History of Art Literature Anthologies
Click here to see all the anthologies reviewed in the series
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 Two
As we saw in the first part of this post,
Panzacchi always linked literature and art. Art literature was implicitly
defined by him as that vast space in the world of letters crossing writings of literates and of artists on aesthetic issues. The crucial role of
the encounter between language and image was evidenced by the fact that Panzacchi took advantage of the few months of his presence in the government of
the kingdom in 1900 to introduce art history into high school programs, integrating it
precisely in the frame of the teaching of letters. Two years later, in 1902,
the publication of the anthology The Book
of the Artists, the widest of his writings on art, offered professors and
students a wide anthology of authors of Italian art literature. It was one of
Panzacchi's last efforts, since he passed away two years later in 1904.
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| Fig. 27) Giampietro Zanotti, Warnings to a Young Man for his Introduction to Painting, 1756 |
We are considering herafter the contents of the
anthology, analysing Panzacchi’s selection of around 250 pieces, of which one
hundred were poetic texts. We are doing this with some degree of detail, because we feel that
Panzacchi wanted to create, for the first time, a
complete canon of art history sources in Italy with his anthology. From a quantitative point of
view, the main points of reference for the anthology he compiled were Leonardo
da Vinci (with fifty-eight chapters of the Treaty
of Painting), Vasari (with about forty quotations, mostly quotations from
the Lives, but also letters he sent
or received), Cennino Cennini (with eighteen chapters of his Book of the Art), Michelangelo (with
eighteen texts, including poems and letters he sent or received), Benvenuto
Cellini (with thirteen quotations from the autobiography, treatises and
verses), Gian Battista Marino (with ten poems and letters), Filippo Baldinucci
(with eight passages from the Notizie dei
professori del disegno - Notes on the Teachers of Drawing), Francesco Milizia
(eight quotations) and Salvator Rosa (five poems and letters). An important
role was also assigned to the Renaissance dispute over the comparison of arts
(with eight texts of various authors, brought together in the anthology so as
to identify them as part of a single discussion). Among the authors of recent
years, it was relevant his interest for two renowned artists, both only recently
deceased at the time of publication: Giovanni Segantini (with six passages)
and Telemaco Signorini (with fourteen quotations in prose and poetry).
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| Fig. 28) Giuliano Cassiani, Selected Poems, 1794 |
Since the Seventeenth century, the contribution
to the anthology from authors living in Emilia-Romagna was really noticeable.
In that age, the inputs by Malvasia, Scannelli and Rosignoli were added to the
whole material produced by the artists of the Bologna school (writings by the
three Carraccis and Domenichino, Guercino, Guido Reni and Albani). In the
sections on the Eighteenth century and the Nineteenth century Panzacchi quoted other artists and literates from the same region although, at least in some
cases, they were much less known at national level. This was the case of Zanotti,
Luigi Crespi, Cassiani and Passeri (1700) and Costa, Fontanesi and Serra
(1800). Possibly, he included them in the Book of the Artists to represent the continuity of local art literature in his own region.
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| Fig. 29) Niccola Passeri, Reasoned examination over the nobility of painting and sculpture, 1783 |
What were the sources of Panzacchi? At least at
a first examination, it seems that all texts came from libraries rather than
from archives, that is, they were all already printed works and not
manuscripts. In other terms, Panzacchi surely consulted a broad spectrum of
already available works, but did not enlarge the perimeter of scientific
knowledge. Considering, for example, the Emilian authors already quoted in the
section of the eighteenth century, Zanotti’s Avvertimenti per lo incamminamento di un giovane alla Pittura
(Warnings to a Young Man for his Introduction to Painting) existed in printed
editions in two versions (1756 and 1828), the Poesie scelte (Selected Poems) by Giuliano Cassiani in editions of
1794, 1802 and 1897, and finally Nicola Passeri’s Esame ragionato sopra la nobiltà della pittura e della scultura
(Reasoned examination over the nobility of painting and sculpture) in an
edition of 1783. More generally, the collections of Bottari, Gaye and Gualandi
obviously offered to Panzacchi an important repertoire of letters. Also the
name of Gaetano Milanesi was recurrently quoted as a source for Tuscan texts.
For poems, one of the most frequently use repertory was Poesie italiane inedite di dugento autori (Unpublished Italian
poems from two hundred authors) by Francesco Trucchi (1846).
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| Fig. 30) Francesco Trucchi, Unpublished Italian poems from two hundred authors from the origin of the language to the XVII century, 1846 |
It seems equally important to point out what
Panzacchi obviously decided not to include in the anthology. Bellori was
mentioned only in a footnote. There were only few Venetians (Algarotti, Canova
and Goldoni), probably because - in the world of the University of Bologna dominated
by Carducci - it was difficult to propose to a wide public texts not written in
Tuscan, the language officially chosen as common communication tool for the
whole of Italy. With the exception of Milizia, there was no treatise from the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth century, probably because they were seen as not
belonging to literature. We miss also the texts of the early historians of
Italian art, including those of great diffusion (for example, Lanzi at the end
of the Eighteenth century) and the writings of the Italian connoisseurs of the Nineteenth century (from Cavalcaselle to Morelli), probably because Panzacchi
did not consider them as part of the magical encounter between literature and
art. Finally, there was no text of foreign artists.
Let us now consider separately the various
sections, trying to understand - as far as possible - the reasons that led
Panzacchi to select the authors.
Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries
In the introduction to the first chapter,
Panzacchi returned to the topics he had been dealing with ten years earlier in
a conference on “Le origini dell'arte
nuova” (The Origins of New Art), held in Florence in 1890 for a round of
meetings on the "The dawn of Italian Life" [30]. In that text,
Panzacchi wanted to take distance from the typically romantic movements
rediscovering the art of High Middle Ages: "What are, aesthetically speaking, the Middle Ages? One cannot speak of
the artistic awakening that manifested itself in the Thirteenth century without
tracing back, either a little or much, the preceding time. (...) For me, I say
right away, the Middle Ages are essentially un-aesthetic. Resellers of this era
are opposed to this affirmation, and adduce numerous and important facts to
prove the opposite, but I believe that they are ambiguous, as they confuse the
true Middle Ages with facts that are precisely the denial and the principle of
end of that time. Imagine: there are some who put the Divine Comedy among the
glories of the Middle Ages! (...) During the previous centuries, you will never
find true and complete artworks. (...) And then, in the Middle Ages, the
fantasy of the ugly prevails excessively" [31].
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| Fig. 31) Apsidal fresco with Christ Pantocrator, San Clemente de Tahull, about 1123 |
According to the text of 1890, both the images
of Christ Pantocrator of Byzantine tradition and the Gothic churches with their
decorations belonged to the ugly. And yet, unlike other countries, in Italy
even during the Middle Ages, in a fantastic and mythological form, the memory
of classical beauty had been preserved, which enabled the "artistic resurgence in Italy and Tuscany"
thanks to Niccolò Pisano and Giotto. In this context, in the 1890 conference,
Panzacchi relied on an ancient rabbinic legend, "resuscitated and commented" by Ernest Renan (1823-1892), the
French historian of religions for whom he had a veneration (he devoted to him
one of the Saggi critici [32] – Critical Essays – of 1896 and quoted
him continuously in many writings). According to this tradition, during the
Middle Ages the people of Rome would have hidden the most beautiful old statues
of women in their homes, not declaring their discovery to ecclesial
authorities, to be able to admire them in secret. In this way, the Italian
people would have secretly preserved good taste and love for the beautiful
[33].
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| Fig. 32) Léon Bonna, Portrait of Ernest Renan, 1892 |
The anthology opened with the first chapter of
the Libro dell’arte (Book of the Art)
by Cennino Cennini (here quoted as the Trattato
della pittura - Treaty of Painting – as in the Milanesi edition of 1859).
From a chronological point of view, Cennini's text rather belonged to the
concluding phase of this period (and, according to some scholars, it was an
innovative text of the first humanism). Nevertheless, Panzacchi published the
entire first chapter at the beginning of his Book of the Artists, as the first piece of his anthology and
therefore as the true founding act of art literature. I think he did it for
what was written there about "fantasy"
and "hand operation" and on
the modernity of the artistic language that moved with Giotto from the Greek to
the Latin manner. He proposed seventeen other chapters of Cennino, but, significantly, he did not include them immediately after the first one, to emphasize that this first
section had an absolute value on the rebirth of art, as confirmed by other
passages in the section, drawn from the texts of Ghiberti and Vasari (not
belonging to the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries).
Panzacchi, as we said, did not share the
late-romantic enthusiasm for the recovery of the myths of the Middle Ages. And
yet, despite the brief citations from the statutes of the art of painters and
goldsmiths in Florence and Siena, his attitude was not the recovery of old documents, according to a rigorous philological method which had been spread in the Austrian world by Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg
(1817-1885) and in Italy by Gaetano Milanesi (1813-1895). Panzacchi’s picture
of the Twentieth and Thirteenth centuries was instead dominated by his love for literature, as
evidenced by the inclusion in the anthology of texts on art by Giovanni
Villani, Dante Alighieri, Franco Sacchetti and Francesco Petrarca.
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| Fig. 33) Andrea Orcagna, Saint Matthew with scenes of his life, around 1367 |
Panzacchi's specific interest in poetry as the
most noble expression of the artists' feelings was witnessed by the beautiful
verses of Andrea Orcagna (circa 1310-1368), one of the first global artists
(he was painter, sculptor, architect and poet). Among them, I chose the verses
on "The Miserable Effects of Gaming",
drawn by Panzacchi from Trucchi’s collection of Italian poems published in
1846. I am translating these mediaeval verses (like all others) in a simplified
modern English prose, without any attempt to reproduce the original metrics and
musicality.
“Even if I had hundred
tongues, I could not tell how bitter my life turned, neither could I narrate all
my afflictions nor the loss of my so dear soul.
The cause of
everything is the devilish foolishness of gambling: for I could no longer live
with virtue, if it was not due to the help of fortune, which always protected
me from my grave calamities.
I am destroyed by you, vicious gaming; I am losing and winning, and I forgot Christ and the Saints;
And the body is so tired, slammed and won, that I cannot keep it alive, even though I show a living image on my face.
I never managed to overcome this vice of mine, so that reason could prevail; but I would prefer to die rather than to win money” [34].
I am destroyed by you, vicious gaming; I am losing and winning, and I forgot Christ and the Saints;
And the body is so tired, slammed and won, that I cannot keep it alive, even though I show a living image on my face.
I never managed to overcome this vice of mine, so that reason could prevail; but I would prefer to die rather than to win money” [34].
