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Lorenzo Lotto
Il libro di spese diverse
[The Book of Accounts]
Introduction, commentaries and apparatus by Francesco De Carolis
Trieste, EUT Edizioni Universitarie di Trieste, 2017 (but 2018)
This by
Francesco De Carolis is the fourth edition of the Libro di spese diverse (Book of Accounts) by Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556/7), discovered
in 1885 in the archives of the Santa Casa
(Holy House) in Loreto, where the artist died. The first edition by Adolfo
Venturi was published in the first issue of the Gallerie Nazionali Italiane (Italian National Galleries) in 1894 [1]; the second (by far the most
influential one, even if nowadays impossible to find) was published in 1969 by
Pietro Zampetti [2]; the third dates back to 2003 and was curated by Floriano
Grimaldi and Katy Sordi [3]. Was there a need for a new edition? Indeed, there
was, and not only to update criticism and attributions of the many paintings by
Lotto mentioned in the manuscript. In reality, the edition of De Carolis has
the merit of finally bringing into focus the true nature of Lotto’s Book, which was purely an accounting
document. Let's understand: of course, we have always been aware that the
artist produced a notebook merely addressing accounting aspects. However, this
was simply considered a circumstance of little relevance; instead, scholars
preferred to focus on an 'intimate’ reading of the handwritten notations made by
Lotto on his register. Zampetti, in his introduction, wrote that "Venturi believed it appropriate not to reproduce
the manuscript according to the original draft, that is displaying debits and
credits one in front of the other, and followed instead a chronological order"
(p. IX) To correct it (despite some
mistakes in the material transcription), he presented the documents on a double
page, but he immediately forgot psychologically that he was dealing with a
register of accounts. Marco Carminati, in the book review published for the 2003 edition, wrote about the Book of Accounts: "It was a notebook
bound in cardboard, made up of 200 sheets and looking like a modern phone book
with alphabetical letters on the right side of the page. Lotto used these
letters to record the names of debtors and creditors from A to Z. The page on
the left is dedicated to "debt", the opposing one is dedicated to
"credit", according to the principles of double entry". Indeed,
double entry: what did it mean for an artist to hold a double entry ledger in
the middle of the sixteenth century? Ultimately, this is the answer that De
Carolis tried to address, through his new 'focus'; a focus that - not to be
forgotten - is particularly demanding for an art historian, because it means learning
to cope with issues (that of accounts and commerce) different from the 'visual'
relationship with the artwork and its attribution, which inevitably tends to prevail
in the discipline. To understand it better, it seems appropriate to refer first
to what Zampetti had written in 1969 about the Book.
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| Frontispiece of the Book of Accounts Source: http://www.lorenzolottomarche.it/libro-di-spese-diverse-di-lorenzo-lotto/ |
Pietro Zampetti: an 'intimate' reading of the Book of Accounts.
In his
edition of the Book of Accounts,
Zampetti attached to the transcription of the text all the autograph writings
of Lotto known at the time of publication (i.e. in 1969). Two sets of documents
stood out: on the one hand, the letters that the artist addressed to Bergamo’s Confraternity of Misericordy between
1524 and 1532 because of the realization of the inlays of the Choir of Santa
Maria Maggiore and, on the other hand, the Venetian testament of March 25,
1846. All the documents in question (including the Book of Accounts) were read as if they were written with the same
intention, e.g. to reveal the intimate nature of the artist. The
misunderstanding (for the Book was an
accounting document, and certainly not a diary) appeared immediately evident
from the Introduction: "The «Book of Accounts» is Lotto’s autobiography. It is a
human document of great interest, since the brief annotations, the comments,
the observations that he added to the proper accounting (...) display the
figure of a man with his bad moods, his pessimism, the sudden upsurge, the gentle
attentions for the others and, finally, the love for peace and rest after so
much suffering and so much turning in the counties of Italy, looking for work
and a well-being that in reality he never reached" [4]. And again: "Lotto, a restless man, was also an optimist
by nature. He always hoped for the future, yearned for the moment when he would
finally have tranquillity, serenity, and comfort. His optimism, therefore, had
a fundamentally painful foundation. The good was seen in the future, as liberation
from the present evil. This was the dominant theme of his entire book, and it
lasted, never resolved, until the end of his last days" [5].
