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History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Enrico Panzacchi,
Il Libro degli Artisti. Antologia
[The Book of the Artists. An Anthology]
Milan, L.F. Cogliati Printing House, 1902, 527 pages
Milan, L.F. Cogliati Printing House, 1902, 527 pages
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part One
[2] La storia dell’arte nella scuola italiana, in Civiltà Cattolica, Volume X, 1903, pages 198-206. See: https://books.google.de/books?id=qnARAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA199&dq=il+libro+degli+artisti+panzacchi+1902&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifx6eEo4bTAhXiCJoKHXViDOAQ6AEIKzAC#v=onepage&q=il%20libro%20degli%20artisti%20panzacchi%201902&f=false
[3] Venturi, Adolfo – Enrico Panzacchi, Il libro degli artisti, in L'arte: rivista di storia dell'arte medievale e moderna, Issue 1, 1903, page 75.
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| Fig. 1) The frontpage of The Book of the Artists, 1902 |
An innovative
anthology
When the anthology of art history sources by Enrico
Panzacchi (1840-1904), entitled The Book of the Artists [1], was published in
1902, the magazine Civiltà cattolica (Catholic Civilization) did
not hesitate to use expressions of clear praise: "A book that, under the modest appearance of an anthology, delivers the
fruit of a bright idea and will certainly have a great effect" [2].
According to the magazine's practice, the review was not signed. A newly-founded
art journal, (entitled “L'arte:
rivista di storia dell'arte medievale e moderna” - Art: History Magazine of Medieval and Modern
Art), hosted the review by Adolfo Venturi (1856- 1941), which also used equally
praiseworthy words: "Panzacchi's
book can be a really good start to learn the spirit, the life habits, and the
culture of our painters, sculptors and architects" [3]. It is
therefore astonishing that – at least to my knowledge – there is no study today
about what was considered a truly innovative tool in those years. Perhaps this
is due to the fact that, over time, the memory of Panzacchi as an art critic and
historian went lost, to focus on his activity as literary and musical critic,
as well as poet, playwright, journalist, orator and author of tales and opera
booklets. And his activity on art literature is even completely ignored, as we
can see in a (otherwise quite interesting) recent study dedicated to him by
Valeria Giannantonio, which was released in 2017 [4]. With today's eyesight on
Panzacchi, we would not be able to understand the reasons for this post in a
blog about art literature. With these notes, we are also attempting to fill
a gap.
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| Fig. 2) Cennino Cennini (attributed to), Blessed Bishop and Blessed Pope, without date |
Panzacchi’s anthology was a relatively large
work (527 pages), organized in chronological order. It opened with a quote from
Cennino Cennini, the Giottesque painter and author of the Book of Art near the end of the 14th century, and concluded with pieces
of prose and poetry by Telemaco Signorini (1835-1901), a Tuscan painter of
the Macchiaioli school who had passed
away only the year before the publication of the book. With this publication, a
rich selection of art literature was finally made available for the first time to
the large public in our country in 1902. All previous Italian texts offering a
collection of history sources (the collection of letters by Giovanni Gaye [5] 1839,
that by Michelangelo Gualandi [6] 1845, the one by Giuseppe Campori [7] 1866 and
finally the volume of Carlo Pini and Gaetano Milanesi [8] 1871) were in fact not
only out of sale (in 1903, the International Congress of Historical Sciences even
approved a formal motion to plea that the Gaye collection be reprinted) [9] but,
in any case, were addressed only to an expert audience. Panzacchi’s anthology was
instead a dissemination work. And indeed the author was convinced – as he wrote
in a pamphlet of those years about "L’arte nel secolo XIX" (Art in the XIX Century ) – that the fundamental contribution of
modern times was to spread "aesthetic activity" beyond the small
group of specialists: "What did the
Past Century make for Art and Beauty? ... The results are huge, culture extends
wonderfully throughout the whole globe" and all people, whether rich or
poor, are moved by "the curiosity
and desire for aesthetic emotions" [10].
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| Fig. 3) The cover of the pamphlet on “Art in the 19th century” |
Art literature anthologies
as texts underpinning the study of art history
The "Note
to the reader" introducing the anthology (at pages
viii-ix) provided some essential information. Here is the text:
Note to the reader
I hope that the
reading of this book will assist those who want to study and grasp the artistic
history of Italy, familiarizing them with the spirit, culture and habits of our
painters, sculptors and architects.
The artists of all
times, and especially ours, were usually no scholars and literates in the
precise sense of the word, but they were not even those uncultured people as many suppose. They were open to the life of their time and to the
manifestations of poetry. They were in most cases passionate mediators for everything
that affected their art, from which they expected consolation and glory.
This was especially
demonstrated by their personal letters; and when some of them used the pen with
some literary intent, they deserved to be sometimes envied by those who are properly
said men of letters, for their vivacity and for the innate grace of writing.
Not all the prose and
verses I have collected in this volume, however, were authored by artists.
Indeed, intentionally, I included pages of poets and prose writers in the book,
which are testimonies of the multifaceted and continuous relationships that,
through the centuries, united our art and our literature.
How to exclude, for
example, a page of Dante’s Vita Nova [The New Life] where we are surprised to
see him painting angels? Or a chapter by Francesco Berni or letters by Pietro
Aretino, so warmly reflecting their enthusiasm for artists and the happy
feeling and intuition of the living and triumphant art around them?
Readers will judge. I feel
that, with this collection, I made something useful and also new. Exactly
because of the novelty, I would like to apologize for omissions and
disproportions that may not be missing in the book and which it will be easily possible
to amend later on.