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| Fig. 34) Andrea Orcagna, Tabernacle, Death and Assumption of the Virgin, 1355-1359 |
Fifteenth Century
The section of the anthology on the Fifteenth century opened with the architects of the early Renaissance (Alberti
and Brunelleschi) and closed with Leonardo, who was therefore considered - to
use Vasari‘s terminology - as the last of the great artists of the 'modern manner', and not as the first of the 'new sixteenth-century manner', thus following a different logic
from that of the Lives.
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| Fig. 35) Leonardo da Vinci, The newly highlighted Treatise of Painting, with the life of the same author, written by Rafaelle du Fresne, 1651 |
As to the architects of the first Fifteenth
century, Leon Battista Alberti was present with pages from his Latin treatises On painting and On statue (in the Italian translation by Cosimo Bartoli) and two
short poems in Tuscan. The texts of the Treatises were drawn from the version
published in 1651 by Giacomo Langlois, who had included them in the appendix to
Leonardo’s Treaty on Painting. Also
two more recent versions of the Langlois Edition (respectively 1733 and 1786)
were available, but Panzacchi had access to the first edition. A more modern
critical version (in Italian and in German) of the texts of Alberti's treatises
had also been published in Vienna in the famous 1877 edition by Hubert
Janitschek (as part of the positivist-oriented Viennese collection of the
sources of art history). It is not excluded that Panzacchi did not know it.
Alberti’s poems were drawn from the already mentioned Trucchi’s collection of
poetry. The same applied to three Brunelleschi’s sonnets, one of which is of
great bitterness. I would like to display it because it seems to confirm that
feelings of profound dissatisfaction about the functioning of society belonged
to all ages, including those (such as Florence in the fifteenth century) which
are now considered as an age of collective excellence.
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| Fig. 36) Filippo Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel, starting from 1429 |
“I see that the world
goes back and forth, because those who have to give asks those who have to
receive, and those who are promising do not want to fulfil what they pledged,
and those who offend then accuse the injured.
Absolved is the thief,
the just is punished; and betrayal is estimated as a surplus of expertise. And
so those in power are deceiving each other, and whoever does worse, gets the
best result.
I see fathers
abandoning sons, and brothers beating each other: friendship, reason, and
factual documents no longer matter.
And then the one who
is better in the art of betrayal can get his share, and instead the one who is
less experienced will get the worst.
And it will be however
necessary that the reason clears these so gloomy notes, well before a long
season has passed” [35].
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| Fig. 37) Benozzo Gozzoli, The Cavalcade of the Magi, Southern Wall, 1459-60, fresco, Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence |
The structure of the anthology, as it was
already said, was chronological. However, I believe that the section of the
anthology on the Fifteenth century can be 'de-structured' by identifying five
'pillars'. The first was the story-telling by Vasari, a widely present source
of information in the anthology. Of his Lives
Panzacchi cited pages about Brunelleschi, Donatello, Andrea del Castagno,
Domenico Veneziano, Fra Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, Ghiberti, Desiderio da
Settignano, Lorenzo Costa, Iacopo Bellini, Ercole de' Roberti, Filippino Lippi,
Verrocchio, Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Francesco Francia, Cecca and Leonardo,
here quoted in the order in which they appeared in the anthology. The second
pillar consisted of the letters that artists addressed to the most important
power-holders of their time (Benozzo Gozzoli to Pietro de' Medici, Andrea
Mantegna to Francesco Gonzaga, again Mantegna to the Marquise Isabella Gonzaga,
Giovan Giacomo Calandra to the same marquise), all taken from Gaye’s collection
of letters. They were the testimony of the social success which artists enjoyed
in the fifteenth century. The third pillar included incepts from various
autobiographical texts (Ghiberti’s Commentaries,
Alessio Baldovinetti's Memoirs,
Filarete's Memoirs) quoted from
nineteenth-century editions, and a passage from Francesco Colonna’s Polifilo: artists became authors of
literary works with their own defined identity. There were also, as the fourth
pillar, long and purely literary poetic texts, like Poliziano's Giostra, the Cronaca Rimata (Rhymed Chronicle) by Giovanni Santi, father of
Raphael (cited from the famous German monograph by Passavant on Raphael and his father, translated into
Italian in 1882 with the title "Raffaello
d'Urbino e il padre suo, Giovanni Santi"), and the most famous Triumph of Bacco and Arianna by Lorenzo
the Magnificent: art had become one of the subjects of primary reflection of
intellectuals of the time, including those who shared no experience with the
materiality of art making. The last pillar consisted of a series of epitaphs
and funeral inscriptions that testified to the need of society to remember the
personalities of art that had passed away, the first necessary requirement for any
identification of art history.
Here are two epitaphs on the young Masaccio
(the first one by Annibal Caro, the second anonymous), both originally included
in Vasari’s Lives.
“I painted, and my
painting was equal to the true; I set it, I enlivened it, I gave it motion, I
gave it a feeling. Buonarroti may well teach to everyone else, but he will just
have to learn from me alone” [36].
“If someone was
looking for my marble or my name: the church is the marble, a chapel is the
name. I died, because nature was envious of how art needed and desired my brush” [37].