"[Lotto] was really an improvident
man, in the sense that he did not take care of his own interests, despite the
rather narrow meticulousness with which he kept his day-to-day accounting. In
reality, he never knew how to do his own business, nor did he ever managed - an
eternal wanderer – to create his own world, neither a favourable environment
nor powerful protections. It is not clear why he never set up and found a
propulsive centre of life and security. Probably his inner restlessness, the
eternal dissatisfaction, the search for a goal without ever being able to grasp
it, were the basis of his unhappy life; they were also all elements that
characterized the very nature of his art, always carried beyond the limits of a
peaceful achievement of creative quiet. You always notice in him, from his
youth, that pathetic act, that sense of hidden drama that will always dominate
his characters, even those of the last works" [6].
This raises
the spontaneous question: would Zampetti had ever come to the same conclusions,
commenting on the items in the ledger, if he had not known Lotto’s life in
advance? If, for example, he had not already read the testament of 1546, where he
wrote about himself: I am "old [he was
66], and alone, without any faithful government and very restless in my mind"?
Would this scholar have otherwise drawn analogies between the Book and his art? Obviously not.
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| Lorenzo Lotto, The Alms of Saint Antoninus, 1542, Venice, Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo Source: http://www.arte.it/opera/elemosina-di-sant-antonino-1101 |
The Book of Accounts: an example of double entry
This, in
essence, is the point made by De Carolis in his comment (although much more elegantly
and conducting a work that engaged him for several years). And it is no
coincidence that his first choice was not to publish the other writings of
Lotto together with the Book of Accounts, since of course they have a completely different nature. First of
all, he understood that the use of the double entry was not a curiosity, but a
precise signal (there are others: we will see them) of Lotto’s inclusion in the
guild-based mercantile community in the Venice of the time. Reading Lotto's
notebook, in short, one can certainly have the idea of an artist lacking fortune
[7], but not of a 'cursed' painter (certainly not a van Gogh ahead of one's
time, to be clear). The double-entry system was a mercantile invention of the
late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Venice, the city of commerce, not only
knew it well, but just in Venice Luca Pacioli had published in 1494 the Particularis
de Computis et Scripturis (within the Summa de Arithmetica) which outlined its functioning. According to
Pacioli, the accounting system consisted of three parts: "The memorial, where the activities were
marked daily; the journal [note of the editor: where each operation was analysed
and reported in chronological order]; and
the 'mastro', which was a larger ledger aimed at containing all the data
previously recorded in the other two instruments, so as to have a complete range
of information for the analysis of the operations of the same person or company”(pp. 18-19). Ultimately, the double entry served for the evaluation of profits
and losses (normally on an annual basis) and of a balance sheet. The Book of Accounts was clearly a
ledger, organized like a rubric, with an indication of the letters on the side,
in which the author noted the accounting movements of his company (which was
nothing but his workshop).
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| Book of Accounts. Detail with the letters of the book Courtesy of Francesco De Carolis |
It is quite
obvious that Lotto was not the only party to keep accounts in his time. Not by
chance, in several of his posts, referring to various economic transactions,
Lotto wrote that the same operation was also noted in the book of the other
party. Moreover, we know, in the artistic field, the Second Book of Francesco and Jacopo Dal Ponte which covered a
much longer period of time, including the years of Lotto. Also the Book of the Bassanos was based on double-entry.
It goes without saying that alternative accounting systems could have been
adopted (for example a simple chronological record). Even more obviously, the
practice was not left to painters alone.
Lotto’s Book included some pages that did not
conform to the double-entry system. Far from affecting the consistency of the
artist's accounting system, these pages highlight its compactness, precisely
because of the contrast that characterizes them with respect to the central
core of the recordings. These were the initial or final pages. The initial
pages contained, for example, a very famous recipe by Jacopo Sansovino for the
production of wax models. The final pages even included a sheet with
indications about the relationship between the artist and Ottavio da Macerata.
