I personally have more doubts. In the third book,
dedicated to it, Lomazzo also provides, first of all, a clearly
Aristotelian-derived definition of colour, but at the same time ends up to tie it
inextricably to light (Ms Tramelli is very convincing to refute the thesis of
Moshe Barasch [10] according to which colour and light in Lomazzo would be
completely separated). The theoretical definition of colour is followed by the
indication of 'matters in which you can
find colors'. It is, in essence, a set of colour recipes that already MaryPhiladelphia Merrifield had noticed to be strikingly similar to the so-called Paduan Manuscript, which she published
within her Original Treatises in 1849
[11]. The inclusion of the recipes is contextualized within the transmission of
colour recipes in the sixteenth century art treatises, which according to the
authoress was more frequent than one might believe. Here, on this specific thing,
I am not entirely agreeing. I do not think, in fact, that workshop knowledge is
significantly testified across the sixteenth century treaties. It is certainly factual,
to mention an example quoted by Tramelli, that Giorgio Vasari provides
technical guidance in the preface of his Lives,
but it is equally true that, albeit he knows Cennini’s Book of the Art, when talking about the artist the historian from
Arezzo merely says that the latter gave "many... warnings, about which there is no need to reason, since all
those things that he reported as much secreted and very rare in those days are
now very well known" [12]. About Cennino, the knowledge by Lomazzo of
the Book of the Art is assumed for
granted (see for instance page 97); actually, it is a belief already endorsed
by Ciardi [13]. In my opinion, it is a today unprovable matter and cannot be
based on the coincidence that both in Cennino both in Lomazzo there are seven primary
colours (a common medieval legacy to many).
Ms Tramelli
offers in the appendix both excerpts from the Paduan manuscript as well as from Lomazzo’s Treatise (pp. 231-232).
Correctly, she points out that there are differences and that the version of the
Lombard artist appears more elaborate, with the introduction of a lexicon that
(again, as for the human body) would reflect the influence of the Milanese
society. Then she concludes by saying that probably the two texts were copied
and processed from a common manuscript. I would go further. The differences
between the two versions are such that it cannot be said (indeed, in my view,
it is to be excluded) that they are direct copies from a common original (and thus, it's uncertain that the lexical entries are by Lomazzo). It should be more
correctly said that the two texts belong to the same tradition, i.e. to a
family of recipes which bears testimony to a (probably much earlier) original
unknown to us. Giving then a closer look at Lomazzo’s recipes, and bearing in
mind the latest scholarly research in the field of transmission of the
knowledge of artistic techniques [14], I think I can say that in this case we
are faced with Tabulae, i.e. with
lists of pigments whose items were presented with the clear intention to be
learned by heart. More than a real workshop tradition, Lomazzo is then
recovering a proverbial knowledge, and it does it in my opinion with mnemonic aims.
It is known that, among the many interests of the artist, also appeared
mnemonics. Lomazzo was absolutely fascinated by it. It is no coincidence that
the title of the Idea del Tempio
della Pittura (Idea
of the Temple of Painting) so clearly recalls the Idea of the Theatro (Idea of Theatre) of Giulio Camillo Delminio (1550), a
key work of mnemonics, which had huge success in the second half of sixteenth century
[15].
One cannot,
however, exhaust the discussion on colours without facing one of the toughest
aspects (and here Ms Tramelli is really persuasive): the relationship with astrology. In the
sixth volume of the Treatise (that on
painting practice) Lomazzo illustrates the link between colours, planets and
elements. We are obviously confronted with the artist's astrological interests.
Without going into complicated topics (of which I have also little knowledge) it
should be clarified that for Lomazzo (and not just for him, in those days) art
and astrology are both tools of knowledge of an other-worldly reality to which
the artist can and should aspire by developing his talents on a proper
"inspiration”. That inspiration is not simply that to which you feel
inclined, but is determined in a much more 'scientific' way, through the study
of the stars and their interpretation. The fact that we know that Lomazzo was
born on April 26, 1538, at five in the afternoon, is not the classic stroke of
luck, but an externalization of the artist himself, who considers it important
to add that that day was astrologically dedicated to Venus. We said earlier
that Lomazzo knew the Cardano brothers. Girolamo was a doctor and
mathematician, but according to the poem that the artist dedicates to him in the
Rhymes, he was also able to predict
him blindness. And the relations with the astrologer Girolamo Vicenza, part of
the Academy of Val Blenio, were such that Lomazzo asked him to make his horoscope.
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| Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Allegory of the Lenten Feast, Windsor, Royal Collection Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Who did read the Treatise?