In relative terms, the widest space throughout
the anthology was to the benefit of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise of Painting. Panzacchi devoted to him a conference during
the 1890s, published in a collection of Conferenze
e discorsi (Conferences and Speeches) in 1899. These were presentations to a
non-specialized public (in that case, a uniquely female non-expert public), which
confirmed Panzacchi's vein as a disseminator. As to Leonardo, the scholar aimed
to clarify that, in his view, he was first and foremost an artist and only
incidentally a scientist" [38]. “In
fact, as much as I have learned from my passionate study of the Leonardian
manuscripts, now largely published, I think that while the scientist sometimes
seems to hide the artist, in reality the artist is always in charge. The compass of Leonardo's mind is always art. Just read a few pages of the Treatise in which he celebrates the praises of
painting, his favourite among arts, to understand from which overwhelming
aesthetic enthusiasm his soul was heated and moved. Thus many times, while you
would first say that the scientific inquiry prepares Leonardo's art work, the
real truth is the opposite: that is, the work of science is nothing but an
extension, so to speak, of the artistic research. And with this great difference:
while other artists of his time stopped at the semblance of things, and were
trying to portray it according to rules, Leonardo, driven by his very peculiar
fervour of mind, also went well beyond the artistic semblance, and wanted to
find, and indeed found, its raison d’être in a higher speculative reason"
[39]. This is why Panzacchi,
alongside pages clearly relevant to understanding the painter's style, such as
chiaroscuro, also included in the anthology passages of the Treatise on how to paint trees, meadows
and leaves: it was always the theme of natural art.
Sixteenth Century
The introductory section of the chapter about
the Sixteenth century replicates the 'traditional' separation between the first
four decades of the century, which would have marked the culmination of Italian
art, and the second half of the century, which would be characterized to the
contrary by an inexorable decline. The anthology condemned therefore Mannerism
as an involute form. Panzacchi assigned a central role to the papacy to
establish Roman art as the climax of Italian art in the first four decades of
the century. He cited Raffaello's letter to Pope Leo X of 1519 on the
protection and preservation (or even reconstruction) of the monuments of pagan
Rome as an
example of how humanistic culture strengthened and even became the core of the
Church’s public policies. Incidentally, exactly to the opposite, in the same
years that letter was often mentioned by the new streams of art criticism in
Germany as a paramount example of bad management of intellectual resources in
papal Rome: the pontiff distracted the main artist of the time from his main
tasks, nominating him as chief commissioner for antiquity and excavations of
Rome in 1516, thus leading to a slowdown in his pictorial production. After the
1540s, decades of decadence followed: "Styles
corrupt themselves and manners triumph" [40].
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| Fig. 38) Raffaello Sanzio, Letter from Raffaello d'Urbino to Pope Leo X, rediscovered by Chevalier Pietro Ercole Visconti, 1840 |
Adopting the same technique we have already used to
‘deconstruct’ the chronological sequencing of texts, we can prove that there
were obviously aspects of continuity with the account of events in the 15th
century, based on the same 'pillars'. The narrative role of Vasari continued to
be preeminent, not only with artist biographies but also with 'programmatic'
pages: the section of the Sixteenth Century was opened by the pages of Vasari
(in the introduction to the third part of the Lives) on the three periods of Italian art. To them were added
other quotations from Vasari, including discussions on the relationship between
painting and sculpture and on tempera painting (in the introduction to the Lives) and the description of the origin
of the Lives themselves (contained in
the Vita di sé medesimo, his own
autobiographic section). The usual biographical pages of Vasari were taken from
the Lives of Giorgione, Sodoma,
Correggio, Piero di Cosimo, Tribolo, Rustici, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto,
Sebastiano del Piombo, Marcantonio Raimondi and Titian.
The letters to powerful personalities were
represented, as already mentioned, by the text Raphael sent to Leo X
(accompanied by less demanding letters, such as to Francesco Francia and Count
Baldassarre Castiglione), but also by the correspondence between Titian and
Federigo Gonzaga as well as the Spanish Crown Prince. Autobiographical texts
included the Autobiography by
Raffaello da Montelupo and, above all, the Life
of Benvenuto Cellini. As regards poetry, Panzacchi interest continued to be
witnessed by the verses of many authors: in the same order as they can be read
in the anthology, I would like to recall the poems by Bembo, Bramante, Ariosto,
Giovanni Della Casa, Francesco Francia (with the mentioned suspicion that it
might be a fake), Francesco Berni, Giovan Battista Strozzi the elder,
Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Bronzino and Domenico Poggini. This richness
clearly gives the impression that producing poetry in the sixteenth century was
an even more widespread activity than in the fifteenth century. For artists,
compiling verses was not simply a joke to satisfy the spirit, but a powerful
communication tool. These were, to a large extent, the same Tuscan art circles
where, only a few decades later, the modern opera would be born, a sign that
society was looking for new communicative tools combining arts.
Here are the lines in which Giovan Battista
Strozzi declared his admiration for the Pietà of Michelangelo, using religious
arguments with great freedom, a sign that the time of the theological rigidity
of the counter-reformation had not yet come.
“Oh Virgin Mary do not
continue to cry beauty and honesty, and sorrow and mercy, as strong as you are
still doing, like if they were dead in living marble. Our Lord and your spouse,
your son and father will awake again ahead of time; and you are his only bride,
daughter and mother” [41].
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| Fig. 39) Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498–1499 |
It goes without saying that the Book of the Artists of course devoted a
lot of attention to Buonarroti, both with “sonnets and madrigals”, but also
with some letters, also sent to friends and family. Here too, the relationship
with power was central: Cosimo I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, turned
to Michelangelo in 1557, inviting him to return home after his long stay in
Rome. To Michelangelo were also devoted numerous quotations from the biography
on him written by Ascanio Condivi. Here are some verses of Buonarroti himself,
which I am reporting in the 1885 translation by Ednah D. Cheney.