As far as notations
are concerned, I have been trying to keep those to the strict necessary, just
to make sure the text can be immediately understood by artists and young
scholars. Every time the name of an artist appears in the book, a note
briefly recalls his life and works, so that some key information on our art
history is included in this volume.
In gathering, ordering
and noting this book, I was greatly and lovely assisted by Prof. Giuseppe
Lipparini, a well-known poet and art scholar. I would like to warmly thank this
excellent young researcher for his cooperation.
Bologna, August 25,
1902.
Enrico Panzacchi
***
The Book
of the Artists had a clear chronological structure. Its didactic intention was
evident; it sought to establish a common narration through the texts, capturing
however different aspects (spirit, culture and habits) of the artist's life and
activity over the centuries. The anthology was therefore a supportive text also to learn art history itself. An important part of the anthology was
reserved for poetry texts (one of Panzacchi's true passions). Most of the texts
(prose and poetry) were authored by painters, sculptors and architects, but
there was no lack of pieces on art and artists produced by literates. We will
see in the last part of this essay that many of the characteristics of the anthology
were the result of aesthetic choices typical of Panzacchi's world. He belonged
to Carducci's school, who - throughout his long academic career - used the
genre of anthologies as a teaching and narrative instrument. Panzacchi however
also announced some of the novelties of the anthologies by Giovanni Pascoli: among
them, the interaction between art, prose and poetry was also typical of
the aesthetic taste of Panzacchi, according to the logic of so-called 'total
art', the Gesamtkunst propagated by
Wagner (Panzacchi was his greatest supporter in Italy, making Bologna one of
the largest Wagnerian centres in Europe, in opposition to Verdi's Parma).
Finally, the emphasis on the personal relationships between artists (including literates
in a broad sense) and between the same artists and power holders reflected
- at least I believe - the biographical experience of Panzacchi himself: he was
not a scholar who produced, in hard-working loneliness, seminal essays on art
and artists, but a tireless author of newspaper articles, lectures, speeches
and pamphlets, to draw from every opportunity to make art known to the
inhabitants of his region (think, for instance, of the conferences he held in
Parma and Cento on the occasion of the anniversaries of Correggio and
Guercino).
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| Fig. 4) Telemaco Signorini, Pulling a boat, 1864. |
Of course, when browsing this and other writings
by Panzacchi, one is struck by the total absence of any image of artworks. The
reason is that he focused on art taste, not on art style. For him, written text was
really an omnipresent factor. His use of adjectives was still typical of an era
in which art critics expressed their judgment on artists' intentions, rather
than on their consistency with a coherent formal system. For instance, in 1895
Panzacchi wrote a very rich (sixty page) review of the first edition of the
Venice Biennale [11]. He captured the importance of this exhibition, a sign of
his interest in the problems of contemporary Italian art: his aim was to show
that, after having lost almost completely a century, Italian painting had
awakened and was now able to keep up with foreign art. On the other hand, he
understood also that an advanced process of globalisation of international
pictorial taste was reducing the differences between national schools:
Panzacchi spoke, in a negative sense, of a “European painting”. As we shall
see, he was a cultural nationalist (only in 1912, with Adolfo Venturi, the Xth
International Congress of Art History raised the problem of the relations
between Italian and foreign art, taking a global view of art). Also in the case of the above-mentioned long
review of the first Biennale, Panzacchi did not show any images. He did it
intentionally, since he thought that the multiplication of prints and photographs was
one of the reasons leading to the loss of local specificities in art, specifically
favouring the prevalence of French art models. An art critic must therefore describe
but not show photographs or prints, just as a writer or a poet can use ekphrases
to describe art works. However, Panzacchi’s beautiful pages on religious art at
the first Biennale (with references, for example, to Sartorio,
D'Agnan-Bouveret, von Uhde and Morelli) or his scrap of the symbolic painting “Il Supremo Convegno” (The Supreme Meeting) by Grosso (lost shortly
afterwards, due to a fire in the United States, where it was being exposed in an exhibit), and
finally the celebration of Michetti's Figlia di Jorio (Jorio's
Daughter) as the best painting of the Biennale can take on a more clear meaning
today, only when confronted with images.
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| Fig. 5) Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Madonna of the angels, 1895 |
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| Fig. 6) Giacomo Grosso, The Supreme Meeting, 1895 (now lost - reproduction of the time) |
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| Fig. 7) Francesco Paolo Michetti, Jorio's daughter, 1895 |
One would also search in vain, in Panzacchi’s
anthology, a red line of philosophical character. He was a pure aesthetic
critic. It will be the following generation (the one of Croce and Gentile) to
see in art the formal expression of the revelation of the spirit - hence the
expression of the revelation of the spirit materialized in an object. The later authors of 20th-century anthologies (think of Uhde-Bernays in Germany) will
compile collections of art history sources to identify conceptual regularity in
the creative activity of the artist, always different but at the same time also always manifestation of universal rules. In the Book of the Artists there is no trace of these general problems.
From this point of view, Panzacchi was really the art critic of lightness and Bell'époque.
I think this is why the next generations may have
criticized Panzacchi's judgment as superficial.
He was an art narrator precisely because he saw the central theme of art in the
rhetorical aspect of narrative. The Book
of the Artists, in this sense, was not just a collection of stories, but a
reading which treated the written text as the fundamental aspect for the
understanding of art history. In many respects, this feature put Panzacchi's art
criticism in great trouble all throughout the twentieth century, when critics were
confronted with the problem of identifying the ultimate formal meaning of artworks
as the key criterion of interpretation. Nowadays, however, Panzacchi’s attitude
is very modern: contemporary art no longer lives of the formal objectivity of
creation, but is a state of mind, a testimony, a dematerialized event. Therefore,
in a last analysis, it is only language that can decipher it. A critic who is
not communicator and does not know how to use social media is now placed at the
margins of art world.
