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Francesco Mazzaferro
Count Benedetto Giovanelli von Gerstburg -
Archaeology and erudition in the Italian Tyrol during the first half of the nineteenth century
Part One
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| Fig. 1) Antonio Bonini, Portrait of Count Benedetto Giovanelli, 1833 |
That of Giovanelli has been, since 1500, a
family of Hapsburg nobility living between Venetia, Lombardy and Tirol (both in
the German-speaking part, which was ruled from Innsbruck, and in the Italian-speaking
one, which was centred on Trent and the territory around it). The Giovanellis therefore
played for centuries - in their various branches - a role of dialogue between
those cultural realities. Count Benedetto Giovanelli von Gerstburg (1775-1846),
often known simply as Benedetto Giovanelli in Italy, was an important figure
for Trent, both in political-administrative and in cultural terms. Of course,
we are discussing here the topic from the perspective of art literature only, well
knowing however that we are confronted with a man of great importance in the
municipal life of Trent during the Habsburg era (he was the mayor of the town for
three decades). The first part of this post is dedicated to his writings as a scholar
of local history in the Roman / Medieval era and as an archaeologist. The
second part will examine some manuscripts of the Count on the fine arts. The
third one will consider his main writing on art: the Vita di Alessandro Vittoria scultore trentino (Life of Alessandro
Vittoria, sculptor from Trent).
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| Fig. 2) Map of Trent (XVIII century) from Lorenzo Scotto's 'Itinerario d'Italia', Roma, 1761 Fonte: Pfranchini under the GNU Free Documentation License |
A citizen of Trent at
the mercy of historical events or a skilled navigator in stormy waters?
The personal story of Benedetto is truly
unique. His life was marked, in some phases, by political events that changed history
in a profound, sudden and unexpected way and, at other stages, by elements of substantial
continuity.
Still young, Benedict took part in the filo-venetian
and anti-Napoleonic resistance movements, being arrested between 1796 and 1797
in Padua [1] (during
those months, the revolt against the French was led by Iseppo Giovanelli and
Alvise Contarini, both sentenced to death by the French army [2]). In those
years of great disorder, Benedetto travelled extensively across Italy, before undertaking
his studies in law in Innsbruck. His militancy against the revolutionary ideas
must have been long-standing, if the art historian Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, at the end of his first trip to
Italy, explained that Giovanelli (when he was now thirty years old) aided to
organize, with the help of the Tyrolean clergy, the mass desertion in Rome of a
Napoleonic division recruited from German-speaking prisoners in 1806 [3]: when the French threatened reprisals,
he hurried up from Rome to his refuge in Tyrol. Back then, he worked in the
estates of his family in Meran and then assumed the presidency of the Society for the agricultural economy of Trent. In 1803 the city of Trent was
annexed to Tyrol and, in 1805, along with it, to the kingdom of Bavaria (ally
of Napoleon). The local political situation at that time must have been very
fluid, so much that the count was chosen by the pro-French Bavarians to
guide the civil guard in Trento against the Tyrolean troops of Andreas Hofer
[4].
In 1810 Trent was detached, as part of
Napoleonic policies, from Bavaria and aggregated to the Kingdom of Italy to
form the new Department of Alto Adige. In that year Giovanelli published “Trento città d'Italia per origine, per
lingua, e per costumi: ragionamento istorico in occasione che i popoli del
Trentino vennero riuniti al Regno d’Italia” (Trent, an Italian town by
origin, language, and customs: historical reasoning at the time when the people
of the Trent province are being reunited to the Kingdom of Italy) [5]. The 1810 pamphlet
will be republished in 1915 in Verona by the Action Committee for the Italian Trent
province, as a manifest for irredentism at the beginning of World War I. Two
years after, Giovanelli released a study “Intorno
all'antica zecca Trentina e a due monumenti Reti: lettere tre” (About the old Trent mint and two Raetian
monuments: three letters"); the last of the three letters - dedicated
to an inscription in Etruscan and Rhaetian - was addressed to the famous Abbot
Luigi Lanzi, whose interests ranged up to the Etruscan civilization [6].
