[Rome 1536. The 'Observations' by Johann Fichard]. Edited by Agnese Fantozzi.

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Roma 1536. Le Observationes di Johann Fichard
[Rome 1536. The Observations by Johann Fichard]
Edited by Agnese Fantozzi. 

Rome, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2011

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

Portrait of Johann Fichard
Source: Bilderatlas zur Geschichte der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main 1916

A lost manuscript

Johann Fichard (1512-1580), the jurist, humanist, and polygraph from Frankfurt, was the author of a Latin memorial dedicated to his journey to Italy, which was held at a young age between 1536 and 1538. Today, the memorial is lost. We would not be aware of it, if the last member of the family, the historian Johann Carl von Fichard, had not published it entirely in 1815 in the third volume of the Frankfurtisches Archiv für ältere deutsche Litteratur und Geschichte. When later on, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was attempted to find the original, it became apparent that it had gone lost, no longer appearing in the archives of the (in between extinguished) family nor in the town archives. Any interpretation of the text must therefore be attempted with the utmost caution, since we are not confronted with the primitive version but with one from the beginning of the nineteenth century, which could be alterated, and that certainly leaves some unresolved doubts (for example, the paternity of the last pages devoted to the stay in Rome - see pp. 57-60). Schlosser did not express a negative view on the work, although it was not free from stereotypes (see the Italian translation La letteratura artistica, page 221): "Fichard describes various works of art in Rome, Naples, Loreto, Ancona, Pisa, Lucca , Siena, Florence, Pistoia, Bologna, Pavia, Ravenna, Ferrara, Verona, and gives remarkable judgments, but rarely - very characteristic for a Nordic artist - names." The text is, however, totally unknown in Italian, or, to put it better, until the publication in 2011 of a volume printed by the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato (past unnoticed by lack of commercial distribution). The text focuses on the section of the manuscript dedicated to the stay in Rome (dating back to the first part of the trip, in 1536). In the title page, the work is said to be authored by Agnese Fantozzi (who drafted the rich apparatus of notes) but it was also enriched by an introductory essay by Daniela Pagliai, titled I motivi e la realtà di un viaggio (Motives and reality of a journey) and benefited from the beautiful translation from Latin by Emanuela Liuti.

Rome, Colosseum
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, the caveats that I have already mentioned are even more relevant for the Fantozzi edition. The image we have of Fichard’s manuscript (usually referred to as Italia or Iter Italicum) is limited to Rome alone, and unfortunately we cannot learn anything on the other stages of the journey (including a six-month stay, on the way back, at the University of Padua). Notwithstanding the impression it may be given, this was not a monograph dedicated to the eternal city. One has to wonder, for example, on what basis Schlosser expressed his opinion on Fichard's text: Did it have at hands the whole manuscript or just parts of it? To be honest, while in the Roman section the author's interest is prominently for antiquities, especially in the analysis of ruins and statues (many of them reported for the first part), one cannot keep silent that his attention to contemporary pictorial production was basically non-existent, and when some artwork was cited, he also made clamorous mistakes, as in the Sistine Chapel: "This chapel, which was entirely painted, is the most famous in the opinion of all painters for the incomparable paintings of Raphael from Urbino, though the colours are now quite blurred, undoubtedly because of the daily use of incense" (p.135). It strikes, of course, that Fichard mixed up Michelangelo with Raphael, and even more so that he did not point out that the work in the entire wall behind the altar had just begun for the realization of the Universal Judgment. So when Schlosser writes that, 'in a characteristic' way for the Nordic people, Fichard mentioned only a few names of artists, he would probably have better pointed out that he mentioned them erroneously, demonstrating a substantial (and personal, or not related to a specific geographic origin) inability to 'see' paintings.

Rome, Pantheon
Source: Roberta Dragan via Wikimedia Commons

Humanism and law

Fichard belonged fully to a small number of humanists (especially located in Germany) dedicated to the study of the law. Some of them were fundamental to the history of art. This was the case, for example, for Willibald Pirckheimer, Albrecht Dürer's personal friend, who in 1528 published in Latin the posthumous edition of the treatise on the human proportions by the German artist. For these scholars the journey to Italy represented the training experience per excellence; generally, it included a period of study at the main law universities (Padua and Bologna) and a visit to Rome, not (solely) for pilgrimage, but also to pay tribute to the city which, in the end, had laid the foundations of law (but also because of interest for antiquity). Very acutely, Daniela Pagliai points out that the evolution of humanism in law also led to a change in the legal framework in the German area, which passed from purely local bodies of rules to a framework inspired, ultimately, by Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis. Ultimately, in this way the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation was also credited as the natural heir to the Roman tradition. Humanist lawyers, after their Italian experience, often became important officials of the administrations of their home towns or those where they have studied. It is also the case of Fichard, who became "Stadadvokat in Frankfurt, where he participated in the reform of the city's laws, and was the first historian of modern German law with his Vitarum recentorum jureconsultorum" (p.12).