The battle for the
teaching of art history in high schools
Despite all what just said, the "Book of the Artists" was not at all
an extemporaneous initiative. In fact, it was a fundamental tool for enabling a
public oriented towards literary studies, such as the Italian one of the early
twentieth century, to approach art history, a new discipline in the culture of
those years between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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| Fig. 8) Enrico Barbieri, Bust of Enrico Panzacchi, 1912 |
Panzacchi, in addition to being a professor of Aesthetics and History of Modern Art at
the University of Bologna from 1895 until his death, was in fact the promoter
of the battle to include art history in Italian high schools. Until then (see
the interesting article by Elena Franchi on the subject [12]) the newly-united
Italy was in the embarrassing situation of hosting an artistic heritage of
exceptional value, but also unknown even to the (restricted) cultivated part of
its population. Since he was also a member of Parliament in the fifteenth,
twentieth and twenty-first legislatures of the Kingdom of Italy (1882-1886,
1897-1900 and 1900-1904 respectively), Panzacchi had the opportunity to conduct
that battle both as an intellectual and in political terms.
So he wrote on the topic in the first page of
the main Italian daily Corriere della
Sera (see the article "La
storia dell’arte nelle scuole” - The School of Art in Schools) on September 20, 1899 [13]. In Germany –
he wrote – university professions were being multiplied, while in France
teaching had been inserted (since 1895) in the teaching of 'civil history' in
high schools. In the Corriere article, Panzacchi made a plea that art study
become part of Italian language and literature teaching and not of civil
history, as it had just been decided in France: "I am asserting nothing absolute, but I say that I understand it better
in France than in Italy. In our country, from their first appearance, fine arts
can be considered, if not just as a splitting, certainly as a parallel refit of
good letters and poetry, to which they were continually linked. As the art of
our Renaissance was essentially individual - unlike the French Gothic - our
painters and sculptors needed to approach the poets and the humanists. This is
not the place to prove a thesis, but it may well be affirmed that throughout
the historical path of our renewed civilization, we always found united, and
not only by name, a great artist and a distinguished writer. The glorious
series began with Dante and Giotto and closed with Antonio Canova and Pietro
Giordani." The argument was a bit weak: even in France, as part of
academic education since the middle of 1600, art literature had a rather
rhetorical and literary character (if anything, the relationship between
literature and art was stronger in France than in Italy). And, as we shall see,
Panzacchi abandoned later on the thesis that history of art teaching was not
compatible with that of civil history in the schools, although - in his heart -
the strongest link certainly remained the one between art and literature.
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| Fig. 9) The title of Enrico Panzacchi's article of 20 September 1899 |
Panzacchi was opposed by those (think of the
open letter sent to him by Ugo Ojetti, always on the front page of Corriere
della Sera, also titled "The History
of Art in Schools" on October 2, 1899 [14]) who believed that there was
no room to include art history within the existing study program (and that literature
professors were not prepared). Ojetti (1871-1946) asked for a separate teaching
for art history to be created, and for that purpose he proposed to set up a
training program for teachers.
Undersecretary of
State to Public Education and the Circular 86 of 1900
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| Fig. 10) A picture of Enrico Panzacchi, which I purchased on ebay. It was auctioned with the words "Minister of Education Enrico Panzacchi from Ozzano dell'Emilia". On the back of the photo there are print characters of a newspaper, a sign that the photo comes from press sources |
The dream came true when, on June 24, 1900,
Panzacchi was called to the government as undersecretary at the Ministry of
Public Education. The Prime Minister was Giuseppe Saracco (1821-1907), a mildly
conservative Italian politician who was given the task of creating a government
of 'national pacification': the former administration led by Luigi Pelloux (a
military) had ordered the army to open the fire against the socialist
demonstrators and led to a serious institutional crisis (the pacification
however failed: King Umberto I was killed in Monza by an anarchist on July 29,
1900, only a month after Saracco's start in government). The new undersecretary
had clear ideas on what was needed: Panzacchi issued the Circular No.86 of
November 20, 1900, titled “Insegnamento
della Storia delle Belle arti” (Teaching of the History of Fine Arts) [15], where he decided that art
history should be taught in the most important high schools of the country,
whenever they had an orientation towards humanities. In the first, experimental
year the lessons might be held either by teachers of Italian literature or
civil history, depending on the preference and availability of teachers. This
should be decided by school principals. The circular also stipulated that
teachers should submit a report to the undersecretary at the end of the first
year, so that he could take consequences and make the necessary adjustments.
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| Fig. 11) The first page of Circular 86 of November 20, 1890 |
The text of Circular 86 is relevant also for
the purpose of this post, since it demonstrates that the promotion of art
literature was part of a plan to bring Italians closer to art.
Circular No. 86
Rome, November 20,
1900
To the Reali
Provveditori agli studi (Royal Overseers for School
Administration)
To the Principals of Gymnasium
and Lyceum High-schools
For several years,
numerous authoritative and increasingly voices have called for broadening programs
in our classical schools to include basic notions of art history, especially in
the most glorious times.