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| Fig. 3) The pro-Italian pamphlet 1810 |
Whatever Giovanelli’s real intentions were,
when he claimed in 1810 that the soul of Trent was Italian, the Habsburgs trusted
him, assigning the city government to him, just after they took back the
control of the Italian Tirol in 1816. In fact, in a new writing published in
1824, Benedetto did not call anymore Trent as an "Italian town". The
title was significantly "Trento,
città dei Rezi e colonia romana”, or Trent, city of the Raetians and Roman
colony. Giovanelli was the mayor of Trent for thirty consecutive years, between
1816 and 1846 (i.e. till his death), and one would hardly find anyone commenting
in the negative that municipal administration, which saw among others the
beginning of the urban renewal, the demolition of the walls, and the
construction of the theatre. At Benedetto’s death, his library and all historical
assets collected by him were donated to the municipality, as he disposed in his
will. There was also an 'institutional' testament, i.e. the "Ricordi del conte Benedetto Giovanelli
podestà̀ di Trento (dal 1815 al 1846) al suo successore" (Memoir addressed by Count
Benedetto Giovanelli, mayor of Trent (1815-1846), to his successor) [7], but I was
not able to see it. Today, the count is almost a forgotten figure in Italy
(there is no entry devoted to him in the Biographical
Dictionary of Italians), perhaps because he served the authorities in
Vienna and Innsbruck for much of his life, and was therefore not in line with
the national historical narrative, which always justified the annexation of
Trent to Italy with the hard yoke of the Austrian oppression.
But what interests us most are his studies.
During the thirty years as mayor, Giovanelli cultivated his interest in epigraphy
and archaeology: he published several writings in Italian and German in which,
starting from the reading and interpretation of inscriptions and tombstones of
the Roman era, reconstructed the history of the area since the Rhaetian to the
Langobardic-Bavarian era. In 1824 he established the first public collection of
Monumenti patri (Homeland heritage),
mostly Roman gravestones and sculptures, in the Municipal Palace of Trento. The
same year, he published two other writings, one in Italian and one in German. In
Trent, he released a "Discorso sopra
un’iscrizione trentina del tempo degli Antonini” (Discourse on an inscription
in Trent of the time of the Antonines). In Bozen, he issued the essay "Ueber die in der k.k. Bibliothek in
Innsbruck befindliche Ara Dianae und die Richtung der Römerstrasse Claudia
Augusta von Tridento bis Vipiteno"(On the altar of Diana located in
the royal and imperial Library of Innsbruck and on the route of the Claudia
Augusta Roman road between Trento and Sterzing) [8]. In 1825 he enriched the
archaeological collection with the Situla Cembra, on which he published a paper
in 1833 [9]. Over the years, he multiplied the essays in Italian and in German
on the archaeological finds in Tyrol, the ancient Raetia. Since 1839 he was
corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Bavaria [10] and from 1841 of
that of Turin [11].
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| Fig. 4) Drawing of the Situla Cembra and of its Raetian inscriptions, published by Benedetto Giovanelli in 1833. Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck. Source: http://www.zobodat.at/pdf/VeroeffFerd_8_0133-0149.pdf |
The instant book of
1810, or how a historical narrative can serve a political argument
“Trent, Italian town
by origin, language, and customs”, or the text published in 1810, had the purpose "to investigate and discover a truth,
which those declaring Trent not as an Italian, but a Germany or Tyrolian town, had
long tried to hide" [12]. It
was the equivalent of what today we would call an instant book: in about thirty
pages, its main aim was to support and disseminate a political thesis immediately
after the materialization of a new event (as already mentioned, the Trent
province became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1810, due to Napoleonic
pressures). We do not intend here to document the reasons which the Count used
to this aim. From a methodological point of view, however, I would like to note
that the brief writing contained no stylistic analysis of monuments - neither of
their historical nor artistic significance - to justify the Italian character
of the territory. His thesis was therefore exclusively historical; it was based
on a succession of widely known events, which did not require any accurate research
activity (although, certainly, their interpretation was probably the subject of
serious differences of views). Giovanelli’s text of 1810 therefore did not
belong in any way to art literature, but was only a political pamphlet.
There is, however, a point that must be
emphasized. The text opened with the (in my way, totally unfounded) statement
that the Raetians would be the ancestors of the Etruscans in Italy (and thus
the region would have Italian roots well before the Romans) and ended with the
statement that the Council of the Counterreformation was held in Trent precisely
because the city was not German (the catholic church, according to Giovanelli, would
have certainly not wanted to grant the Lutherans the luxury of playing at
home). The text did not include however any reference to more recent events.
Even when he intended to trigger political controversies, Giovanelli remained
fundamentally a scholar of historical things, and did not dare to discuss any
of the convoluted recent events, in which he had even been participating.
