History of Art Literature Anthologies
Click here to see all the anthologies reviewed in the series
Émilie Passignat
[The Cinquecento. Sources in the History of Art]
Il Cinquecento. Le fonti per la storia dell’arte
[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 Two
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| Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X with the Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, 1518, Florence, Uffizi Gallery Source: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons |
The non-artist - an identikit
In this
second part of the review I would like to address the representation of the
artist in the Sixteenth century from the reversed perspective of the
‘non-artist’(always remembering that it would be more correct to talk about the
so-called artefice – i.e. the art
maker – since the use of the term 'artist' was used only sporadically at the
time, for example, in a famous sonnet by Michelangelo, see page 321). Is it
possible to understand who the non-artist is in the eyes of an art writer in
the 16th century? I hope to be able to demonstrate, based on Passignat's
anthology, that dwelling on this issue is useful.
First of
all, I would like to make it clear right away that, in my opinion,
counter-reformist precepts would not help to give an answer. From a conceptual
point of view, in my opinion, treatises like those of Paleotti provided a
series of rules that artists must follow, and then defined the mistakes of the
artists (and Michelangelo with the nudes of the Sistine Chapel censured by
Gilio was, for example, a artist making mistakes, but still an artist). If there was
something specific, in the religious approach, it was the persistence,
throughout the whole century, of artists' figures considered 'exemplary' for
their faith and the sobriety of customs. The most famous figure (undoubtedly one
of the most recurrent in artistic literature) was that of the Bolognese Lippo
di Dalmasio, whose Madonnas proved miraculous because, before painting, the
artist confessed and was therefore without sin (the reference to Lippo’s Madonnas
appeared in Vasari, but, for example, also in Lamo’s Graticola di Bologna). The
religious response, therefore, was very simple: the artist is a man of faith,
and the non-artist is a man of blasphemy.
The issue
is, however, much more complex. First of all, I should say that the non-artist was
a man who could not read and write. Which, of course, concerned 95% of the
population, and certainly a very large majority of those who lived and worked
in the workshops and studios. If one thinks that the right to write about art
(as Passignat pointed out in chapter II.I) was disputed between artists and
writers, there is nothing to be surprised about. The manual set-up of know-how
and its oral transmission were excluded. The artist must be educated. This too (and
not only the development of new iconographic programs) explains the many
partnerships between painters and writers during the Sixteenth century, first
of all the very famous one between Raphael (who was in fact an illiterate) and Baldassar Castiglione. One could say that the exception was Leonardo: he recognized
to be a man "without letters",
predicted that many would consider him arrogant as he wanted to write painting
precepts, and claimed that his things "are
more to be taken from experience, that from others’ words"(page 225).
For Leonardo, painting was noble in itself, even if painters did not write.
"Art is no less noble for this
reason, as few painters make profession of letters (...). Would we ever say
that the virtues of herbs, stones and plants do not come into being because men
do not know them?" (page 226). The nobility of painting, for Leonardo,
consisted in the fact that the latter is a science, and therefore an instrument
of knowledge: "In fact, it seems to
me that those sciences which were not born from the experience (mother of all
certainty), and which do not culminate in an experiential note (since their
origins or means or ends do not pass through any of the five senses), are vain
and full of errors" (p.263). In fact, Leonardo wrote. And his image of
"man without letters" is
greatly reduced when one considers that - as it is presumed - he simply meant
that he did not know Latin and Greek [5].
Knowing how
to write is not enough. The ut pictura
poesis was predominant and the artist had to compose in verse. For example,
Paolo Pino stated: "I want our
painter to exert assiduously himself in painting, but also to amuse himself by
operating, intertwining and establishing himself with the sweetness of poetry, either
through the melodiousness of the music of voice and different instruments, or
with his other virtues, of which every true painter must be garrisoned" (p.
169). Bronzino, Michelangelo, Bramante, Vasari were the most famous examples.
Lomazzo confirmed: "We have seldom
found a painter who could have painted anything, and was not prompted by his natural
genius to sing it purely in verse, even though he could not read or write for
adventure" (p. 273). For Lomazzo, in short, declaiming verses was even a circumstance that
went beyond being literate. This was clearly a rhetorical provocation:
non-artists could not write and were no poets.
