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History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Émilie Passignat
[The Cinquecento. Sources in the History of Art]
Il Cinquecento. Le fonti per la storia dell’arte
Rome, Carocci, 2017
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part One
The series Le fonti per la storia dell’arte
In
chronological terms, The Cinquecento
by Ms Émilie Passignat was the fifth anthological volume published since 2001,
within the series Le fonti per la storia dell'arte (Sources in the history
of art), conceived and curated by Antonio Pinelli and edited by Carocci
Publishers. As I am about to review this volume, I feel the need to spend a few
words, first of all, on the series itself, giving first consideration to the
titles printed so far:
- M. Letizia Gualandi, L'antichità classica, 2001;
- Émilie Passignat, Il Cinquecento, 2017;
- Tomaso Montanari, L'età barocca (1600-1750), 2013;
- Chiara Savettieri, Dal Neoclassicismo al Romanticismo, 2006;
- Silvia Bordini, L'Ottocento, 2002.
The idea
behind the series, presented by the curator Antonio Pinelli in his forward
(printed identical in each volume) was to make order in an enormous mass of
written testimonies (the sources, in fact) that often ended up being forgotten
or were even all unknown. The investigation did not concern only the typologies
of texts included, in his time, by Julius von Schlosser in the notion of Kunstliteratur
(Art literature), but extended to documents such as contracts, inventories and
other texts of a notarial nature.
The series was
designed in ten volumes, covering a chronological period ranging from “classical antiquity to the present day”.
Unfortunately, I do not know the overall plan of the work, and I am therefore
not able to say what the timing of publication of the missing titles will be.
The structure
of each volume has remained so far essentially identical. First of all, the
organization was based on themes. A first wide-ranging section of Reading Paths offered a critical
interpretation of the various topics treated; thereafter, a very wide selection
of (often rare, sometimes even unpublished) texts made the real Anthology of the sources. Within each
section, the texts were presented in strict chronological order. The modular
structure of the anthology allowed a comfortable cross-reading between Reading Paths and Anthology of the sources, thanks to the relative cross references
(which are very clear). The final index, which also presents thematic voices,
also facilitated a transversal reading within the anthology.
It goes
without saying that it is not my intention to trace here a history of
anthologies of artistic literature (to those interested, I suggest you consult
the series of reviews dedicated to them on this blog). On the issue, I would
like to mention that, although affected by influences of famous anthologies, such as those (never blessed enough) by Paola Barocchi on the
Italian side and the agile volumes published by Prentice-Hall in the Sources and Documents in the History of
Art Series in the Anglo-Saxon world, the series directed by Antonio Pinelli
was mainly aimed at supporting university classes and presented characters of
originality and undoubted interest.
I say this
because, at this point, I have to confess that I have never read in full (but
only used for consultation) the four volumes published before the present one.
I did not do it because, personally, I have a sort of mistrust towards all
anthologies. This diffidence is not related to their sufficient or insufficient
completeness, but to their inherent nature. In giving an account of the debates
of a more or less theoretical nature related to the art world, an anthology
inevitably tends to highlight differences of thought, historical evolutions, and
dynamics of ideas. On the other hand, when I read the sources, I am looking for
the uniformity that bear witness to the diffusion and circulation (not only in
a chronological, but also geographic sense) of the same basic ideas, then
declined according to specific factors. Simplifying in a totally improper way,
I am looking for what unites, while, by their very nature, anthologies end up
highlighting what makes the difference.
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| Leonardo, Lady with an Ermine, about 1490 circa. National Museum of Krakow Source: http://www.ncm.com/content/files/art_downloads/LeonardodaVinci-TheLadywithanErmineX6803.jpg |
Il Cinquecento by Émilie Passignat
This is not
the case of The Cinquecento by Émilie
Passignat [1]. I can imagine what effort it may have been necessary, when
taking the task of dealing with the century of Leonardo, Raphael and
Michelangelo, and of course Vasari's Lives.