Rome. Arch of Constantine
Source: Wknight94 via Wikimedia Commons

A Frankfurt jurist in Rome

Fichard arrived in Rome - it was said - in 1536. This was a particularly important year. Nine years earlier, the sack of the city by the troops of Charles V had closed an era; exactly in 1536 (just a few months before Fichard arrived in the city), the great reconciliation between Papacy and Empire had symbolically occurred, with Charles V's arrival in the Eternal City returning from the conquest of Tunis. In just nine years the great plunder had became the paladin of Christianity in the name of the struggle against the common Ottoman enemy. Rome also returned to live on festive occasions: Carnival started to be celebrated again, the apparatus for the Emperor's entry into the city was set up (Fichard mentioned in particular the ephemeral arch erected in Rome’s St. Mark's Square and already in ruin due to meteorological agents). However, Fichard’s Rome was very similar to the town which, according to tradition, led Ildeberto Lavardin (1056-1133) to exclaim: Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet ' (How great Rome was, its very ruins tell): "If you look at the walls from a great distance, you can somewhat imagine the amplitude of ancient Rome. Today, instead, just one third of the space enclosed by them seems to be inhabited; there are gardens, fields and vineyards everywhere" (p. 87). The upheavals of the centuries have in fact rendered almost unreadable the topographical features of ancient Rome; subject of studies at least since the beginning of the fifteenth century, the topography of Rome had not yet defined with absolute certainty, at the time of Fichard, the position of the Forum.

Of course, the great importance of the manuscript of the German humanist is to 'fix' in a text the overall picture of the city's reality at a given moment. Fichard, on the other hand, proved without any doubt antiquarian interests, which did not prevent him from turning his attention to the 'modern' accommodation of the city. Clearly emerged two areas of Rome, contiguous but separate: the oldest part, that of the Forum, the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla and the Capitol, and, next to it, the modern area, closest to the Tiber river and reaching the Vatican. Of course, things should be read in a relative, and not absolute sense. It is no coincidence that the centre of 'modern Rome' was set by the German humanist in the Pantheon, on whose roof Fichard said to have climbed up, in order to get a general overview of the city and to overlap it mentally with the ancient descriptions of the 'regiones' (roughly, modern districts) in the antiquity. 

Roma, Column of Marcus Aurelius
Source: Markos90 via Wikimedia Commons

Fichard's sources

In its route through the city, the author did not fail to recall the most illustrious precedents in terms of studies on the topography of the city; indeed, Fichard began the pages of the manuscript dedicated to Rome, by clarifying his debt with those who wrote on ancient Rome (p. 67), all egregious humanistic figures like him. They include Pomponius Laetus and Marcus Fabius Calvus from Ravenna, (the latter involved a few years earlier by Raphael in his survey on the antique city [1]), Flavius Blondus and Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani. Precisely to the latter, and to his Antiquae Romae Topographia, edited in 1534 (just two years earlier), Fichard constantly referred the reader for further details and clarifications. So, in some ways, it can be said that the text was intended to be read in complementary terms to Marliani's work: "There are many who have outlined the topography of ancient Rome in the past years, but especially among all Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani, patrician of Milan, who wrote very recently and very carefully. Since I am pleased with his work as far as the ancient aspect of the city is concerned, I have just wanted to fix in the memory only the current plant and condition, the ancient buildings or the temples or, finally, all the ruins which remain today and that can be visited and recognized with certain attributes" (p. 69). "The current plant and condition": probably in these few words is the key to understanding Fichard's writing: it was not an antiquarian work (for this genre, reference is usually made to Marliani) but a series of notes on how ruins, temples and, more generally, also the modern human presence appeared in the city of Rome in 1536. It is certainly no coincidence that the chapter under which these words are expressed was titled "Observations on antiquities and other important things that can be seen in Rome".