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| Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, about 1540, Metropolitan Museum of New York Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435802 |
Among the
many steps dedicated to the virtues that must be possessed by the artist, I
like here to remember what Pomponio Gaurico wrote in his De sculptura, at the beginning of the century (precisely in 1504).
Gaurico obviously spoke of sculptors, but clearly his assumptions could adapt
very well to the world of art in general: "Undoubtedly, the artist will have to be in the highest degree euphantasíotos, i.e. capable of imagining the infinite aspects of an individual: suffering,
laughing, being sick, dying, anguished and so on. [...] The sculptor must also
be cataleptkikos, that is, capable of
welcoming and imitating the ideal forms, conceived in his mind, of all the
models he wants to portray" (pp. 162-63). The non-artist, therefore,
will neither be one nor the other. Not being artist meant not knowing how to
imitate the real, but above all not being able to grasp the ideal abstraction
of nature, the one that first lies in the mind and then is translated into the
work.
To imitate
the real, the painter must know the basic instruments of representation, first
of all perspective, and then the skilful use of the shadows and the lights to
render three-dimensional situations painted on a two-dimensional support. The
non-artist, obviously, did not know how to do it. Among the many aspects that
contributed to defining the non-artist, that of colour - unexpectedly for me - was
perhaps the one on which we have more precise indications. It should also be
said that these statements were not part of the querelle between design and colour that contrasted Tuscan and
Venetian painters (a controversy, however, that in the anthology of Passignat was
greatly scaled back, in my opinion rightly so). The basic thesis that united
the authors of the treatises was that a non-artist tries to attract the viewer
by resorting to bright and deceptive colours. This type of subterfuge was
indicated by both Vasari (page 304) and Cristoforo Sorte (page 306) as the
deception of the "vagueness of colours".
Vasari continued: "The union in
painting is a discordance of different colours lying together [...]. Yes, as
the ears are offended by a music that makes noise or dissonance or hardness
[...] so the eyes are offended by too heavy or too raw colours. In fact, a too bright
colour offends the design, and a dazzled, dull, dazzled and overly sweet colour
seems like an extinct, old and smoky thing" (page 309). And Lodovico
Dolce (who would be a champion of Venetian colouring) clarified in a letter
written before 1559: "I do not say
that beautiful colours do not adorn; but if it happens that under the colour,
and together with the colour, the design does not contain beauty perfection,
the fatigue is vain; and it is indeed
like beautiful words without the sauce and the nerve of the sentences"
(page 306). The discourse on colour inevitably led to the discussion on how to
provide the luminist aspects linked to light and shadows. In this regard,
Leonardo wrote de facto a declaration
of intent: "The painter's first
intention is to prove that he can make a distinguished and detached body in a flat
surface [...]; this investigation, indeed crown of this science, arises from
the shadow and from the lights, or you can say light and dark. So who flees
shadows also flees the glory of art with the noble minds, while it buys it with
the ignorant people, who wants nothing in the paintings other than beauty of
colours, forgetting all the beauty and wonder of showing plane things in relief"
(page 307).
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| Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Young Man, about 1530, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice Source: http://www.gallerieaccademia.it/ritratto-di-giovane-uomo |
The non-artist and genre painting
The true
painter engages in the painting of history, the most 'noble' type of art par
excellence. Everything else is less valuable, with the exception perhaps of portraiture.
In everyday reality, all artists produced portrays, from the most humble to the
most requested. Armenini (1587), in this regard, was certainly very tough:
"But know for certain that in the
matter of the portraits you should not spend time to show you the ways, since a
mediocre ingenuity can master it enough, all the time that a painter has some
practice in colours and, thanks to a long practice, keeps in mind the true
colours" (p.395). It follows that "the more men have been profound in drawing, the less they have been
able to make portraits" (ibid). But already forty years before Aretino
(inextricably linked to Titian, portraitist of popes and emperors) felt the
need to distinguish the 'nobility' of the genre depending on the rank of the
models. In short, the true artist can certainly dedicate himself to the genre,
provided that it is ennobled by the level of who is portrayed. "Portray the images of the like, and not the
faces of those, who are known to themselves, but not to others. The style
should not portray a head, which has not been hailed before by fame. And do not
believe that the ancient decrees allowed portraying people in metal who were
not worthy to be reshaped. This century be condemned to infamy, as it allows
that tailors and gravediggers appear there alive in painting" (page
336). It is impossible, reading the final invective of the Aretino, not to
immediately recall the beautiful Tailor
by Giovan Battista Moroni, today in London at the National Gallery. Well, for
Aretino, that was not art.
