Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION
El Greco.
Il miracolo della naturalezza.
Il pensiero artistico di El Greco attraverso le note a margine a Vitruvio e Vasari
[El Greco. The miracle of naturalness. The artistic thought of El Greco through the margin notes to Vitruvius and Vasari]
Edited by Fernando Marías and José Riello
Roma, Castelvecchi, 2017
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part One
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| E Greco, Portrait of an old man, 1595-1600, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Source: Metmuseum.org via Wikimedia Commons |
Other contributions on Giorgio Vasari in this blog
[N.B. On Vitruvius see in this blog
also: Francesca
Salatin, An Introduction to Fra Giocondo's Vitruvius (1511); Vitruvius,
On Architecture, Edited by Pierre Gros. Translation and Commentary by Antonio
Corso and Elisa Romano. Essays by Maria Losito, Turin, Einaudi, 1997; Giovanni
Mazzaferro, Rare
Books and a Great Discovery: a Specimen of Vitruvius' De Architectura Annotated
by Cosimo Bartoli; El
Greco. The miracle of naturalness. The artistic thought of El Greco through the
margin notes to Vitruvius and Vasari. Edited by Fernando Marías and José Riello,
Rome, Castelvecchi, 2017; The
Annotations by Guillaume Philandrier on Vitruvius' De Architectura. Books I to
IV. Edited by Frédérique Lemerle, Paris, Piccard, 2000; Marco
Vitruvio Pollione's Architecture, translated and commented by the Marquis Berardo
Galiani. Foreword by Alessandro Pierattini (unabriged reprint of Naples
edition, 1790), Rome, Editrice Librerie Dedalo, 2005; Claude
Perrault, Les Dix Livres d’Architecture de Vitruve, Corrigez et traduitz
nouvellement en françois avec des notes et des figures, Paris, Jean Baptiste
Coignard, 1673; Vitruvius,
Ten Books on Architecture. The Corsini Incunabulum with the annotations and
autograph drawings of Giovanni Battista da Sangallo. Edited by Ingrid D.
Rowland, Edizioni dell’Elefante, 2003; Massimo
Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio. Le traduzioni del 'De architectura'
nei codici Zichy, Spencer 129 e Magliabechiano II.I.141, Leo S. Olschki, 2003;
Francesco
di Giorgio Martini, La traduzione del De Architectura di Vitruvio. A cura di
Marco Biffi, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2002; Francesco
di Giorgio Martini, Il "Vitruvio Magliabechiano". A cura di Gustina
Scaglia, Gonnelli editore, 1985.]
Finally,
the Italian translation of the margin notes marked by El Greco to two samples
of his library has been published: respectively, a sample of Vitruvius’s De Architectura in the version edited
by Daniele Barbaro (1556) and one of the Giuntina edition of Vasari's Lives (1568). The annotations were first
published in full in Spanish, respectively in 1981 [1] and in 1992 [2] and then
were the subject of studies, which have spread to the other works owned by the
Cretan painter. I would like to refer, as the most recent example, in
particular to the catalogue of the exhibition The Library of El Greco, published in 2014 and already the subject of a review in this blog. I am recalling it because much of the information
provided in that review (for example, the issue of the two inventories identifying
part of the books owned by El Greco) will not be discussed here, to avoid
repetitions for the reader, who is invited to refer to it.
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| El Greco, Christ healing the blind, about 1567, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Source: Web Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons |
El Greco between naturalness and mysticism.
The title
of the book, in itself, is already a program: "El Greco. The miracle of naturalness." What is naturalness? Can
we talk about El Greco as a naturalist? All what remains written by the artist
(who composed a treatise on architecture, which was not printed and is now
lost) are about 18 thousand words resulting from the notes to Vitruvius and
Vasari. These notes (this is the fundamental thesis of Mr Marías, then reinforced
by Mr Riello) do not coincide with the artist's image which was formed in Spain
around the turn of the century, according to which Doménikos would be a
fundamentally Spanish artist, the precursor (or the founder) of a mythical
national school, a deeply religious man, caught by mystical crises of which his
paintings would be the most obvious expression. In his 18 thousand words in
question, El Greco never addressed religious themes. Instead, he expressed his
way of conceiving the 'naturalness'.