To bind me faithful to
my calling high,
By birth was given me beauty’s light,
By birth was given me beauty’s light,
Lanterns and mirror of
two noble arts;
And other faith is but a falsity.
This bears the soul alone to its proud height;
To paint, to sculpture, this all strength imparts.
And other judgements foolish are and blind,
Which draw from sense the beauty that can move,
And bear to heaven each heart with wisdom sane.
No road divine our eyes infirm may find;
And other faith is but a falsity.
This bears the soul alone to its proud height;
To paint, to sculpture, this all strength imparts.
And other judgements foolish are and blind,
Which draw from sense the beauty that can move,
And bear to heaven each heart with wisdom sane.
No road divine our eyes infirm may find;
The mortal may not
from that world remove
Whence without grace to hope to rise is vain [42].
Whence without grace to hope to rise is vain [42].
Finally, another author who occupied a prominent role was Benvenuto Cellini. Formidable and still exciting today are his pages in which he describes the fusion of the Perseus, drawn from his Life. Here are to the contrary the verses with which Benvenuto Cellini challenged his rival Baccio Bandinelli in poetic terms, after confronting him in front of Cosimo de 'Medici with an accusation of plagiarism:
O my knight, if you
were also a poet, albeit a rough one, as I am, I would always like to receive
your verses and to send mine to you: we would make a good and discreet
friendship.
And instead, at the
Duke's presence, we already had an open public contention: and then you made
laugh the hell, and I also did, and we cursed the sacred gods. One of us has a
perverse and restless nature.
While I killed many
men, you destroyed many marbles. In your shame, the destroyed statues are still
visible, while my dead have disappeared under ground.
Does perhaps one of us
talk and behave hopelessly, as we both give to Neptune, great god of the sea, responsibility
of this just war between us? [43].
[Note of the editor: Among others, Cellini and
Bandinelli competed for the Fountain of Neptune in Florence, then executed by Bartolomeo
Ammanati].
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| Fig. 40) Titian, Portrait of Pietro Aretino, 1545 |
The writings of some scholars show that they
acted as intellectual transmission point between art and literature. One of
them was Pietro Aretino, of which the anthology hosted letters with Sebastiano
del Piombo, Veronica Gambara, Lorenzo Lotto, Michelangelo, Titian and
Tintoretto.
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| Fig. 41) Benvenuto Cellini, The Treatises on the Goldsmith's Art and on Sculpture, edited by Carlo Milanesi, 1857 |
Treatises were well represented. The Florentine
writer Agnolo Firenzuola wrote, in 1552 (at least, this is what Panzacchi wrote: in fact, the first edition dated back to 1541) the Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Dialogue on the beauties of
women), i.e. a text focusing on the central issue, for Panzacchi, of art as a
source of delight. Paolo Pino produced a few years before the Dialogo della Pittura (Dialogue on
Painting), consulted in the original edition of 1541, and cited sections also
dedicated to female beauty. Ludovico Dolce gave the floor to Aretino in another
Dialogo della Pittura in 1557, whose
passages in the anthology celebrated Dürer and Raphael. The same genre of the
dialogue was also represented in the anthology by Andrea Gilio, with his
1561 work just entitled Dialogue. Benvenuto
Cellini was present with pages of the Trattato
dell’Oreficeria (Treatise on the Goldsmith's Art), Andrea Palladio with I quattro libri dell'architettura (The
four books of architecture) 1570, Raffaello Borghini with Il Riposo (The Rest) 1584 and finally Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo with
the Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura
(Treatise of the Art of Painting) 1584 and the Idea del Tempio della Pittura (Idea of the Temple of Painting) 1590.
The series in the anthology (which had been opened by singing the beauty of
women) was closed by a work already influenced by the culture of
counterreformation like Armenini’s I Veri
Precetti della Pittura (The True Precepts of Painting (1586).
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| Fig. 42) Two lessons by M. Benedetto Varchi, 1549 |
And yet, as we have already said, the anthology
identified the heart of Sixteenth-century art literature in the discussion
organized by Benedetto Varchi on "the
question of the preminence between painting and sculpture". This
scholar topic had been previously treated already by Alberti, Leonardo and
Baldassare Castiglione, but became fundamental in the Sixteenth century. At the
centre of Panzacchi's analysis there was the volume that Varchi published in
1549 at Torrentino’s publishing house, with a lesson on the theme, based on
opinions he had asked for to a series of artists. Another important source for
Panzacchi was the discussion on the theme, contained in the 1857 introduction
by Carlo Milanesi of The Treatises on the
Goldsmith's Art and on Sculpture of Benvenuto Cellini. Panzacchi included
in his anthology the opinions that Varchi had collected from Cellini, Pontormo,
Giovambattista Del Tasso, Sangallo and Michelangelo; he also added the
discussion on the topic in Raffaello Borghini's Rest. Of Varchi were also the funeral prayer for the death of
Michelangelo and a sonnet in praise of Cellini’s Perseus.