They remember that the
education of imagination, feelings, and taste is an important part of a liberal
education. They add that the most modern concept of history, shifted from the
narrative of purely political facts to the analysis of all great manifestations
of the life of a people, cannot and must not omit those manifestations that the
seal of art has rendered immortal. The arts were great and glorious part of our
history; even in the saddest times of political subjection and literary
decadence, the Italian genius shone and illuminated the world. They ask: foreigners
coming from across the Alps and over the sea flock to the old palaces of our
communes, inside our cathedrals, galleries and museums. And would we still
allow our children to bring school to an end ignoring what foreigners admire and envy
us in our house?
Let me not forget that
in 1893 the Minister of Public Education ordered that the young people be led to
visit the most noteworthy art monuments in the country. I am glad to be able to
add that later on, here and there, experiments have been made that have yielded
very good results. In Milan, Modena, Cuneo, Bologna, and Florence, willing
professors of secondary schools began teaching art history. The noble example was
certainly limited; so I feel it appropriate to express my thoughts about
the limits in which this teaching must be contained and the method that should
follow.
The history of art is
so intimately linked to civil and literary history, that not pretexts, but
reasons and opportunities are offered continually to move from literature and
history to art. To name only a few examples, from the pages of the Iliad, the
image of Jupiter which inspired Phydias is majestic; in the verse of the
"sovereign Poet" [note of the translator: Homer, as defined by Dante
Alighieri] Niobe mourned the slaughter of the children before they cried
visibly in Greek marble. The second book of the Aeneid recalls the Laocoön
group and the glories of the arts of Rhodes. The 12th singing of the Purgatory
invites to talk about Cimabue, Giotto, the miniatures, and the new dawns of
Italian art; Angelo Poliziano’s Stanze recalls several panels by Botticelli.
The reading of Sannazzaro's Arcadia invites you to find out what a great artist
was Andrea Mantegna. A chapter of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Courtesan invites
to consider and compare the different excellence of Raffaello and Michelangelo.
It is to be added that,
in our literary history, many art makers were also distinguished writers: Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Benvenuto
Cellini, Vasari, Salvator Rosa. And the beautiful series, continuing, comes
close to our times with Massimo D'Azeglio and with Giovanni Dupré.
These considerations
and these examples are sufficient to clarify my concept: spontaneously and in
various respects, the teaching of the history of art emerges from the
discussion of our political and literary history; and the three stories will
intertwine and mingle together with little effort by teachers and learners,
adding variety, vagueness and relief of profitable digressions to school teaching.
The assignment of this
so coordinated teaching with the discussion of other subjects can be taken over
by either the professors of letters or those of history. Let teachers of these
disciplines have the freedom to offer their work. Where the offer is lacking or
abound, the school principal should choose, in this year that must be
experimental. At the end of the year, each teacher will send me a brief report about
the matter he treated, the sequencing he followed, and the benefit he obtained.
He will make the observations he would have liked to do in the course of the
year. He will suggest me the means that, in his opinion, are better suited to
making the lessons of art history easier and profitable for young people.
So, if the trust I put
in the teacher's good will does not deceive me, young people will easily
acquire useful and beautiful knowledge, and they will be desirous to keep in
mind a too neglected study in our classical education with our own harm and
with disadvantage, made more apparent from the comparison with what is being
done, and not since yesterday, in this field, in the secondary schools of the
most civilised nations.
For the Minister
Panzacchi
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| Fig. 12) Massimo D’Azeglio, Roman Campaigns, 1824 |
This was undoubtedly an extremely readable
circular, compared to today's bureaucratic monsters. But this did not make the
endeavour easier. In fact, on February 15, 1901, the Government of Saracco fell
under the pressure of that part of the Parliament wanting a firmer hand against
the socialist movements of strikes and land occupation (these were years, in
fact, during which liberal politicians did not yet have democratic mind-set. Think
that Panzacchi himself, in the aforementioned pamphlet on "Art in the XIX Century", spoke of
"democratic, trivial, and vile art",
where the adjective democratic was derogatory). The government's experience
lasted only eight months, even shorter than that year of experimentation for
the teaching of the history of art in classical high schools, which was nevertheless confirmed, and permanently integrated into the one of Italian
language and literature.
Implementation was due to be characterized in
the following years by much debate on the unpreparedness of administration and
teachers, and many emphasized that the resulting confusion was certainly not
contemplated in the original intent [16]. Panzacchi wrote in 1902 in the
introduction to Giuseppe Lipparini's "History
of Art" manual: "I am aware
that the introduction of the teaching of art history in our secondary schools
has raised objections: the first and the strongest is that it broadened already
vast school programs! But this cannot be an unbeatable obstacle if not for
those (and where are they?) who believe in the sacred intangibility of our
current programs" [17].
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| Fig. 13) Giovanni Dupré, Funeral monument of Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti, 1867 |
The connection between
art, literature and art literature
From all that has been said, it is evident that
the link between art and literature was central to Panzacchi's thinking and
action. Indeed, in the undated essay "Literature
and Art in Italy", he explicitly wrote of "letteratura artistica” [18], i.e. art literature. And it is at this
point that in this blog one cannot help but have to raise some fundamental
issues. Why did Panzacchi conceive the battle for art education in schools
solely as a form of expansion of school curricula, and in particulare of those on literature? Why was his anthology on art
literature the most extensive and demanding of his books on art? And why, nevertheless,
has his contribution to art literature been forgotten by now?
I think Panzacchi's fundamental choice had both
practical and ideal reasons. Let us examine them separately.
Practical Reasons
If we consider the subject objectively, we can
only agree that the option of creating history of art teaching as a
separate matter would have made it necessary to address three basically unsolvable
fundamental problems.
