Elizabeth Darrow. Pietro Edwards: The restorer as 'philosophe'. Published in The Burlington Magazine, April 2017

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Elizabeth Darrow
Pietro Edwards: The restorer as 'philosophe'

Published in
The Burlington Magazine, April 2017 CLIX, pages 308-317

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

The Burlington Magazine: front cover of the No. 1369 - Vol. 159, April 2017

As part of a series of contributions on the history of restoration and its protagonists (The Art of Conservation), The Burlington Magazine entrusted Elizabeth Darrow the task of writing about Pietro Edwards. A thankless task, because we know very little of the personal biography of this Venetian of English origin (his Catholic family moved to Italy in 1688, after the Glorious Revolution): the bulk of the private papers of Edwards (for example, all correspondence) went lost and what is kept today by various Venetian institutions (especially the Seminary of the Patriarchate) has fragmented nature only. Even physically, Edwards today looks to us like a blurred character: we lack any portrait (or self-portrait) of him, so that each of us can imagine him according to his own phantasy.

Elizabeth Darrow’s contribution is therefore most welcome, mainly because, in addition to referring to now well-known elements (at least among insiders, like the endeavour of the General Restoration of the paintings, which were publicly owned by the Venetian Republic) she has the merit to recall two points, which in in my opinion are underestimated. Ms Darrow also devoted to Peter Edwards her PhD thesis [1].

Francesco Albotto (formerly attributed to Michele Marieschi), Campo santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, about 1731
Naples, National Museum of Capodimonte
Source: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons

 A European level culture

First, Edwards’ know-how was undoubtedly up to date with respect to the technical literature (and in particular with respect to developments in chemistry) across Europe. How do we know it, if, as known, Edwards never published anything? The evidence of his specialised education lays in the huge amount of reports drawn up on behalf of the Republic as director of the restoration workshop at the Basilica of Saints John and Paul (or, for the Venetians, simply San Zanipolo). In these texts, and in other more technical ones, however always written in the form of reports to public institutions, Edwards demonstrated knowledge of the writings of the French Pierre Macquer (1718-1784), Jacques François Demachy (1728-1803), Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), René Antoine de Réaumur Ferchault, and Robert Picault, the Germans Johannes Kunckel (1630-1703) and Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734), as well as of English Robert Boyle (1627-1691). So the first thing to be regretted is the loss of his personal library. Edwards not only proved to be up to date on the foreign experience, but he himself established new standards for the restoration of paintings, demonstrating exceptional skills on how to organise and implement operational projects and establishing benchmarks for technicians from all over Europe. The progress made by Edwards departed from a single source: the experience he gained when he was exposed to the need. It is well known that, for its special climatic conditions, Venice put its paintings (not to mention the frescoes) to a severe test. There is not the slightest doubt that Edwards’ career was the one of a failed (and perhaps mediocre) painter converted into a completely new professional figure up to that time: a full-time restorer. The struggle that Pietro fought (in the mid-70s of the eighteenth century) to be assigned the restoration of the canvases in the Doge's Palace was dictated, no doubt, by economic reasons at a particularly difficult time for those who made art in Venice, as well as by personal ambition; but above all, it marked the replacement of sporadic action, taken by painters who also acted as restorers, with exclusively employed professionals acting in the preservation of the works. It also marked a new awareness on the purpose of restoration, which Edwards stated very clearly and Ms Darrow displayed with great clarity: restoration cannot return immortality to a work, simply because no work is immortal. It was a clear closure to the world of interested swindlerss, trying to be commissioned recovery interventions promising 'miraculous' healings; and it was the emergence of a science based on experience (in which, for example, the methods applied to the canvases were not identical in all cases, but depended on the real conditions of every single object). Let me say, Pietro Edwards reminds me Bacon’s empiricism and makes me wonder whether his family had already been familiar with this empiricism before their exile to Italy (we know nothing about the family).

Titian, The Martydome of S.Lawrence, Venice, Church of the Jesuits
Soutce: http://caffetteriadellemore.forumcommunity.net/?t=56726894

The international fame of Pietro Edwards

In this context - and we are passing to the second aspect - the author reminded us how great the fame of the Venetian Edwards was. There are at least three episodes witnessing it. The first is the visit of the heir to the throne of Russia, Paul I, and his wife Maria Feodorovna. Under the false name of the Counts of the North, they arrived in Venice in January 1782, and on January 22 they visited "the Bridge in Rialto and the workshop of Pietro Edwards" [2]. Edwards’ account of the event - as reported by Darrow – had triumphant tones, but, beyond all, it is clear that, if the Venetian government was carrying two Russian princes to visit the restoration workshop of San Zanipolo, it was because this structure was judged - to use a term used today - the excellence of the Republic. Edwards' fame is also witnessed by the lines that Lanzi devoted to him in his Storia pittorica dell’Italia (History of Painting in Italy) and, last but not least, by Goethe himself, something which absolutely I did not know. Goethe reported on it not on his Journey to Italy, published much later, but in a text which has only recently been translated into Italian [3]. Here Goethe dealt with modern restoration in Venice; referring to an episode in 1790 (his second stay in the lagoon city), he said he got to meet (almost by coincidence) the operators working in the laboratory of San Giovanni e Paolo and passed by there several times, fascinated by the way they worked. Charles Lock Eastlake, the great connoisseur of mid-nineteenth century, possibly read that text, which was indeed translated for the first time in English by A.J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet in 1833, as appendix to their Goethe’s Travels to Italy (moreover, Eastlake knew very well the works of Goethe, since he translated his Theory of Colours into English in 1840); surely, he knew and read the English translation of Lanzi’s History of Painting (made by Roscoe in 1828) and the passage on Edwards did not go unnoticed either to him or to the English world, which was frantically searching the secret of oil painting since the late eighteenth century [4]. There is no doubt that when, on behalf of the British government, he sent Mary Philadelphia Merrifield in Italy to try to investigate the techniques of the Old Masters (1845), he instructed her to travel to Venice and to turn first of all to the son of Pietro Edwards, Giovanni. What is certain is that, during his life, Edwards became well known abroad as restorer and, during the first half of the nineteenth century, he got almost a mythical reputation among English scholars of art techniques. What interested them, of course, was not the restoration process in itself, but the investigation about secret techniques, in the hope of discovering them and thus being able to start to paint such as Titian and the other great masters of the Venetian Renaissance.