Seventeenth century
“In the Seventeenth century, the supremacy of Italian art fell. The other nations
entered the race, and often were winners in painting. The other two arts, until
the end of the century, remained ours” [44]. With these words, Panzacchi
explained, as explicitly as possible, that his goal was not to write an
anthology of 'global' art literature, but only of Italian authors. His theme
was the competition between Italian and foreign art, and there is no doubt
about his preferences: not for art as such, but for Italian art tout court. The fortune of each section
of the anthology was thus intimately tied, in his mind, to that of the fate of
national art literature: where he perceived that the Italian art literature had
produced less valuable results, he felt the need to counteract it by offering
readers a selection of texts which would be nevertheless representative of that
age. Moreover, as we will see in the next part of this post, all the literature
anthologies published in Italy between the two centuries, up to the innovative
collections of texts by Giovanni Pascoli, only embraced Italian production.
Anthologies (as well as national galleries and art history texts) were all
coding tools that were intended to 'form' a new national Italian identity.
 |
| Fig. 43) Bologna School of the Seventeenth Century, Annibale, Ludovico and Agostino Carracci, undated |
It was a clear sign of adherence to the culture
of his era. And yet Panzacchi did not share the negative attitude of his time
vis-à-vis Baroque art: "The
seventeenth century is now a disparaged century. (...) Is it really true that
the seventeenth-century painters, in general, and those of the Bolognese
School, in particular, deserve the whole severity of judgment, which now almost
unanimously criticism shows on them?" [45]. The Book of the Artists represented therefore an innovative attitude in
this case. Beyond the various general reasons to defend that century (think of
his musical interests), we cannot forget that our author was, also and above
all, a strenuous defender of the Bolognese world, which had given so much to
that century’s painting not only with the art of the Carracci, but with the
creation of the Accademia dei Desiderosi
(1582) and then the Accademia degli Incamminati (1590) and therefore with
the foundation of an important art school, which will directly or indirectly
inspire artists from Emilia-Romagna until the early eighteenth century, when
the Accademia Clementina was
re-established after a period of decline.
 |
| Fig. 44) Giampietro Zanotti, from the title page of the History of the Clementina Academy of Bologna (Bologna 1739) |
Panzacchi was inspired by Pietro Selvatico's
teachings when he explained - in the introduction to the section of the
anthology on the Sixteenth-century art literature - the foundations of the
Carraccian teaching: "(i) Study of
perspective, anatomy and those branches of general culture which have close
affinities with figurative arts [sic]; (ii) a live study in the most
appropriate circumstances, so that the artist can grasp the two main
manifestations of life, that is, motion and chiaroscuro; (iii) to compose and
colorize, having an eye on what best the great painting schools had produced
before" [46].
The wish of the Carraccis to draw a balance
from the Italian schools preceding the last decades of the sixteenth century
(the so-called 'eclecticism', which Panzacchi devoted a long note to, explaining
that it "proposed as an art rule the
design of the ancients, the colour of the Venetians, the composition of
Raphael, the grace of Correggio, the strength of Michelangelo” [47]) also
reflected an imperative that was common to the intellectual needs of Panzacchi’s
generation: to absorb - in the short space following the Italian unity - the
great variety of traditions from previous centuries, offering 'new Italians' a
comprehensive vision of fine arts, which would remain consistent with the
narrative of political unification. After all, every new art in Italy had,
always and in any case, the immanent need to systematize and rework a varied
and glorious past, in which new layers were added to several century-old
settlements. In the Book of the Artists,
this parallelism was symbolized by the similarities between two sonnets with
which two artists of different ages dwelled on the ways of drawing lessons from
the past: one by Agostino Carracci (then still considered by Panzacchi as
having a humorous meaning and today, according to the writings of Carracci by Giovanna Perini, interpreted as a tribute to his colleague Nicolo dell'Abate)
and the other by Telemaco Signorini, i.e. from the years directly preceding the
publication of the anthology.
 |
| Fig. 45) Nicolò dell’Abate, The rape of Proserpina, 1552 |
Here is the translation of the verses of
Agostino:
“Who wishes and wants
to become a good painter, must know how to draw as in Rome, to create motion
through shadow as in Venice and use color as respectably as in Lombardy;
He must imitate the
energetic way of Michelangelo, the true nature of Titian, the pure and
sovereign style of Correggio, and the perfect symmetry of Raphael;
The decor and the
foundation of Tebaldi, the ability to invent of the learned Primaticcio and a
little grace as Parmigianino.
But without so many
studies and efforts, he should simply imitate the work that our Nicolò
[dell’Abate] left here [48].
And here are Telemaco Signorini’s verses (with
the title "Recipe for doing Italian
art"):
“If I take the colour
of the Venetians, the chiaroscuro of Bologna, the drawing of Florence, and the
noble and certain grandiose art of the Romans;
If I do not neglect
the grace of Parma, but I do flavour the dish in all respects; If I do not care
about those who push back, because I will have done art for the Italians.