And on this - I would say - there is nothing surprising: we are accustomed to
speak of naturalism for the Carraccis, Caravaggio and so on, as if mannerism,
classicism and anything else had openly proclaimed themselves 'anti-naturalists'. Obviously, it is not like this: even for Lomazzo or Zuccari (to give examples
of Mannerist theorists related to the concept of an 'Idea' that is first formed
in the mind), painting was an imitation of nature, and in fact it has remained
so until the early years of the twentieth century. But here, I am leaving the
floor to Mr Riello: "In fact, these margin
records should become part of a large-scale debate, which would help to make all
even more complex: the discussion concerning the current revision of the
term "naturalism" and its consequences. In this sense, what is now being
tried, with regard to the margin annotations, is: to deny their attribution, a
difficult task since both internal and external hints attest that they were drafted
by El Greco; to accept without any doubt that they were his own and then
immediately to try to "kill the author" [...]; to question their
contents, reading them in extremely pedantic way; [...] to bypass the author's
intentions, a no less arduous task since the notes are, as I said, fully
consistent with the practice of El Greco and, among other things, with the
contents of his library; or finally to face the challenge that implies tying
them to his prolific and varied artistic activity" (p. 63).
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| El Greco (attributed to), The Modena Tryptich, 1568, Modena, Galleria Estense Source: Web Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons |
Concretely,
there are (roughly) three views: those who see El Greco as a schizophrenic
artist, who wrote (for private use only, mind you, not to be read by others)
incompatible things with his way of painting; others consider the artist as a
"double converted" or as a painter who, during his surely unique
biography, switched his style twice: first, from the "Greek manner" to the Venetian colouring; second, from the
"Venetian (or, more generally,
Italian) manner" to a religious and almost Expressionist mysticism (for
them, the annotations belonged to a time when the second conversion had not yet
occurred); still others (for what it is worth, this is also my view; more
importantly, it is what Messrs Marías and Riello also think) see nothing but
the development of a consistent thought (albeit expressed in a not particularly
linear manner, as it is natural for any series of margin annotations) in which
the artist did not deny anything, but rather developed and deepened his
thinking.
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| El Greco, Portrait of Giulio Clovio (detail), 1571-1572, Naples, Capodimonte Museum Source: Julije Klovic via Wikimedia Commons |
El Greco and Vitruvius
El Greco’s notes
to Vitruvius and to Vasari share their bitterness in the comment. There is no
doubt that the polemical component played a fundamental role for him: such
component, in the case of the comments to Vasari, suggests even the existence
of some form of personal resentment. In this respect, there is a note which is
not very clear ("This, and not I, is not what
makes him furious”) that could somehow confirm a direct, and in this case
probably not easy-going, acquaintance between the two. One may anyway believe
Giulio Mancini, when he says in his remarks on painting that "when it turned necessary to cover some
figures of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, since they were estimated as
indecent by Pius for that place, he [El Greco] came out with the statement
that, if it had been decided to destroy the frescos completely, he would have
made them again with no less honesty and decency than goodness of painting. Therefore,
after he had made angry all painters and those who enjoy delight in this
profession, he was forced to move to Spain" [3]. The episode, however,
is perfectly consistent with what El Greco tells of Michelangelo. In fact, he judged
him as a great sculptor and drawer, as a great architect, but as a bad painter,
because of his technical inability to use oil painting and the totally
inadequate range of colours (see the second part of the review).
It should
be said that, from a theoretical point of view, the margin notes to Vitruvius
are certainly more interesting than those to Vasari, because they seem to form
a network of notes in preparation for the drafting of that treatise on
architecture, which the son (an architect) gave account of after his father
died; they constitute a more coherent theoretical structure than the annotations
to Vasari, very biased because of the overwhelming weight of his personal hatred
towards Vasari. One must ask, first of all, why El Greco worked for so many
years at a treatise on architecture. It must be said that Pacheco, in his Arte de la Pintura, defined him as a 'painter philosopher' and reported that he dealt with all three arts: painting,
sculpture, and architecture. Probably, more than because of the education of
the child, it seems logical to think of a phenomenon of reaction against the
triumph of Vitruvian classicism in architecture. In those years, 'Vitruvian'
orthodox architects were triumphing in Spain for the construction of the
Escorial. El Greco moved at first to Madrid, at the Royal court, but after a
few years he withdrew to Toledo, most probably because he had not fully entered
into the good graces of the Spanish court.