First, until a few years before 1900 there was
not in Italy – and perhaps even insufficiently among scholars - an extensive culture of “The art of seeing art” (to use the
famous title of Matteo Marangoni’s bestselling book of 1935), with its own
lexicon and its logical categories, even in the simplified form of the
description of 'aesthetic taste'. Secondly, there was not yet a patrimony of
photographic images, which could be made available for consultation and to which teachers
and pupils could refer across the country (only in 1903 a subsequent circular
of the succeeding Minister of Public Education, Mr Nunzio Nasi, disposed that the
Royal Cartography [19] would distribute graphic reproductions
and prints in each school). Third, in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth
century, there were only two professorships of art history at the university: the
one of Adolfo Venturi in Rome and the one of Enrico Panzacchi in Bologna. How
to teach high school students to understand a work of art, if university teaching was still
so limited and so it was so difficult to quickly create a new generation of high
school teachers?
In order to teach art there was therefore no other
tool available than to lever on the only common culture that was taking
shape in the school of the young country (Italy was then only forty years old):
the study of the Italian language and its literature. In this situation, the
choice to teach art through art literature, i.e. through the instrument of
written texts on art, was a real necessity.
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| Fig. 14) Adolfo Venturi, History of Italian Art, First Volume, From Early Christian Art to Justinian's Time, 1901 |
Even Venturi, author since 1901 of an Italian Art History in 25 volumes, extremely
rich in illustrations, saw, in his already cited review about Panzacchi's
anthology, no contradiction between studying the sources (through the knowledge
of written texts) and getting acquainted with the art works (through
photographic material): "To make
sure that the noble efforts of those who aim to disseminate the notions of the
history of our art have the success that everyone hopes for, one must not lose
sight of the two best suited means to make passionate for certain studies those
who are so ill-informed to date: to spread the cognition of masterpieces of
Italian art through countless reproductions of every species and every format;
to make the artists known especially for what they have written and made and
for what the contemporaries have told about them” [20].
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| Fig. 15) Giuseppe Lipparini’s Art History Manual, with Enrico Panzacchi's introduction |
In order to spread art history through
the channels of the study of literature, however, a didactic effort was still
needed. It was the purpose of one of the assistants of Enrico Panzacchi:
Giuseppe Lipparini (1877-1951), novelist and poet, but also a critic of art and
literature, and author of a manual of "History of Art" which was
released in parallel with the "Book
of Artists", always in 1902. The partnership between Panzacchi and
Lipparini was really solid. In the introduction of Panzacchi’s anthology, as already mentioned, the
first thanked the second for the assistance received; and again the first one was also
the author of the introduction of Lipparini’s manual. Here's what Panzacchi wrote
about the latter: "This volume
differs from other similar ones, in terms of its nature and the scope of the
subject matter, because the author and the publisher proposed to provide,
though it, a useful textbook for literature schools." Lipparini's
manual was published in fifteen editions, the latter of which dated back to
1948, and thus long after the Gentile school reform, which in 1923 established
the teaching of art history as an autonomous matter.
 |
| Fig. 16) The nineteenth volume of Lipparini’s anthology of the Italian literature, about contemporary writers, issued in 1937 |
In the shadow of the tradition created by
Carducci as a professor of Italian Literature
between 1860 and 1904, the Panzacchi-Lipparini duo made the University of
Bologna one of the first centres of art history dissemination in Italy, although in
this integrated form with the study of literature (Lipparini was also the
author of a rich anthology of Italian literature in about twenty volumes).
Their attempt was both acculturation and dissemination. Perhaps this is the
reason for which their traces were soon lost in the history of artistic
literature: dissemination and teaching were considered of secondary importance,
and ignored with some sign of disdain by 'professionals', including those
dealing with art literature artistic and history of art criticsm. Schlosser ignored the Book of the Artists both in the 1914
German edition as Kunstliteratur and
in the Italian Letteratura artistica in 1935 (is it really possible that he never had Panzacchi’s book in his hands?
And yet the title was not included in the list of its private library, which
was auctioned in Vienna in 1961). Even in the recent "History of Art Histories" by Orietta Rossi Pinelli, there was
no reference to either Panzacchi or Lipparini.
This is, in my opinion, a mistake. Certainly,
school teaching cannot be a guarantee per se of the diffusion of a culture. For
many high school students, art literature may have been boring, after all: it is certain
that booklets and more concise primers were soon spread throughout the country
to make it possible for students to memorize a few notions in short time before
being questioned by teachers. And yet, there must also have been students who got
passionate about art literature and remembered it through life. Even today, in
Italy, art history sources are read and studied much more than elsewhere. In
short, Panzacchi put the foundations for the success of art literary studies in
Italy. When von Schlosser's handbook was translated in Italian in 1935, there had
already been at least two generations of cultivated men and women who, at least
in very general terms, knew the names of the artists who had written their
ideas on art, and perhaps even the main contents of their texts.
Let us go back to the review of Civiltà Cattolica: "The Book of the Artists is almost a story or
gallery where the artists themselves and their contemporaries appear on stage,
talk and judge, with their memories, their letters, and their writings, telling
their own lives, describing their works, among praises, satires and epigrams
flourishing around them. Cennino Cennini, Dante, Franco Sacchetti, Vasari,
Ghiberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Ascanio Condivi, biographer of Michelangelo, and
he himself, this titan of wisdom and honesty, Raphael, Cellini, Salvator Rosa,
Bernini, Zanotti, Milizia, Giovanni Duprè, Fontanesi and the late Segantini
whose tomb has just been closed, all this pleiad of Italians with many others
pass before us in a series of varied and most instructive readings. They are
grouped together and distributed according to the great natural periods of
Italian art, from Cimabue and Giotto to the present day, forming an equal
number of chapters, we would almost say as an equal number of halls of an
artistic-literary museum."