I am uniting these
ingredients all together, just as the nation was united, and I am making a meal
for all the teeth;
Then I will serve it
hot in Rome at the Great
Salon, and the art that opposes these prodigies
will have to excuse itself with a contraction” [49].
 |
| Fig. 46) Telemaco Signorini, The room of the troubled ladies in the hospital of Saint Boniface, 1865 |
And yet it must be said that - while Panzacchi
found the Carraccis’ teaching modern and contemporary - the prevention of the
Italian art world towards them and the common places on their eclecticism were
due to be overcome only with the exhibitions on the Drawings of the Carraccis, organized in Bologna by Dennis Mahon in
1956, and on the Masters of Seventeenth Century Emilian Painting
curated by Francesco Arcangeli in 1959, always in Bologna. That of Panzacchi
was therefore a view which for a long time was not shared broadly.
 |
| Fig. 47) Catalogue of the Exhibition on the Drawings of the Carraccis, Bologna, 1956 |
 |
| Fig. 48) Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Masters of Seventeenth Century Emilian Painting, Bologna, 1959 |
The attitude towards Caravaggio and his school
was different. Panzacchi criticized their 'naturalistic'
direction because it "denies any
authority and gives everything to the material imitation of the visible world":
it was the far echo of controversies that originated with Bellori, developed
for two centuries and were still very present in the early twentieth century. Eventually,
they would be overcome only after World War II, with the Exhibition on Caravaggio and his School, organized by
Roberto Longhi at Royal Palace in Milan 1951. If, as mentioned above, Bellori
was not among the authors included in Panzacchi’s anthology, the anti-Carracci
mutiny was represented by the statements of Francesco Albani (as testified by
Malvasia), who "could never tolerate
those following Caravaggio, considering his manner as the precipice and the
total ruin of the most noble and fulfilled virtue of painting" [50].
 |
| Fig. 49) Catalogue of the Exhibition on Caravaggio and his School, Milan, 1951 |
Let me repeat the work of 'deconstruction' of
the chronological sequence of the Seventeenth century quotations. The section
was arranged on the narration of biographical facts about several painters by
Baldinucci and Malvasia. It belonged to the former the passages of the Notizie dei professori del disegno
(Notice on the design professors) about Annibale, Ludovico and Agostino
Carracci, Domenichino, Barocci and Bernini; the latter was present with the
pages from the Lives of – once again
– Domenichino, Guercino and Guido Reni (with a touching text about the gaming vice
which also afflicted Guido Reni). Among other sources, one could list Francesco
Scannelli (Microcosmo della Pittura -
Microcosm of Painting, on Guido Reni), Giovan Battista Passeri (Vite dei pittori - Sculptor's Life, on
Pietro da Cortona) and Francesco Milizia (actually a eighteenth-century author,
with his Memorie degli architetti -
Memories of Architects, on Borromini). The texts of the Jesuit Rosignoli (with
his Pittura in Giudizio - Painting in
Judgment) continued the tradition of treatises inspired by counter-reformation.
The only letter sent by an artist to a power
person was the one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini to cardinal Richelieu. For the rest,
the letters were often communications between artists, both on art issues and
on personal themes: the Carraccis between them, Domenichino and Albani, Zuccari
and Ludovico Carracci. It may suggest that those artists were often
'team-players', to use a modern terminology, but often simply indicates that
they attended common academic institutions. The importance of family ties was
highlighted by the testimonies of Domenico and Pietro Filippo Bernini about
their father Gian Lorenzo Bernini. There was also plenty of correspondence
between artists with their clients (Ludovico Carracci to Don Carlo Ferrante,
Guido Reni to Antonio Galeazzo Fibbia, Francesco Albani to Cesare Leopardi,
Salvator Rosa to Giovan Battista Ricciardi), indicating the artists’ economic
dependence from affluent people, who were however no longer holding absolute
power at the top of the institutions. The citation of some pages of Guercino’s Journal and the medical report with
Borromini's statements on his suicide attempt (which eventually led to his
death within a few days) were, in many respects, only curiosity.
 |
| Fig. 50) Salvator Rosa, Scenes of witchcraft, circa 1645-1649 |
 |
| Fig. 51) Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Mercury and the dishonest woodcutter, circa 1663 |
As for poetry, it is worth pencilling the
satire "The Painting" by
Salvator Rosa. On him Panzacchi wrote: "It was one of the most bizarre wits in Italy. He was a genre painter of
portraits and battles, and also one of the most notable landscape painters. He
interpreted with great inspiration the horrors of wild or enraged nature, the
hurricanes of earth and sea, the gorges of the worlds inhabited by shadows and
bandits. (...) He was, as one can see from the above verses, a vigorous and
witty satiric poet. His satire is of extraordinary importance for the study of
art and its seventeenth-century developments; the first three are devoted to
music, poetry, and painting” [51]. In the latter satire, Rosa - who was
himself a fanciful painter and far from traditional iconographic criteria -
attacked frontally the activity of the so-called "bamboccianti" (literally, puppet painters). They were
foreign-born (mostly Dutch) painters active in Rome (Rosa called them "ultramontani", i.e. transalpine)
specialised in the caricature painting of popular scenes (see here the Roman Carnival by Jan Miel).
 |
| Fig. 52) Jan Miel, Roman Carnival, 1653 |
And yet, despite Salvator Rosa's desire to
signal his disapproval of what he thought to be an excessive behaviour by the
‘bamboccianti’, the text of his satire was so explicit that it was even
censored by Panzacchi: the verse "the
one pisses, the other shits, the other sells the tripe for a cat" was
modified in " the one p…, the other s…, the other sells the tripe for a
cat ".
"There is then
someone who spends his time with his brush to paint hats with wide wings and
filthy things, porters, brats and pickpockets,
grape harvests,
wagons, crowded places, pubs, groups of drunkards and guzzlers, stingy tobacco
sellers or barbers,
cowards and lazybones,
who are looking for louse and those who scream and sell cooked pears to the baron,
one who is [pissing],
the other who is [shitting], one who sells the tripe for the cat, Gimignano who
plays, one repairs a mug, one a scuff.