Moreover, the preceding Italian anthologies included the Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Art Treaties of the Sixteenth Century) [2] and the Scritti
d’arte del Cinquecento (Writings
of Art of the Sixteenth Century) [3], both by Paola Barocchi. Forty years have
passed since those certainly more ambitious publications (and therefore it would
be totally ungenerous to compare them with today's anthology). In other terms: the
first merits of the Carocci edition are that it updated us with newly rediscovered
texts (or only recently emerged to the attention of scholars), and offered an essential
but modernised bibliography. The choice (of the series) to present many texts,
but of limited length compared, for example, to Paola Barocchi’s anthologies
might have exposed to the risk of an excessive fragmentation, and also here I
must say that the final result is instead a compact, very dense book, in which
the basic trends clearly emerge. Then, of course, one can discuss the inclusion
of this or that text, what is missing and what is included. This is, obviously,
what seems immediately natural when one has to do with works of this type.
However, I would like to immediately state that this is not my intention (except
in one case, at the end of this review, which will be published in two parts); all
what is essential is included in the volume, and thus so let's talk about it.
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| Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi, 1504, Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/zwFGJLYuIszRRw |
Nobility of the art and models of reference
If there is
a basic tendency that, in fact, is common to all the texts of the anthology
(and, more generally, all writings on art at least until the end of the
nineteenth century) is that of the nobility of the art. Which, of course,
should not be surprising: in end effect, it is a matter of reflecting on the
importance of the own work, reflections that we may experience today (please accept
it as a provocation) even by dentists, nurses or plumbers. After all, a
reasoning on the 'nobility' of painting was also conducted at the end of the
fourteenth century by Cennino Cennini in his The book of the art. He assured to art the second place after
science, and in equal terms as poetry. If anything, the aspect to keep in mind
is the general awareness now permeating the world of art creators about their
role (not by chance, during the 16th century they began to be called artists). The
nobility of art was an argument that concerned architecture first and foremost.
The figure of the architect emerged in a clearer way both on a historical and
on a theoretical level. The reason was trivial. There was a reference text
that, in an unusually large number of manuscript copies, had come up to those
days, and that text was, of course, the De architectura by Vitruvius. Vitruvius as a model was essential to understand
operations of personal reworking (think of the De re aedificatoria of Leon Battista Alberti), but also the
reissues printed and the first Italian translations of the sixteenth century
(see chapter III.3.2.1). The sixteenth-century primacy of the architectural
treatise on that on painting seems to me beyond question. Also because, to be
honest, the 'all-encompassing' treatise on painting did not exist, nor ever saw
the light. Painting, of course, had Pliny, and Pliny, with his innumerable
anecdotes, and in the absence of ancient works, was an inexhaustible source of
inspiration to support the nobility of painting itself, starting, for example,
from the fact that ancient Greeks did not allow but subjects coming from noble
lineage to practice it. Pliny, therefore, in the absence of an 'encyclopaedic'
treatise on painting, was the true reference of those who wanted to write about
art in the sixteenth century, and not only in Italy. Just think of the Comentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos by Felipe de Guevara (around 1560) and the
'collective biography' of artists presented in the Batavia by Hadrianus Junius (1566-1575). Vasari himself, in his Lives, cited Plinian episodes in the
first edition of Torrentiniana (1550) on several occasions; moreover, he still
felt the need to insert the Letter by Giambattista Adriani in the Giuntina, in
1568. It was a paraphrase of Pliny’s text, which had little in common with Vasari’s
historiographical project, but evidently was 'requested' by the public (and if
you browse through some of the Lives
you will see that the letter by Adriani was among the most highlighted by
readers of the time).
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| Raphael, The school of Athens, about 1509-11, Vatican Museum Source: Wikimedia Commons |
From Pliny to Vasari via Dürer
While a
painting treatise of universal reference (and on which one could eventually
build new ones) did not exist, a few authors thought of producing it. It is
important, at this point, to stress differences among printed and manuscript
production; on the other end, also manuscripts had their circulation, and must
therefore be taken into account in the evolution of things. I'm not thinking,
in this case, of the De pictura by Leon Battista Alberti, of which a
manuscript circulation is well documented, and which became a true 'book of the 1500' with the first printed
version (princeps) in Basel (1540)
and above all with Bartoli’s translation into Italian of 1568. Instead, and it
is probably the most important case, at the beginning of the century Leonardo
da Vinci thought to give organic form to a large mass of manuscript notes (page
235). We know that the result of this attempt was the Book of Painting, written
by the beloved pupil Francesco Melzi. I will not be here to dwell on the
debates on the 'autography' of the Book
of Painting. Some say (like Carlo Pedretti) that it can be considered in
all respects but physically an autograph by Leonardo; others claim that Melzi
reworked it and that Leonardo would have written it differently. The fact is
that, at some point, this Book was
lost and was found only centuries later. However a number very high of apograph
(and partial) manuscripts was witnessed in Florence, in Milan, in Rome,
testifying that manuscript circulations must be taken into consideration [4].