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| Fig. 5) Trento, Buonconsiglio Castle Fonte: Jacub Halun via Wikimedia Commons |
Innsbruck and Trent,
1824 - Archaeological inspection and definition of the fabric of relations
among different territories
Reading instead the two texts of 1824 (the
"Discourse on an inscription in
Trent of the time of the Antonines" [13] published in Trent and the essay "On the altar of Diana which is located in
the royal and imperial Library of Innsbruck and on the route of the Claudia
Augusta Roman road between Trento and Sterzing" (printed in Bozen), it
was easy to discover that the two papers in Italian and German followed exactly
the same structure, while they were quite different from the text of 1810. In
fact, the two dissertations were defined as of an antiquarian nature [14]; for
both of them the author used the term "archaeology" [15].
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| Fig. 6) The altar of Diana, according to the drawing included in the essay in German of 1824 of Count Giovanelli |
Let's start examining the essay in German on
the altar dedicated to the goddess Diana, and preserved in those days at the
Innsbruck library. It was an erudite text of more than 192 pages, written in
good German. In the introduction the author announced that this would be the
first of a series of texts on what the Roman monuments and inscriptions can
reveal us about the region; he also explained that he wanted to start with a
text on the German Tyrol, because a lot had already been written on the Italian
Tyrol, while a German literature on the subject had been missing for the past
two hundred years. Benedetto thanked his 'German compatriots' for the
benevolence with which they would consider his naiveté and inaccuracy in the
use of the language. He started the script offering an epigraphic
interpretation, line-by-line, of the inscription contained in the altar and
examined every possible exegetical option. Then he went on to identify the
place where the inscription was originally place (in this case, a not-anymore
existing Roman town near today's Meran), and then considered the original use
of the find (the basis of a sacrificial statue with an image of Diana), its
supposed date (180 AD, under the Emperor Commodus), the role of the town where
he was located (a logistics centre to ensure the necessary reserves to the army
on the Danube), the events of those years (after the campaign against the
Marcomanni, this Germanic people had settled peacefully exactly in this area of
the Roman empire) and the individuals involved (actually, a freed slave who had
made a career as a senior official in the military and fiscal administration).
From here, the author extended his analysis in a temporal sense (explaining the
history of Meran and the city's role in the difficult relations between the
Bavarians and the Longobards) as well as spatially (illustrating the role of
the Raetia as a transition area between Italy and the Danube area, but also as
a barrier against the barbarian invasions of Italy). Finally, the second part
of the paper focused on the road structure of the province, centred on the Via
Claudia Augusta as a 'highway' between the Po Valley and the Danube area, and
the progressive shift of commercial activity from that ridge to a parallel axis
(passing through Aquileia) following the defensive requirements of the Empire. The
overall aim was to explain how the whole territory was intensely interlinked,
and how the interaction between the Latin and the barbarian worlds, i.e. the Italian
and German linguistic areas had always been very intense. The historical
discussion opened with the era of the Celts and the Raetian-Etruscans and never
exceeded the limit of the Middle Ages.
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| Fig. 7) The Discourse on an Trentin inscription of the time of the Antonines |
We are now examining the text in Italian,
released by Giovanelli in coincidence with the creation of the public
collection of steles and inscriptions in the Municipal Palace of Trento. The writing
by Giovanelli was not addressed to "scholars", but aimed at "triggering the love for homeland antiquities
in my fellow citizens, and in particular in the youth which has not yet been
introduced in these studies" [16]. However, it was a very complex and sometimes
convoluted text of 150 pages. The epigraphic monuments, the Count wrote, were
"despised by the idiots, who do not
know how to make use of them, and even at times deride them for their faded and
untidy appearance" [17]. Instead, they encountered "the delight of the literates, as they are
usually making happy everyone who is cultivated and has a sharp mind” [18]. Among these personalities Benedetto quoted the Marquis
Scipione Maffei (1675 -1755), a nationwide-known personality from Verona, the Baron
Gian Giacopo [sic] Cresseri, a historian of Trent, and the Abbot Girolamo
Tartarotti, author among other of the "Apologia
delle memorie antiche di Rovereto" (Apology of the ancient memories of
Rovereto). In other words, inscriptions were meant to be important sources of
information, for instance on the activity of large and small urban centres.