Rome. Pyramid of Cestius and Porta San Paolo
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Humanists and Artists

In this respect, Fichard's observations find a perfect correspondence in the substantially contemporary designs of artists such as Francisco de Hollanda and especially Martin van Heemskerk (who was in Rome between 1532 and 1537). The presentation of such drawings within the work is a very effective iconographic comment to the text. This raises inevitably a reflection: the years around 1536 (i.e. around Fichard’s journey) were those after the Sack of Rome, an age which saw the multiplication of foreign artists coming to Rome to live a classical experience and to 'learn' drawing and painting. This trend will strengthen over the years, so to become impetuous and to be remembered also by Vasari in his Lives of 1568 [2]. If, for example, artists and humanists often travelled along the same routes, it is obvious that their journeys had different starting assumptions and that they attended different circles. On the one hand, humanists were men of European erudition, writing in Latin; they were guests of officials, notables, cardinals. On the other hand, the young artists spoke the language of their country (most likely, they often were even illiterate), accepted precarious jobs such as apprentices in the workshops of the most famous colleagues and the only idiom they recognized was what they learned by copying the ancient and the true. If, today, we can happily combine Fichard's manuscript with Van Heemskerk's drawings, we can equally be certain that the two in their times did not know each other and that their Roman experiences were articulated in a different way. Of the first, we have received the written testimony; of the second, the magnificent drawings.

There are, of course, several remarkable moments in the commentary by the Frankfurt humanist: the visit to St. Peter, in a basilica that was rebuilt only in half, where the renovation work was interrupted by the Sack: "the central area [ ...] is without covering and not yet completed, so that you could collect grass in the middle of the church itself" (p. 125); the view of the Colosseum, which was a source of extreme wonder; the account of the arrangement of the Garden of the Belvedere in the Vatican and of the Capitol. In many cases, Fichard reported for the first time the presence of statues that were due to remain in those location and even become symbols of Roman sculpture; in many others, they testified later changes to their location. The reading is therefore of extreme interest, especially when combined with the examination of the rich appendix of notes written by the curator.

Rome, Basilica of Saint Paul outside the Walls
Source: Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons

The reason for a manuscript

A doubt remains: why did Fichard write his Observations? And immediately the question must be rephrased: why did he write a manuscript on his trip to Italy, of which the pages on his stay in Rome are only one part? An epigram placed at the beginning of the manuscript (but I would like to caution that the original has been lost) would seem to certify the document as a personal memoir of the humanist. Rightly, in the modern commentary, it is immediately noted that the epigraph could be a simple rhetorical formula. In fact, some doubts arise naturally, and not so much because the work is written in Latin (it is very likely that Fichard even spoke in that language) or because (as one can see by reading some quotes in this review) the scholar used the second person singular (which hints at a destination other than a private memoir). The most obvious clue is that the humanist mentioned on a couple of occasions an unknown Lucretius, seriously suggesting that the latter was known both by the writer and by the reader. So we learn that some cardinals are living in the papal palace, "among whom the most important is the bishop of Capua, now cardinal of Saint Sixtus [...] and with him lives Lucretius" (p. 133). And again, speaking of a doubt arisen in front of a statue of Hercules, "since this type of representation seemed unusual and never seen before for a statue of Hercules, I asked Lucretius, present at that moment, what Hercules it was, and even he was in doubt” (p. 139). It should also be noted the clear tendency to compare Rome and Frankfurt, as if Fichard wanted to better explain what he had seen in the eternal city to an interlocutor living in his own hometown: the Tiber "at the height of Pons Aelius [...] does not even reach half of our own Main" (p. 79); The Tullianum "is deep, cold and narrow, slightly larger than my winter apartment in Frankfurt" (103). The winter apartment in the hometown is cited in comparison to other buildings seen in Rome on two occasions; likewise, there are references to other public offices of the German city. In fact, it is legitimate to suppose that Fichard's manuscript may have been written with a precise interlocutor in mind, unknown to us (maybe a relative, perhaps a companion of studies) with the intent of making him part of an undoubtedly extraordinary experience for the time. Only further studies will permit us to gain more knowledge in this regard.

NOTES

[1] See in this blog the review of Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglion e la Lettera a Leone X.

[2] See in this blog the review of Nicole Dacos, Viaggio a Roma. I pittori europei nel ‘500.