And the painter
believes today not to do well, if he does not paint a group of straps, or if in
painting he does not portray the game with dice. [Translator's Note: literally,
the ‘baron’ painting, i.e. the game with the baron, which was played with six
dice]" [52].
A very special place was reserved to Gian
Battista Marino (1569-1625). In addition to a letter to Ludovico Carracci, the Book of the Artists contained nine
poetic compositions: one in honour of Annibale Carracci and seven celebrating
as many paintings: the Herodias with the
head of St. John the Baptist by Annibale, the Salmace and the Bacchus and
Arianna by Ludovico, Agostino's Polyphemus,
the Calisto and the Apollo and Dafne
by Guido Reni, and the Herodias with the
head of St. John the Baptist by Lavinia Fontana. It should be said that, in
most cases, these were fictitious pictures, which did not correspond to any
actually observed paintings (or perhaps only to drawings and sketches).
Below are two poems by Gian Battista Marino on
the same theme, Herodias with the head of
St. John the Baptist: in the first version for a fictive painting by
Annibale Carracci and the second one for an imaginative picture by Lavinia
Fontana.
“What a fateful tragedy: the sacred head of the good prophet, truncated
and bloodless, made the white sheet dirty of red blood! Ah, only real cans may
be rich of such foods. You nefarious woman, believe me: such a food cannot
belong to a poor table” [53].
“While the Jewish dancer, twisting her stunning foot, asks in words
that what sight cannot tolerate, the Palestinian king - drunk with lust and
wine - violates the oath and promises her even the blessed head. Very deceitful
woman, because only those who are so mischievous can take advantage of others'
perfidy” [54].
Marino would seem to be the perfect
case for a fertile encounter between literature and painting, as in Salvator
Rosa's case. And yet, in spite of the many quotes in the anthology, Panzacchi's
was very reticent, simply stating in the Book
of the Artists: "In the
Galleria [Gallery], the poet celebrated
works of art with rhymes full of smallish concepts and with harmonious verses.
Marino, whose life belongs to literary history, was born in Naples in 1569 and
died in 1625" [55]. In fact, Panzacchi did not like at
all Marini’s poetry. He dedicated to the Baroque poet (considered in his days
to be the most important poet in the world) another of his speeches to a female
audience contained in his Conferences and
Speeches [56], explaining that his poetry was artificial and of bad taste
(and Marinism was even a phenomenon of "literary pathology"), although such flaws were not only his
own feature, but were found everywhere in the literature of those years.
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three (Forthcoming)
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three (Forthcoming)
NOTES
[30] Gli Albori della vita italiana: conferenze
tenute a Firenze nel 1890 (The dawns of Italian life: conferences held in
Florence in 1890), edited by Olindo Guerrini. Conferences by Pasquale Villari,
Pompeo Molmenti, Romualdo Bonfadini, Ruggero Bonghi, Arturo Graf, Felice Tocco,
Pio Rajna, Adolfo Bartoli, Francesco Schupfer, Giacomo Barzellotti, Enrico
Panzacchi and Ernesto Masi Epilogo, Milan, F. Treves, 1897, 398 pages. See
https://www.archive.org/stream/alboridellavitai00mila?ref=ol#page/n7/mode/2up
https://www.archive.org/stream/alboridellavitai00mila?ref=ol#page/n7/mode/2up
[31] Gli Albori della vita
italiana … (quoted), p. 352.
[32] Panzacchi Enrico, Saggi critici (Critical
essays), Napoli, Chiurazzi, 1896, 349 pages. See:
https://archive.org/details/saggicritici00panzgoog .
https://archive.org/details/saggicritici00panzgoog .
[33] Gli Albori della vita
italiana … (quoted), p. 363.
[34] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), pp. 40-41.
[35] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), pp. 70-71.
[36] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 114.
[37] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 115.
[38] Panzacchi, Enrico –
Conferenze e discorsi (Conferences and Speeches), Milano, L. F. Cogliati,
Printing House, 1899, 296 pages. The conference on Leonardo is at pages 87-
111. See
https://archive.org/stream/conferenzeedisco00panzuoft#page/94/mode/2up.
https://archive.org/stream/conferenzeedisco00panzuoft#page/94/mode/2up.
[39] Panzacchi, Enrico –
Conferenze e discorsi …
(quoted), pp. 96-97.
[40] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 10.
[41] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 222.
[42] Cheney, Ednah Dow -
Selected poems from Michelangelo Buonarroti, Boston, Lee and Shepard; New York,
C.T. Dillingham, 1885, 163 pages. See:
https://archive.org/stream/selectedpoemsfr00buongoog#page/n8/mode/2up/search/vocazione.
The Italian text is published in Enrico Panzacchi - Il libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 224.
https://archive.org/stream/selectedpoemsfr00buongoog#page/n8/mode/2up/search/vocazione.
The Italian text is published in Enrico Panzacchi - Il libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 224.
[43] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 274.
[44] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 315.
[45] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 315.
[46] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 316.
[47] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 322.
[48] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 326.
[49] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 527.
[50] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 354.
[51] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), pp. 368-369.
[52] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 367.
[53] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 337.
[54] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 357.
[55] Enrico Panzacchi - Il
libro degli artisti … (quoted), p. 330.
[56] Panzacchi, Enrico –
Conferenze e discorsi …
(quoted), pp. 96-97.
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