The restorer as 'philosophe'

Darrow’s main thesis is that Eastlake was, in his way, a ‘restorer-philosopher'. I can agree with some specific themes; as for others (even taking into account Edwards’ materials, which I got to personally examine) I would agree less [5]. There is no doubt - as mentioned - that Edwards read the texts of the great scientists of the European Enlightenment; it is equally certain that he did not consider the role of the restorer as a simple craft work, but as an intellectually active role in the conservation of art heritage. On the other hand, it is just sufficient to read his less technical and more 'history-focused' writings to realize that he was (I would dare to say, like most Venetians of the era) all dedicated to the nostalgic myth of Renaissance Venice; in this sense, rather than a French Enlightenment thinker, Edwards was a Venetian of the late eighteenth century, living in a twilight world and unable to think of any reality outside of it. The eighteenth century - as a taste - was almost indifferent to him; in the few situations where he wrote on it, he did it only to place it within the parable of the unstoppable artistic decline, which had begun after the death of Titian and continued until his own time. This decline had substantially its raison d'être in the absence of the (presumed and wholly imaginary) control system on the profession operated by the guild of artists first and then by the College of Painters. His solution to the problem was the return to the use of monopolistic practices in the exercise of the artistic profession, to be assigned to the College of Painters. His eloquence about the state of conservation of the paintings, as shown by documents, contrasted with the absolute silence about the methods he used for their restoration. The Anglo-Saxon world of Edwards and Merrifield did not understand him and attributed this conspiracy of silence to the 'Venetian Jealousy'. In reality, he did not compete with other countries, but certainly with other artists / restorers of the Venetian era; it was a fight to secure the monopoly of public restoration, representing a sure income in a city where money was increasingly scarce. Nevertheless, Edwards - and here I fully agree with the author - felt a sincere sense of duty towards the preservation of the public artistic heritage of the city (mind you, the public, not the private one). A strange twist of fate let us remember him mainly for having delivered the Venetian paintings to the French troops and not for his (failed) project of a gallery of Venetian painters, to gather together the best paintings of the Venetian school, since they were now not any more owned by religious bodies following the Napoleonic suppressions. He worked at this project before the establishment of the Accademia art gallery, which, in fact, was only a fall-back solution.

In sum, this man - as all of us - had his dark and other more inspiring sides. His activity as a restorer, definitely at the forefront of Europe at the time, is certainly one of the aspects that go to his credit, and fully justify the inclusion of Edwards in the series dedicated to the history of restoration in The Burlington Magazine.

NOTES

[1] E. Darrow, Pietro Edwards and the Restoration of the Public Pictures of Venice: Necessity Introduced These Arts, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Washington, 2000).

[2] M. Marcella Ferraccioli, Gianfranco Giraudo, Quanto costa un Principe in incognito? Appunti sul viaggio dei Conti del Nord a Venezia, (How much does a undercover Prince cost? Notes on the journey of the Counts of the North in Venice), 2012.

[3] See Cristina Giannini, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Aeltere Gemaelde. Neuere Restaurationen in Venedig, betrachtet, 1790 in “Mosaico. Temi e metodi d’arte e critica per Gianni Carlo Sciolla” (Mosaic. Themes and art and criticism methods for Gianni Carlo Sciolla), edited by R. Cioffi and O.Scognamiglio, Naples, Luciano publisher, 2012, pp. 321-330.

[4] See, in this blog Giovanni Mazzaferro, Indiana Jones and the “Venetian Secret”:

from the Provis Manuscript to Mary Philadelphia Merrifield.

[5] See Giovanni Mazzaferro, Le Belle Arti a Venezia nei manoscritti di Pietro e Giovanni Edwards (The fine arts in Venice in the manuscripts of Pietro and Giovanni Edwards), Florence, GoWare, 2015 and Giovanni Mazzaferro, Fra Repubblica, Napoleone e Impero Austriaco: Pietro Edwards Ispettore Generale alle Belle Arti di Venezia (Between Republic, Napoleon and Austrian Empire: Pietro Edwards, General Inspector of Fine Arts in Venice): in Annuario Accademia di belle arti di Venezia (Yearbook of the Academy of fine arts in Venice), 2015/2016, in course of printing.