Theoretical reasons
 |
| Fig. 17) The edition of ‘What is art’ by Leo Tolstoy, with the preface of two articles on his essay already published by Panzacchi in ‘Nuova Antologia’ in 1898 |
The concept of art in Panzacchi resembles much what
is today the idea of Arts in the
pages of the New York Times: everything that pursues the purpose of beauty.
Therefore, for Panzacchi, art included music, theatre, painting and sculpture,
poetry, as well as Arts include, in
the New York Times, articles on cinema, ballet, contemporary art and
literature. Indeed, in his pamphlet on "Art in the XIXth Century", Panzacchi raised interesting
questions on their interaction: why was art marked by an absolute primacy of
painting over music in nineteenth century Germany and Italy, whereas painting
dominated music in nineteenth century France? [21].
For Panzacchi, art was all what delights, or
using today's language, makes fun. In two 1898 articles for the journal "Nuova Antologia ", which reviewed the essay "What Is Art" by Leo Tolstoy [22], he
found parallels between the concepts of Tolstoy and Manzoni: both of them wanted
to assign moral finalities to art (to unite humanity in religion for the first,
to pursue the useful and the true for the second) and intended to deny art the pure
pursuit of pleasure, and the mere contemplation of the beautiful. To these
rigorist theories, opposing the pursuit of pleasure through art and inspired by
orthodox religiosity in Tolstoy and by Jansenian influences in Manzoni,
Panzacchi replied that "flowers are
beautiful and they smell well [23]” and therefore they provoke delight.
The ultimate or major goal of life may not be pleasure, but poets and
artists "have the right to move and
even wander with some honest freedom in this region of pure delight"
[24]. Indeed, Panzacchi added: "To
affirm that the subjective pleasure generated by beauty is the end of an
artistic work, is it so much a heresy? (…) Why not? I am asking (...) Nor
should we deny that beauty can contain, in itself and for itself, a healthy
power of human elevation and purification" [25].
The role of art literature becomes fundamental
because it creates the cultural contamination between literature and art in the
golden periods of the history of Italian art. The impoverishment of artistic
literature - Panzacchi wrote in 1897 - was the cause, even more than a symptom,
of the Italian art crisis during the nineteenth century. In this regard, the
comparison between the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, according to the
author, was manifest. The first was a lost century, the second had been still full
of vitality, despite the historical difficulties with which Italy was confronted
in those decades:
"Art
literature in Italy, in the past century [note of the editor: in 1700], if it had no sovereign glories, could claim
of having given the best of its time. It is enough to remember the two Zanotti,
the two Bianconi, Francesco Milizia and, in particular Count Francesco Algarotti,
that honest and brilliant Chevallier practicing all surviving forms of the
ancient humanism. He often gave art criticism much vigour and the glow of his
multifaceted genius, and he made the
greatest testimony not only of Italian letters, but also of painting,
sculpture, architecture and music in the most educated capitals of Europe. You
need to be content, and not to demand the impossible from an era of Italian
story to which we are so much passionate in stating severe epithets, when we
judge it in its entirety. Certainly, a book of the value of Lessing’s Laocoon was
not written in Italy. But it is also certain that some treatises of Algarotti
do not succumb compared to Joshua Reynolds’ so-celebrated academic speeches.
And that our Milizia disdained, in the freedom of its artistic judgments, a
critical force and a revolutionary audacity to make appear Diderot shy, if confronted.
 |
| Fig. 18) Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Francesco Algarotti, 1745 |
The real great misery
for us started, in any way, with our century. The two luminaries of Italian
literature, Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo, seem to have lived, judging by
their writings, far from any special interest in figurative arts. And that is
probably the case. Obviously, they did not fall short of the delightful
perception of a beautiful picture and a beautiful statue; but (and it is
essential) they lacked that artificial and vivid sense of fraternity and
artistic solidarity, which, on the other hand, the literate of the sixteenth century... manifested so often to their great contemporaries. When Agricola paints a
beautiful portrait of her beautiful daughter, Monti is moved and writes a
beautiful sonnet; but ordinarily, he is willingly locked in what I would call
his professional exclusivity. Less inward-looking appears the soul of Foscolo.
The marble of Canova exalts him, he loves to have with him the worship of the
Graces and to sing the divine fraternity of the fine arts, because Phoebe
Apollo told him:
....... I educated first
Phidias and then
Apelles with my lira.
But taking account of
all his prose, of such a variety of arguments, I am almost angry that the Italian-Greek
genius [note of the translator: Ugo Foscolo was born in the Zakynthos Island,
Greece], a man who was so exquisitely affected by the divine sense of beauty, never
produced any writing discussing and expanding to the sister arts. How gladly we
would exchange all Foscolo’s notes around Berenice's hair for a single page of
artistic theme!