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| Giovanni Battista Moroni, The Tailor, about 1570, London, The National Gallery Source: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/giovanni-battista-moroni-the-tailor-il-tagliapanni |
Even worse happened
to Flemish non-artists, specialists in landscape painting. Francisco de
Hollanda (1548-49) wrote: "The
painting of the artists of Flanders consists of rags, masonry, vegetables in field,
shadows of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, and many
figures here and there. And all this, although it seems good to the eye of
some, is actually done without any reason or art, without symmetry or
proportion, without attention to or easiness in the choices, and finally
without any substance or nerve" (page 338).
The non-artist
All the
elements mentioned above contribute, in my opinion, to identify two possible
types of non-artists. In the first case, with the eyes turned to the past, the
answer is very easy: the non-artist was what we today call a 'primitive'
painter. It was the painter who worked on gold backgrounds, devoid of the
notions of perspective, incapable of 'composition' and inventiveness, and used
therefore bright colours for a type of decorative painting. All this explains
why (apart from Vasari, who essentially thought the same way, but had to
develop a historiographical model from the origins to the Sixteenth century)
medieval painting did not attract any interest and treatises did not 'see' it:
simply, it was not art. For Vasari, and for Armenini then, the figures of the
medieval painters were puppets. And when it came to describing the ancient
works, the same Armenini did not hesitate to write: "But in these [note of the
editor: in the domes] the ancient painters who were from Giotto's age until that of
Piero Perugino, used to make use of extravagant paintings, working
according to the weakness of those times; so in the domes and in the vaults [...] they made a very great
Christ in the midst of majesty, with a ball in his hand shaped for the world
and with the other hand that blessed, and was sitting over the clouds. [...] Others made gold stars up to
them, figuring the sky for them, and so they fell into such sordidness, which
had neither value nor meaning" [7].
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| Andrea di Bonaiuto, Frescoes in the Spanish Chapel, 1365-1367 Santa Maria Novella, Florence Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The second
type of non-artist was instead contemporary to the writers, and was the typical
expression of the world of the guilds; he worked in a shop, according to serial and
repetitive iconographic models and had a clientele that we would now call
'bourgeois'. Often his images were small, intended for the devotional and
private practice of people of humble origin. We must not be confused about this:
the Sixteenth century was a century in which 'real' artists were still part
(except for individual exceptions) of the guilds (which will be extinguished
only at the time of Napoleon); but it is evident the desire of the most
'educated' and rich part of the art-makers to free themselves from this,
essentially anonymous, world to rise to the honours of time. A typical
expression of this trend was the birth of Academies, often with evident
contradictions. I agree perfectly with the author when she wrote, in this
regard, that "in these early art
academies, personal interests seemed to prevail on a mature collegiality.
Priority was given instead to the problem of establishing, by mutual agreement,
the new methodologies to be adopted. This did not facilitate the task of the
most capable members and overshadowed the primary purpose of the pedagogical
component in favour of the social cause"(page 39).
For a re-evaluation of Felipe de Guevara's Comentario de la Pintura
At the
beginning of the review I wrote that I would refrain from talking about what I
did not find in the anthology, save in one case. These are the missing
references to the Comentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos, written around 1560 by Felipe de Guevara. It
must immediately be made clear that, in practice, the influence of Guevara, the heir of a family
of Spanish officials established in Belgium for almost a century and returned
to Spain in the mid-1500s, was nil. The work remained manuscript, the text was
published only in 1788, and the first critical edition was in 2016. However,
there are at least three elements that would lead to evaluate its importance:
first of all, as far as I know, the writer was a collector, that is an amateur (not just any one: the family held the Arnolfini spouses of van Eyck and the Bosch’s
Haywain Triptych). If it is very true
that, in the Sixteenth century, artists and writers wrote about art, it is
equally important to consider the isolated case of Guevara, who was fully aware
of his role by talking about "esta
nuestra imitaçion imaginaria de los compradores" (our imaginary
imitation of buyers). The expression was used with reference to imitation.