Even Dürer
thought of writing a treatise on painting; moreover, his project testified the
attention of the world of the early sixteenth century for proportion and
symmetry (a work organized in three books, with each book including three
parts, and for each part six chapters). While he did not succeeded in the
enterprise, Dürer published treatises on fortified architectures, Euclidean
geometry and human proportions. During a short season (especially in Florence)
around 1535, his books (in the posthumous Latin translation by Camerarius) almost
became the reference for the theoretical reflection of the time (page 57). This
was testified, for example, by the incomplete translation into Italian (which
has remained manuscript and was only recently discovered) of the Institutiones geometricae by Cosimo Bartoli. That season was buried rapidly by the cultural turnaround linked to
the birth of the Florentine Academy (1541) commissioned by Cosimo I de 'Medici
and the emergence of the living myth of Michelangelo [6]. In fact, Ascanio Condivi
wrote, speaking of Michelangelo, "that
when he [i.e. Michelangelo] read Albert Dürer, his writings seemed very weak
[...] And to tell the truth, Albert did not deal but with the measures and
variety of bodies, on which he did not give any certain rules, but formed standing
figures as masts. On what instead mattered most, i.e. the activities and the
gestures of people, he did not say a word"(page 238).
It was
certainly no coincidence that, with the first edition of the Lives (1550), Vasari placed Michelangelo
at the top of his historiographical parable and presented his biography as the
unique of a still living artist. The Lives
did not, however, mark the only ‘beatification’ of Michelangelo; they
constituted the emergence (and triumph) of the biographical genre applied to
artists, or of "history as a «mirror of human life»" (p. 66), which Vasari himself indicated as an idea coming from Paolo Giovio. If the first edition reflected Giovio’s approach, the second
(1568) seems to be indebted to the philological approach of Vincenzo Borghini,
more prone to historiographical and topographical investigation. "With a global approach to the arts, it
combined history, theory, topography, biographies, broad insights into
techniques and materials, offering multiple angles and reading paths. Nothing,
or almost nothing, was absent. [...] Vasari's
work was truly disorienting for its contemporaries, precisely because it was
double, audacious and exhaustive in its vastness" (p.68). Vasari's
historiographical approach is very well known; it reflected the subdivision
into three parts of the Lives, well
delineated in the foreword of the third part (pp. 480-84): the rebirth of the
arts thanks to Cimabue and Giotto, the fifteenth-century season marking the
progress of the arts, but in a dry and imperfect measure, and finally the
modern manner, from Leonardo onwards, which culminated with Michelangelo’s
season. All this with a clear pro-Tuscan approach (especially in the Giuntina
edition) that mirrored the cultural policy of Cosimo I. This model was shared
or criticized, in a more or less articulated way (just think of the case of the handwritten annotations), but never put in competition with an analogous work, bearer of a
different historiographic perspective.
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| Titian, Pesaro Madonna (detail), about 1519-26, Venice, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Source: Weg Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons |
All art in a century
In the
second half of the century a few treatises (the most important was certainly
that by Lomazzo) tried to provide a 'taxonomic' answer to the problem of what
art is, and gradually saw an enhancing of didactic preoccupations, aimed at
teaching art; however, the historiographical perspective of Vasari, who started
from Giotto and Cimabue and dedicated the first two parts of his work to the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was totally absent. It is not surprising to
read what Lomazzo wrote (1590): "Until
the time of Michelangelo Buonarroti, all arts laid like buried. Then they began
to rise again, and in our art the first was Donato, called Bramante ..." (pp. 229-29); Possevino echoed him (1594): "But (to come to our times), after remaining decayed and dead in past
centuries, the art of painting has risen in this century, just as did literary
studies" (p. 223) ); and I would not forget Armenini (1586), who
condemned the 'extravagances' of the ancient painters, from Giotto to Perugino,
as they worked, according to him, according to the weakness of those times.