Giovanelli started also in this case with a
line-by-line interpretation of an inscription, originating from a Roman military
castle at Trent, once used against the Raetians and today destroyed. The
epigraph – which the Count considered "as
one of 'major monuments, which can and should boast this city" [19] – had
been used as a building material in a medieval church and there retrieved
during a restoration. The text was in honour of Caius Valerius Maximus, a Roman
citizen who had stable connections with the region [20] and had already
achieved the highest hierarchic position, which can be reached in the public
service at the periphery of the empire [21]; probably, the next step for him would
have been a return to Rome to perform even higher functions. Caius Valerius
Maximus exercised multiple functions in Trent, but also in Brescia, where he
was Decurion in the army, and in Mantua, where he also oversaw the local
administration. He must therefore have been a person discharging duties of
worship, management and control at the highest level, supported by a very
efficient bureaucratic, religious and military machine.
We know that Caius Valerius was in charge of a
kind of priesthood as augur at the temple of Jupiter in the city of Trent to which
Roman patricians only could aspire. Giovanelli started here a thorough investigation
of all the members of the gens Valeria that would have been in that condition
(thanks to a very widespread examination of the epigraphic repertoires), but for
none he was able to make himself a final opinion. In particular, the stele
referred to games (gymnastic and musical competitions, accompanied by
offerings) that were held in each town of the empire every five years, for five
consecutive days (the so-called Quinquennali)
in honour of Jupiter. As his next engagement, our Caius Valerius had the task of
organizing them in Trent.
As already mentioned, Caius also had a military task: he worked within the third legion, called Italica, created by Marcus Aurelius in
the context of the campaigns against the Marcomanni. Within the legion, he had
the duty of ensuring the regular provision of food to the troops, also making
use of taxation powers. These tasks, says the Count, were very demanding in a mountain
region, where military operations were very frequent [22]; Trent and the Raetia
were also the supply route for the legions on the Danube. Therefore, the region
was full of warehouses from which "provisions and ammunition" [23] were
continuously sent to the borders of the empire, to ensure their protection.
At this point Giovanelli opened a set of
parentheses, following the order of words in the epigraph, leading us along a
number of different topics:
- The logistical structures of military transportation through the empire and the fundamental role of navigation on the Adige river, in order to enable it to function. It can be assumed that two thousand people worked to perform these tasks close to today’s Meran and other two thousand in Trent, as it could be concluded from other inscriptions;
- The specific functions held by Caius Valerius within the legion, which included the maintenance of the walls and all war machines (today we would speak of military engineering);
- The military command structure under Pertinax (consul and future emperor), who must have considered Caius Valerius as one of his closest collaborators;
- Information on the destruction of the walls of Trent by the Herules and the Alans, and their reconstruction by the Goths;
- The sacred functions of Caius Valerius’ priesthood. And since the wine had an essential role in the liturgy, a further sub-section concerned the grape of the region and the primacy of Trent grapes compared to all those in Raetia and around Verona;
- Assumptions about how he was able to reconcile these positions in Trento with those who were equally assigned to him in Brescia and Mantova.
Based on all the points raised, the Count
concluded that the stele may not have been placed before 177 A.D. He argued
further that, for a number of legal concepts which he explained, the stele must
also have been placed before the Edict of Caracalla entered into force in 217
A.D. Therefore, there was a possible window of forty years, and most likely
around 177 A.D.
The fact that the control of this whole military-logistic
infrastructure was concentrated around Trent consolidates the importance of the
town in the Roman Empire. It is evident that the main objective of Giovanelli was
to prove that Trent was a global nerve centre within the Roman Empire. It is at
this point that the focus of the writing shifted from Caius Valerius to Trent.
The author therefore made a leap back in time, to the late Republican times,
when the territory of Trent was still populated by Roman colonies not yet fully
welded with the motherland [24], and then jumped to the time of Augustus, when the
town became a province [25]. The area was strategic from a military point of
view. From an administrative point of view, this implied the need to combine
forms of civil government with forms of military government (as evidenced by
the same professional experience of Caius Valerius): Trent was therefore both a
municipality (civil structure) and a colony (military structure) [26].
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| Fig. 8) Trent, Piazza del Duomo with the fountain of Neptune and the northern side of the cathedral of Saint Vigilius Source: © Matteo Ianeselli via Wikimedia Commons |
Final considerations on
the writings of 1824
Benedetto Giovanelli published many other texts
of this kind after 1824, but I believe that the two works just described offer
already some first elements of information on his scholar activity on
antiquities, on which one can draw some conclusions.
- Compared to the text of 1810, the tone of the narrative lost civic intensity and became more erudite. From the use of history for political struggle, the author switched to epigraphy as an instrument of knowledge of the past history of the region. This occurred on purpose.
- Definitely, the Count always was a great champion of archaeological studies, but writing about a far past was also a way for him to gain distance from the political and administrative pitfalls of present events, which he had to know very well.