And the comparison becomes
even more serious when you think that, at that time, lived beyond the Alps Immanuel
Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Winckelmann and other superlative spirits,
who were all so seriously occupied to put the renewed art criticism as the
basis of all the aesthetic renewal, which beyond the borders of Germany had to
occupy and shake all the modern culture by passing through all civilized
countries [26].
 |
| Fig. 19) Filippo Agricola, Portrait of Constantine Monti Perticari, 1821 |
[…] Among the men of this
age forming the classical pleiad, of which the greatest stars were Monti and
Foscolo, one exception was a writer who showed to give the highest educational
importance to the study of figurative arts and thought it was a serious office
of letters to illustrate and promote them. This was Pietro Giordani, between
the 1820 and 1850 greeted as the "princes of Italian prose", then
criticized and neglected beyond the right. Actually, he was the only Italian writer of great authority who, at this time, wrote on purpose about art. And
perhaps, if his conditions and those of the country had not prevented it, Italy
would have had in him his Ruskin or at least his Delecluze. It is true that
Pietro Giordani did not extend beyond the general ideas prevailing in his own
time on the precepts of fine arts; but in demonstrating and exalting their civilised
value, he was often warm of sincere eloquence. In the admiration of the
ancients he was categorical and summative; but he could notice and censure, with
very acute criticism, some of our most glorious artists. And, with all the
prestige of his prose, he also knew (what should be especially appreciated) how
to emphasize and disseminate what best was then produced in Italy in the matter
of sculpture and painting. Thus the art works of Canova, Tenerani, Camuccini
and Landi revived, genuinely emulated, in the pages of the Piacenza writer
[note of the editor: Giordani]. In this, he remained a solitary; and if we
add to his texts some beautiful pages of Gian Battista Niccolini around
Michelangelo, we believe to have all what deserves to be remembered, as the
true and worthy contribution of our literature to the figurative arts in the
first half of this century. Really this is not much!
 |
| Fig. 20) Vincenzo Camuccini, Portrait of Pope Pius VII, 1815 |
And the reader should
know here that I have not forgotten several important works on art written and
published in this time. Not, for example, the Storia della scultura (History of Sculpture) by Leopoldo Cicognara, nor the Cenacolo by Giuseppe Bossi, which gave and continues
to give much material to the scholars and historians of Leonardo’s art, nor
finally that huge but valuable warehouse of information, which is the Encyclopedia
of the Fine Arts by the Abbot Pietro Zani.
And especially I do not forget (and how would it be possible) the writings of Marquis Pietro Selvatico, the most serious scholar and one of the broadest
artistic intellects that Italy had in this century. I am so alien to ignore the
importance of those writings, that I am very much doubtful whether all the writings
published by the Italians in the last forty years can benefit from the
comparison with them. But what I am telling is more intimately related to
literature; and for this reason I am searching only for those writings that
come from a pure literary vein and mark a confluence and a healthy fusion of
the literary and artistic spirit. So our inventory continues to be, alas, a
poor one!" [27]
 |
| Fig. 21) The first issue of Il Conciliatore 1818 |
If the judgment on the neo-classic early
nineteenth century was disenchanted, things
did not go better in the field of romanticism: "In fact, in the other field, in the age of new or romantic
literature as it was proposed to call it, things did not go any better. The people
of the Conciliatore were almost
completely disinterested in figurative arts or, at least, they left no
remarkable witness that they thought about them thoroughly and studied them at
the time they wanted enthusiastically to renew Italian culture. And this was a
big evil, since from those minds, maybe a bit doting on novelties but certainly
alive, active and free, we could have had the start of a beautiful and
strong art literature. And it was, above all, a serious misfortune that
Alessandro Manzoni, who was unparalleled to all the others in the greatness of his
intelligence and the vastness of the intentions, kept the same abstention, so
much differing in this from his German brother Wolfgang Goethe .
And so our literature,
from 1921 onwards, was born and grew, indifferent or almost, to the great
artistic movement that warmed the letters of men all over Europe at that time.
What a contrast, for
example, between Italy and France in those days! There was in everyone's
conviction that literature and art could not be separated and that a unique issue
of renewal reinvigorated both of them. Against the precepts of David's school,
young innovators took stance by preaching other ideals. The keepers of
tradition kept their banner high; the controversy was heating up to fury; newspapers
and circles were invaded by the artistic question. How many speeches around Bonaparte Visiting the Plague
Victims of Jaffa, the Oedipus and the The Raft of the Medusa! the The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, and
Dante's Boat! There was no young
writer who did not think about becoming famous by joining art discussions; And the very serious men who turned to politics, felt the need to strenghten themselves in this lively stream of considerations, as if they were contemporaries of Pericles." [28]
 |
| Fig. 22) Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, 1804 |
 |
| Fig. 23) Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819 |
 |
| Fig. 24) Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, 1834 |
 |
| Fig. 25) Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822 |
Panzacchi used twice the term 'letteratura artistica' in the
previously mentioned passages of the essay “La letteratura e l’arte in Italia” (Literature and Art in Italy)
published in the collection of essays "Nel campo dell'arte” (In the field of art) of 1897. Schlosser used the term Kunstliteratur for the first time in
1896, in his Quellenbuch zur Kunstgeschichte des Abendländischen Mittelalters: ausgewählte Texte des viertenbis fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Book of Sources on the History of Western
Medieval Art: Selected Texts Between the Fourth and the Fifteenth Century). In both cases, art
literature was meant to encompass all written production on art, whether it had
been written by artists, literates or intellectuals.
The theme was taken up by Panzacchi - in a more general
sense - in the introduction to 1902 Lipparini's "History of Art".
“Read, with this
caveat, the many art treatises that were abundant in Italy at the end of the
16th century; and you will be convinced that there is almost no need to trace
the causes of decay in other reasons. Focus on the most credited writers in our
time; and you will see that the distancing of our literature from every
familiarity with properly said artistic interests was not one of the last
reasons to break art out of the feeling for nature and isolate it from the life
of the nation. How much difference with the golden age that preceded it!