The
cornerstones upon which the Cretan artist based himself are sufficiently clear: i) the primacy of painting over the other arts; ii) the construction of beauty
based on the investigation of nature; iii) the speculative value of painting, as
instrument of knowledge of the real and of the “invisible”; iv) form, light, colour
and movement as the variables that contribute to the formation of beauty; v) the
rejection of any mathematical proportion and every rule for the construction of
beauty. Beauty must be proportionate in itself and the recognition of such
proportion is the task of the 'judgment' of the painter, a 'judgment' based on
experience and exercise (and therefore also on drawing); vi) rejection of the
myth of antiquity as absolute perfection; antiquity can be emulated and must be
improved. Under this viewpoint, the subject of El Greco’s shafts was not so
much (or only) Vitruvius, who obviously could not be for him a counterpart with
a historical perspective, but his interpreters, starting from Daniele Barbaro,
who based himself on the Vitruvian teaching as a dogma and not as an experience,
in order to bring together the theory of architecture. That said, it should
however be noted that many margin notes, in any case, constituted a punctual
commentary on technical aspects (for example, on the type of the temples and so
on): El Greco entered thereby in a territory (that of proportion and of rules)
that he simultaneously denied and that most likely he could not grasp in its
entirety (as he was a painter and not an architect).
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| El Greco, Retablo mayor of the church of the monastery of S. Dominic the Elder, 1577-1579, Toledo Source: Web Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons |
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| El Greco, Retablo mayor of the church of the monastery of S. Dominic the Elder, Assumption of the Virgin, 1577-1579, Art Institute of Chicago Source: Google Cultural Institution via Wikimedia Commons |
Painting
The second half
of the Sixteenth century was the historical period of the triumph of
architectural treatises. That age marked the years of the Vitruvian canon, of the
'rule' of the orders, of the mathematical proportion and, in some way, of the
(sometimes implicitly given for granted) superiority of architecture on
painting and sculpture. It was not so for El Greco. The architecture is "a simple human invention" and
therefore this system of rules is a "necessarily
particular" convention. It does not possess the ability to interpret
nature. In this sense painting is instead superior, because it is with
painting, which is basically camouflage, that the artist can make a 'judgment'
on nature. Painting does not do it only through the reproduction of the form,
but also (and especially) through colour and light effects: "painting is the only art that can judge of every
object, shape, and colour, having as object the imitation of all; in short,
painting has the function to address and model (or moderate?) all that you see,
and if I was able to express in words what is the point of view of the painter,
it would appear as a singular thing [... ]. But painting, being so universal,
becomes speculative, because there is always the joy of speculation, since
there is always something you can see, since even in a mediocre darkness you can
see and enjoy and find something to imitate" (p. 24). Clearly, a
naturalistic system pervades the art of El Greco. Whether this type of system
is neo-Platonic or neo-Aristotelian is something that has been the subject of
extensive debates. Normally El Greco has been classified among the Neo-Platonists,
because Neo-Platonism fits better with the 'creation' of a mental idea that would
correct nature. The artist was also considered as neo-Platonic because it is just sufficient to replace God for the Idea to explain his
(alleged) mystical crisis and its (alleged) visionary painting, especially in his later years. Unquestionably, El Greco sided for the correction of nature. That
said, it must indeed be noted that the word 'idea' never appeared in his eighteen
thousand words, and El Greco never addressed religious issues. The
'speculative' essence of nature, the attention to optical phenomena, mediated by
light and colour, all of this made of him a modern man of his time, and perhaps
even a precursor (about twenty years later Accolti, Zaccolini and Cigoli wrote their treatises, all related to the question of the 'eye
deception’) and there is no doubt that the "speculative activity" even
in conditions of poor visibility approached him to the totally Aristotelian
mentality of Zaccolini, who wrote his treatise on the basis of the experience
of visual phenomena carried out in the Gulf of Naples.
Quite
simply, El Greco was neither a neo-Platonic nor a pure neo-Aristotelian. He
drew a number of suggestions from the two philosophies and tried to combine
them into a personal solution. Without any doubt, from this point of view, his
representation of the visible and invisible (i.e. the divine entities) was
highly personal. In this respect, the view of the editors (perhaps explained in
even more detail in The Library of El Greco,
to which reference is made) is that the artist represents naturalistically the
visible, while divine realities have instead their own, otherworldly beauty, in
which the proportion is different from that perceived by the human eye. In his
paintings, the two plans often intersect, but they do not indicate a creative
fury that takes possession of the painter's hand and leads him into a sort of
trance. Rather, again, they hint to a speculative approach even to the divine (which
is also object of painting).