- There was a clear attempt to always establish parallels between the texts with Italian theme and those with a German focus. Equal treatment was a crucial component of his scholar activity. Not surprisingly, the 1810 theme of the Italian primacy disappeared completely in 1824. The far past of Trent as a Roman colony and municipality did not have any implications on the future permanence of Trent within the Habsburg Empire (after all, Vienna used to be a Roman city).
- The basic attention to the events of the Roman Empire during the time of the Antonines required a consideration of the balance of power across the territory of Tirol in terms of transnational geographic networks, by assigning a crucial role to both the Italian and the German Tyrol.
- In each of the two texts, it was emphasized the historical role of Trent as a location connecting north and south. The Alps were not seen as a barrier. The Adige was the natural infrastructure that facilitated contacts between the Po Valley and the Danubian world.
The question of the national primacy,
dominating in 1810 (Trent as an Italian city), was replaced by the theme of
local merits of the city of Trent in a much broader empire (as a logistics
centre between the Mediterranean and Central Europe in the Antonine era).
End of Part One
NOTES
[1] Oesterreichisches Bibliographisches Lexicon, item
Benedikt Giovanelli von Gerstburg.
[2] Raccolta di tutte le
carte pubbliche stampate, ed esposte ne' luoghi più frequentati della città di
Venezia, (Collection of all public papers, printed and exposed in the most
popular locations of the city of Venice), Tome X and last Tome, 1797, See:
[3] von Rumohr, Carl Friedrich - Drey Reisen nach
Italien: Erinnerungen. Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1832, 327 pages.
Quotation at page 144-155
[4] Biografia degli italiani
illustri nelle scienze, lettere ed arti del secolo XVIII e de’ contemporanei
compilata da letterati italiani di ogni provincia e pubblicata per cura del
professore Emilio de Tipaldo (Biography
of illustrious Italians in the sciences, literature and arts of the eighteenth
century, and of the contemporaneous, compiled by Italian writers of every
province and edited by professor Emilio de Tipaldo), Volume X, Venezia, 1845.
Quotation at page 22. See:
[5] Giovanelli, Benedetto - Trento città d'Italia
per origine, per lingua, e per costumi: ragionamento istorico in occasione che
i popoli del Trentino vennero riuniti al Regno d’Italia (Trent, an Italian town
by origin, language, and customs: historical reasoning at the time when the
people of the Trent province are being reunited to the Kingdom of Italy),
Trent, Monauni Typography, 1810, pages 26. See: https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/Vta2/bsb10009659/bsb:BV001491577
[6] Benedetto, Giovanelli - Intorno
all'antica zecca Trentina e a due monumenti reti: lettere tre (About the old Trent mint and two Raetian
monuments: three letters), Trent, Typography Monauni, 1812, 173 pages. See:
[7] Giovanelli, Benedetto - Ricordi del conte Benedetto Giovanelli podestà̀ di Trento (dal 1815 al
1846) al suo successore (Records addressed by Count Benedetto Giovanelli,
mayor of Trent (1815-1846), to his successor), edited by Giulio Taiti e Giuseppe
Marietti, Trent, Typography Marietti, 1871, 57 pages. See:
[8] Giovanelli, Benedetto - Ueber die in der k.k. Bibliothek
zu Innsbruck befindliche Ara Dianae und die Richtung der Römerstraße Claudia
Augusta von Tridento bis Vipiteno, Bolzano, Eberle, 1824, 195 pages. See:
[9] Giovanelli, Benedetto - Über ein rhätisches Gefäß
und über rhätische Paläographie, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte von Tirol und
Vorarlberg, Volume 8, 1834, Pages 133-149. The text is available at:
[10] See:
[12] Giovanelli, Benedetto
- Trento, città d'Italia, … (quoted), p. 3
[13] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina del tempo degli Antonini (Discourse on an inscription in Trent of the
time of the Antonines), Trent,
Typography Monauri, 1824, 112 pages. See: https://archive.org/details/discorsosoprauni00giov_0
[14] Giovanelli, Benedetto - Über ein rhätisches Gefäß
(quoted), p. 114. Giovanelli, Benedetto - Discorso sopra un'iscrizione
(quoted), p. 5.
[15] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un'iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), pages 5 and 53.
[16] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 6
[17] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 3
[18] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 3
[19] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 5
[20] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 11
[21] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 20
[22] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 30
[23] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 30
[24] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 71-73
[25] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 74
[26] Giovanelli, Benedetto -
Discorso sopra un' iscrizione Trentina … (quoted), p. 87
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