Artists, humanists, poets breathed, so to speak, in the same living environment
... In each of their studies and in every effort, just as high and intense,
they felt the healthy contiguity with the great life of Italian art and the spontaneous
exchange of energies and inspiration. Without going back to the artistic
fraternity of Dante and Giotto, how could one dissect, for example, the work of
Mantegna, Botticelli and our best Quattrocento artists from the poetry of
Sannazzaro and Poliziano? Ariosto, Castiglione, Aretino, Caro, and Varchi
invoked all some immortal contemporary artist, for the simple reasons that the
lives and the efforts of the latter could not be fully understood if we did not
notice or intend also the streams of ideal life that kept them together in
different ways. On the border of the two glorious examples, one could see the
emergence of giant spirits like Leonardo or Michelangelo, attesting not only
the divine brotherhood, but the continuity and fusion of the two cultures.” [29]
To study art literature meant therefore, for
Panzacchi, to go to the heart of the aesthetic phenomenon, and fully understand
the reasons why artists - in the broader sense - pursued the search for the
beautiful. It is art literature that created the reasons for art, and not vice
versa. This is the reason explaining why the teaching of art could only be
literary. And also the reasons that led Panzacchi to conceive his 1902
anthology as the most comprehensive of his texts on art.
End of Part One
NOTES
[1] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti: antologia, Milano, Tipografia editrice L. F. Cogliati,
1902, 535 pages.
[3] Venturi, Adolfo – Enrico Panzacchi, Il libro degli artisti, in L'arte: rivista di storia dell'arte medievale e moderna, Issue 1, 1903, page 75.
[4] Giannantonio, Valeria – Enrico Panzacchi. Il
critico e il letterato, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2017, 168 pages.
[5] Gaye, Giovanni -
Carteggio inedito d'artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, pubblicato ed illustrato
con documenti pure inediti dal dott. Giovanni Gaye, Firenze : G. Molini,
1839-1840.
[6] Gualandi, Michelangelo -
Nuova raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura : scritte da'
più celebri personaggi dei secoli XV. a XIX., Bologna : A spese dell'editore
ed annotatore, 1844-56.
[7] Campori Giuseppe,
Lettere artistiche inedite, Modena, Soliani, 1866
[8] Gaetano Milanesi e Carlo
Pini, La scrittura di artisti italiani, 3 volumi, Firenze, Le Monnier.
[9] Atti del Congresso
internazionale di scienze storiche (Roma, 1-9 aprile 1903), pages 39-42.
[10] Panzacchi, Enrico - L’arte
nei secolo XIX, Livorno, Belforte, 1901, 101 pages. Quotation at pages 17 and
19.
[11] Panzacchi, Enrico – L’esposizione artistica a
Venezia (1895), in: Nel campo dell’arte. Assaggi di critica, Bologna, Ditta
Nicola Zanichelli, 1987, pages 151-211.
[13] Si veda: http://archivio.corriere.it/Archivio/interface/view.shtml#!/MjovZXMvaXQvcmNzZGF0aWRhY3AxL0AxMzk1OTE%3D
[14] See: http://archivio.corriere.it/Archivio/interface/view.shtml#!/NjovZXMvaXQvcmNzZGF0aWRhY3M0L0A5MzMyNQ%3D%3D
[15] Insegnamento della
Storia delle Belle arti, Circolare n.86, in “Bollettino ufficiale del ministero
dell’Istruzione pubblica’, anno XXVII, vol. I, n. 47, 22 Novembre 1900, pp.
1981-1982
[16] See:
https://archive.org/stream/rivistadarte00fire#page/n241/mode/2up/search/panzacchi e http://archivio.corriere.it/Archivio/interface/view.shtml#!/MTovZXMvaXQvcmNzZGF0aWRhY3AxL0AxNzk1OTU%3D
https://archive.org/stream/rivistadarte00fire#page/n241/mode/2up/search/panzacchi e http://archivio.corriere.it/Archivio/interface/view.shtml#!/MTovZXMvaXQvcmNzZGF0aWRhY3AxL0AxNzk1OTU%3D
[17] Lipparini, Giuseppe -
Storia dell'arte, Introduzione di Enrico Panzacchi, Firenze, Barbera, 1902, 448
pages. Quotation at pages 31.
[18] Panzacchi, Enrico – La letteratura e l’arte in
Italia, in: Nel campo dell’arte. Assaggi di critica, Bologna, Ditta Nicola
Zanichelli, 1897, pages 73-93. The reference to ‘letteratura artistica’ is at
pages 78 and 85.
[19] Circolare Nasi. n. 70.
in "Bollettino ufficiale del Ministero dell'Istruzione Pubblica",
anno XII. vol. II. n. 44. 29 ottobre 1903, pp. 1798-1799
[20] Venturi, Adolfo –
Enrico Panzacchi, quoted, p. 75
[21] Panzacchi, Enrico - L’arte
nei secolo XIX, (quoted), p. 35
and following.
[22] Lev Nikolaevič
Tolstoj, Che cosa è l'arte, Introduction by Enrico Panzacchi, Milano, Treves,
1904, XLVII and 264 pages.
[23] Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj,
Che cosa è l'arte, (quoted), p. xlv
[24] Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj,
Che cosa è l'arte, (quoted), p. xlv
[25] Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj,
Che cosa è l'arte, (quoted), p. xlv-xlvi
[26] Panzacchi, Enrico – La letteratura e l’arte in
Italia, (quoted), pp. 79-80
[27] Panzacchi, Enrico – La letteratura e l’arte in
Italia, (quoted), pp. 83-85
[28] Panzacchi,
Enrico – La letteratura e l’arte in Italia, (citato), pp. 85-86
[29] Lipparini, Giuseppe -
Storia dell'arte, (quoted), pp.vi-vii
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