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| El Greco, Retablo mayor of the church of the monastery of S. Dominic the Elder, Holy Trinity, 1577-1579, Madrid, Prado Museum Source: http://www.digibis.com/elgreco_digimus/es/musobjects/2725.html?ctx=freetext%3A0 |
Movement
Life is not a static
fact, but it is made up of movement. I think it is particularly important to
try to understand how El Greco tried to implement motion in his painting. Mr Marías
speaks brilliantly on it: "The
accentuated relief, the forced glimpses, the contortions of the figures -
serpentine, flame-shaped, sinuous, in simple or crossed contrast - do not show
us only their three-dimensionality, but also their movement, their different
aspects, in an unstable, momentary, fleeting equilibrium. The elongation of the
bodies gives them agility and beauty [editor's note: and it is not a
mystical, but a speculative experience]; colour
and the light give them a natural aura that circles the structures suggested by
the artist's peculiar imagination" (p. 33). "In this sense, the smashing success, though limited from a social point
of view, of the portraits of El Greco is not surprising. Likewise, we should
not be surprised by the problems raised by his religious painting in Spain" (pp.
33-34). "El Greco, in his world,
enjoyed success in portrait and admiration in religious painting, but was
criticized for the lack of convenience and devotion of his sacred theme. He was
supported by a narrow social and cultural group which evaluated more his art that his work in sacred genre, full of
impropriety and formalistic distortions that belittled the content to which one
was used."(p. 36).
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| El Greco, Spoliation of Christ, 1577-1579, Toledo Cathedral Source: Pictorpedia via Wikimedia Commons |
Beauty
I talked a lot about
beauty and its creation. At this point, it should not be totally surprising to
note that, when speaking of architectural solutions, El Greco is much more
attentive to beauty effects, or to what Vitruvio called venustas, rather than to the firmitas,
the solidity of the building, which was - to the contrary - a bit the
cornerstone of all sixteenth century architectural treatises and even the
Vitruvian text (the reference is obviously to the triad firmitas, utilitas, venustas):
"Venustas embraces everything, because, being
generated by proportion, it cannot miss from force except in the basement,
where you have to beware any avarice" (p. 104).
What really matters is
the gracefulness and variety of the building, whatever its destination, and
that grace is a fruit of proportion. Once again - it is good to clarify -
proportion must be "natural,"
and cannot result from a pre-established and untouchable set of geometric
relationships. It is the result of the 'natural' human proportion (the
architecture is anthropomorphic) which is wisely assessed by the architect's
vision. In these circumstances, the firmitas
is a consequence of venustas; it
naturally follows, except for the building foundations, in which the
relationship is reversed, and the first thing to do is to worry about the
solidity of the basis on which the building will be built up.
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| El Greco, The martyrdom of Saint Maurice, 1580-1582, Madrid, El Escorial Source: Colleciones reales via Wikimedia Commons |
El Greco and Scamozzi
In his commentary to
the notations by Vincenzo Scamozzi to Giorgio Vasari's Lives (spread after
1600, that is at least ten years later than those of El Greco), Lucia Collavo
suggests that it would be appropriate to compare the records of the Cretan
artist and the architect from Vicenza, to recognize any common debt to their
Venetian acquaintances. Today, thanks to this Italian translation, one can do
it fairly easily. I find it more appropriate to do it here, actually comparing El
Greco’s annotations to the De
Architectura with those by Scamozzi to Vasari's Lives, because in fact this is the illuminating comparison. In both
cases, in fact, the attitude vis-à-vis Vasari is common, and negative. But the
reasons are opposite. By the way, it could not be otherwise, given that El
Greco was a painter and Scamozzi an architect. Scamozzi criticised Vasari
because it did not provide the 'measures' of the orders and spoke of
perspective in a few lines only, while El Greco railed against Daniele Barbaro
because he provided measurements and made a dogma of them. Scamozzi complained
imprecision and failure to respect the classical canon also on the level of
professional practice (consider the case of the Uffizi), El Greco refused to
even consider just any corrective effect of the columns justified by optical
phenomena; Scamozzi investigated antiquities, El Greco removed them. It is no
coincidence that the instances of the Lives
that are reported by Scamozzi as indicators of Vasari’s lack of professionalism
(and which have to do essentially with architecture) are not commented by El
Greco, because they did not interest him.
NOTES
[1] F.
Marías, A. Bustamante, Las ideas artisticas de El
Greco. Comentarios a un texto inédito, Madrid 1981.
[2] X
de Salas, F. Marías. El Greco y el arte de su
tiempo. Las notas de El Greco a Vasari, Madrid 1992
[3] Giulio Mancini.
Considerazioni sulla pittura pubblicate per la prima volta da Adriana Marucchi
con il commento di Luigi Salerno, Vol. I, pp- 230-231. It should be added that the travelling of El Greco across
Italy is by no way very clear. According to a (minority) thesis Domenico
would not have moved to Spain in 1577 because he was 'hunted' by the Roman
artistic circles, but he returned to Venice. From here, he would have run away in
1576 because of the plague.
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