At the
conclusion of this review it remains to ask who, in the end, had read the Treatise. If we consider the work as a
vehicle of knowledge, we can certainly try to understand what were the sources
from which the author drew, but we should also ask how this knowledge was
implemented and by whom. Barbara Tramelli is fully conscious of the thing, but
clarifies that she is not able, at the present state of the art, to provide a
comprehensive report. My hope is that she will do so soon. The final pages of
the work, however, contain some information about it, like the name of some
artists who possessed the Treatise:
Daniele Crespi, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Pellegrino Tibaldi and Jacopo Ligozzi
(it is information that emerges from an examination of the inventories). As for
any repercussions abroad, the author reports the case of the scholar Richard
Haydocke that in 1598 (fourteen years after the publication of the book)
published an English translation under the title A Tracte Containing the Art of Curiose Painting. Please, allow me to add just two more cases. The
first one is the French painter Hilaire Pader. After being in Italy, he published
in Toulouse in 1649 the translation of the first book of the Treatise, with the title Traicté de la proportion naturelle et
artificielle des choses par Jean-Pol Lomazzo (Treatise of the natural
and artificial proportion of things by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo) [16]. Second, on the same year it
was coincidentally released in Seville the Arte de la Pintura by Francisco Pacheco. Pacheco knew and had read Lomazzo, as it
witnessed by a very simple and dramatically underestimated element: the first
chapter of his work (which explains what painting is and why it is a liberal
art) is largely the literal translation of the beginning of Lomazzo’s Treatise of Painting [17]. The circulation
of Lomazzo’s work in Spain is, moreover, an entirely logical circumstance, since
Milan, in the days when the artist lived, was under Spanish control.
In Italy -
and I am concluding - as the years were passing the study of Lomazzo was
increasingly focused on historical information he provided on the artists. In
this regard, allow me to point out that the anonymous author of the margin
comments in a copy of Vasari's Lives,
now kept at the Archiginnasio Library of Bologna (ms. B. 4223), quotes in the
second volume Lomazzo about Rosso Fiorentino and writes: "Lomazzo calls Rosso admirable and highly equipped
(prontissimo)". This is the same specimen which, in the third volume,
presents the very famous margin notations by Annibale Carracci. It is certain,
however, that the second and third volumes were originally part of several
specimens, and the calligraphy (clearly from the second half of the seventeenth
century) leaves no doubt that the writing were not by Carracci. The author of
the annotations for now remains anonymous, but it is evident the impression
that Lomazzo’s text was well known to whoever was writing.
NOTES
[9] As
reported by Ms Tramelli, Moshe Barasch says in his Theories of Art that the "practice proves no less theoretical than
theory" (p. 7), while Roberto Paolo Ciardi notes: "In chap. VIII of the Idea (and in the preface of the Treatise) it
even seems that Lomazzo understands, with these two terms, two different ways
of painting rather than two moments of artistic activity. As «practice», he intends a schematic
and routine art, i.e. the mechanical imitation of a single model artist; as «theory» the ability to
achieve technical artifices, like the foreshortenings and the chiasmic
compositions, and the understanding of the ideal justifications for his own
work" (Lomazzo,
Scritti sulle arti (Writings on the arts), Vol. I, p.
LXIV n. 193).
[10] Moshe
Barasch, Theories of Art ... quoted.
[11] Mary
P. Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting ...: “Some parts of the early section of the work,
from No. 1 to No. 13 inclusive, bear such strong resemblance to parts of the 3rd
book of Lomazzo’s Treatise on Painting, that it can scarcely be supposed that
one was not copied from the other.”
[12] I
would refer to Giovanni Mazzaferro, The Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini (1821-1950): An Example of Dissemination of Italian Culture in the World in
Zibaldone. Estudios Italianos de la Torre del Virrey vol III, Number 1, January
2015.
[13] Gian
Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, Vol. I, p. XXV, no. 64.
[14] I am
referring to Studi di Memofonte No 16/2016 [Proceedings
of the seminar "Treatises and recipe books for colours. A methodology of
study in the field of humanities." Milan, December 6, 2013], already
reviewed in this blog.
[15] For a
discussion on the Idea del Theatro and
its influence, see in this blog: The First Treatise on Museums. Samuel Quiccheberg's Inscriptiones 1565.
[16] See
Stéphanie Trouvé. Lomazzo and France. Hilaire Pader's Translation: Theoretical and artistic issues, 2016.
[17]
Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura, by Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas,
Madrid, Ediciones Cátedra, 3rd ed, 2009, p. 73.
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