Guevara believed - as obvious - that painting was an imitation of nature, but
distinguished between two types of imitation. It was not, however, the
distinction between true 'natural' and 'ideal', or between 'portraying'
and 'imitating', of which Vincenzo Danti spoke (see Part One). The author distinguished
between the imitation of reality and the imitation of understanding ("de entendimiento"), which belonged
to the public. In an unexpected (and I would dare to say absolutely
anticipatory) way, here made irruption the public (of the 'compradores'), for the scope of the fruition of the work of art. About
these things – in my view – Dubos would talk only in 1719 (even if in an absolutely
more organic way). Finally, one should remember the writer's attitude regarding
Bosch. Below, I am reporting what I wrote in my previous review of the work. Of
course, Guevara's attempt ended in nothing, overwhelmed by the 'Romanist'
fashion that was soon adopted by Philip II of Spain. Nevertheless, it seems to
me that the true importance of the treaty is that it demonstrates how the
debate on art making was not only Italian, but also had European voices, and
ideas of absolute originality. Being aware of it is important.
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| Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych, about 1516, Madrid, Prado Museum Source: Anthony Bond [et al.] (2005) Self portrait. Renaissance to contemporary, London: National Portrait Gallery, ISBN 978-1855143579, fig. 44. tramite Wikimedia Commons |
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| Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych. Detail: The murder Source: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons |
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| Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych. Detail: The Fight Source: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons |
"The space dedicated to Bosch in the treatise (pp. 190-191) seems to respond to a debate evidently taking place about this artist, in Spain in those years. The author wondered whether the "monstrosities" painted by the artist were immoral and had to be avoided. On this Felipe (who owned several paintings by Bosch, including the Triptych of the haywain) had very clear views: first of all, he related the artist's work to that of the Greek-Egyptian painter Antiphilus (by itself, a bond with the noble tradition of antiquity) and then denied that Bosch had invented monsters and chimeras, arguing that in fact he always stuck to a type of painting linked to the imitation of nature, decency and morality. "I do not deny that he painted effigies of strange things, but only when he came to paint the Hell, in which case, wanting to paint devils, he figured compositions of admirable things. All of this, Bosch has done with prudence and decorum, while the others have done the same and did so without discernment and judgment, because they had seen in Flanders how well this kind of painting was accepted and therefore decided to imitate monstrous paintins and disarticulated fantastic images, signalling that in this consisted only the imitation of Bosch" (p. 190). Guevara, in short, witnessed the extraordinary success of the genre, but claimed that Bosch always consistently offered his monstrous creatures where they were used to show to the public the actual existence of monstrosities, i.e. in hell. On the basis of this line of morality (which the curator, in my view rightly so, keeps separate, in her commentary, from the Counterreformation’s censorship of the following decades) Guevara made a distinction between Bosch’s fantastic creatures and the growing phenomenon of grotesque (on which he spoke in a special chapter) which he severely condemned. Again referring to the morality of Bosch’s painting (which he distinguished from his followers), he pointed out an interesting phenomenon: the many fakes that had flooded the market, based on the success of the Flemish painter..."
NOTES
[6] The
idea itself that Leonardo did not know Latin, for example, was strongly reduced
in the recent work by Carlo Vecce, La biblioteca perduta. I libri di
Leonardo (The lostlibrary. The books of Leonardo), Rome, Salerno Publishers, 2017, which I will
review soon.
[7] Giovan
Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura. (On the true precepts of painting). Edition
by Marina Gorreri. Preface by Enrico Castelnuovo. Turin, Einaudi, 1988, pp.
175-76.
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