Art, in its most complete sense, was all encompassed by one century only, and
within that century it described a parable that, at the end of the sixteenth
century, led to talk about a crisis after the death of great artists. It was
the questioning of what we now call Mannerism, in my opinion only partially
linked to the new ethical requirements imposed by the Counter-Reformation.
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| Michelangelo, The Lybian Sybil, Sistine Chapel, about 1508-12 Source: Wikimedia Commns |
Among the
various 'parts' of art that are identified in the context of the sixteenth
century artistic theory, without any doubt imitation played a fundamental role.
Nothing new: the imitation of nature was in principle the element on which all
art has been based until the birth of abstraction. Differences can be noticed only
when we move on to discuss what is imitated (nature) and how it is imitated (i.e.
whether by limiting itself to pure representation from the truth or instead by correcting
nature itself in the parts in which it is imperfect to arrive at an idealized
representation of the form). From this point of view, it seems interesting (also
because it explains how the meanings attributed to certain terms can change
over the centuries) the distinction made by Vincenzo Danti between 'portraying' and 'imitating' (pp. 318-19). For Danti, to portray means to reproduce
something exactly as we see it; to imitate means to the contrary "to make something not only in that way that
others see it (...), but to make it as it would to be in all perfection".
An imitation, in short, is a form of idealization of nature and compared to a portrait;
in the same vein, in literature (the comparison with the literary world is a
topos) poetry would compare to the simple narration of a story. As such,
imitations show a greater nobility: "we
see that portraying can be of two kinds: one is to portray things, either
perfect or imperfect as they are, as they are seen, and this cannot be admitted
under the true design". Here, design assumes an ideal charge that is
not very different from that which Bellori, more than a century later, used for
his theory, and in the name of which he disputed Caravaggio-style naming it as "naturalism".
This ideal aspect was loaded with meanings during a good part of the century so
that - Passignat wrote - "it was no
longer a question (in order to evaluate the quality of an artist) to know how
much of the nature he had corrected reality with the fantasy, but how much of
the Idea he had transmitted to his work" (page 90). The author referred
to fantasy and it is undeniable that the century saw a progressive
expansion of the importance attributed to it (an importance that found its seal
in the words of Michelangelo) and then returned to collapse with
counter-reformed theories. At a certain point, the role of fantasy, and
therefore of invention, led to the birth of new partnerships between artists
and writers (such as Borghini and Caro) who drew up real iconographic programs
(always looking for the 'new') of the pictorial cycles commissioned to the artists. It is ludicrous that this – paradoxically – called into question the
artist's manual dexterity. The latter was considered a simple practical act on
a theoretical level. This led to the risk of returning to prove the craftsmanship
of art making. The century therefore lived on a subtle balance between 'fantasia' (fantasy) and 'operazione di mano' (manual skills), in which the former seemed to prevail over the latter with
Mannerism, only to be resized in the context of counter-reformist negotiations.
I have deliberately spoken of 'fantasy' and 'manual skills' because they were
the same terms with which Cennino Cennini, at the end of the fourteenth
century, had defined painting in the Book of Art: "This is an art that I call painting, for which it is convenient to have
fantasy and manual skills. These
skills will involve finding unseen things in the shade of natural and fixing
them with the hand". Unless one thinks that Cennino was a mannerist,
it is worth remembering that contextualizing a source in the era in which it
was written is always the first duty of the interpreter.
NOTES
[1] For a
look at the 16th century sources reviewed or discussed on this blog, see the relevant index.
[2] Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento tra
Manierismo e Controriforma [Sixteenth-century art treatises between Mannerism and
Counter-Reformation], by Paola Barocchi, 3 volumes, Bari, Laterza, 1960-62.
[3] Paola
Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del
Cinquecento [Sixteenth
Century Art Writings], 3 volumes, Milan-Naples, Riccardo Ricciardi, 1971-77.
[4] See
Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900, by
Claire Farago.
[5] See Giovanni Maria Fara, Albrecht Dürer nelle fonti italiane antiche 1508-1686 [Albrecht Dürer in ancient Italian sources 1508-1686], Leo S.
Olschki publisher, 2014
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