All of this was there simply because of the costs of paper: one had to use all white
spaces. The procedure was very similar to what had happened in many manuscripts
that testify ancient recipes of artistic techniques: white spaces had been
occupied by texts that were not always consistent. In other cases, because of
the loss of the original, the relative transcriptions led to a fundamental confusion,
which here however has no reason, because, fortunately, we still have the
original text. With the same motivation, Lotto used the still remaining final
pages of the Book, overturning them
and transcribing the list of his minute expenses incurred for the exercise of
art and for personal expenses (especially his clothes). These are lists
referred to a shorter period (from 1540 to 1545), but of particular interest (I'll
talk about it in the second part of this review)
 |
| Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Liberale da Pinedello (or Portrait of a Gentleman with Gloves), 1543, Milan, Brera Gallery Source: https://www.finestresullarte.info/685n_i-ritratti-di-lorenzo-lotto-alla-pinacoteca-di-brera.php |
A 'simplified' accounting?
All this said,
it must be clarified that Lotto's accounting was not always impeccable (as you
would also logically expect). Nevertheless, the real question seems to me another:
provided that the artist adopted the double entry, did all this only serve to compute
the operating result (obviously of his workshop)? In all honesty, I'm not entirely clear
what the curator thinks about it. Personally, I have many doubts, and here I briefly
explain the reasons that lead me to think of it in this way. It has been said
that Lotto had a ledger. Was there also a journal. i.e. did there exist a
register of day-to-day expenditures and revenues? In fact, it was the journal
that ultimately proved indispensable for the formulation of the financial
statements (whatever the time frame taken into consideration for the accounting
period). Of course, it is very possible that the journal was lost. All in all, one
should keep into account that we are talking about accounting records, which
ended up being kept very rarely; a journal, then, would have made sense for the
time related to the exhaustion of the accounting period and the transcription
of the items on the ledger. Among the accounting records (by themselves, already
rarely preserved), therefore, the journal was the one that was thrown away
first. However, it should be noted that in none of the posts of Lotto's ledger
appears a reference to the transcription of documents from a journal. On the
contrary, the artist speaks indifferently of his 'Book' or 'journal' referring precisely to the ledger which has
arrived to us. The lists relating to the expenses for art and personal needs prove
that Lotto noted on different and separate supporting pieces various types of
financial expenditures (or revenues), without having a special accounting book.
Finally, it should be noted that on several occasions Lotto declared to write
down the accounting operations directly from loose sheets (contracts, receipts,
private entries); he certainly did so often with years of delay, sometimes
indicating generic dates, as if the material he had available was not complete
and he did not remember the chronological extremes. If that was the case, if
Lotto did not keep a 'journal', the next question is: what was the use of a
heading in double-entry? It seems to me that the answer can be that the purpose
of the posting of the items was twofold: to guarantee mnemonic recollection (it
was a question of remembering the economic transactions carried out) and at the
same time to document accounting: next to the debit and credit items were
placed monetary values. If the two amounts coincided, the operation could be
considered completed; if they were different, it meant that there was the
permanence of a credit or a debt (in the case of Lotto - this is the reality of
things - of many debts). All of this was very straight away; allow me the
suggestion (which, it is clear, is my own alone, and does not involve the
curator): with an exquisitely 'visual' fruition method, congenial to the
mentality of a painter.
 |
| Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Febo da Brescia, 1543-44, Milan, Brera Gallery Source: https://www.finestresullarte.info/685n_i-ritratti-di-lorenzo-lotto-alla-pinacoteca-di-brera.php |
 |
| Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Laura da Pola, 1543-44, Milan, Brera Gallery Source: https://www.finestresullarte.info/685n_i-ritratti-di-lorenzo-lotto-alla-pinacoteca-di-brera.php |
Looking for a 'fair price'
Whether
Lotto 'measured' or not the economic results of his workshop, all the observations
proposed by De Carolis in his initial comment are perfectly valid. In
particular, I would like to mention that since long time scholars have
identified the formation of a luxury goods market (including works of art) as one
of the fundamental aspects of the new Renaissance spirit, in the economic
context of the historical process of refeudalization. De Carolis wrote: "From these assumptions, however, it was
noted that when history of art scholars drew the most immediate consequence of
defining the wealth of a society on the basis of investment in artistic artefacts,
they limited themselves to the development of market forms, i.e. to the
purchase of works of art. On the other hand, it is evident that this cannot be
the only implication; in fact, it is necessary to further analyse how the
Renaissance civilization developed a
specific awareness of the material characteristics of artistic objects as
luxury goods even during the production phase." (pp. 26-27). It is
evident that Lotto’s Book can teach
us a lot in this sense, being written by an art creator of the time. In this
sense, the search for the identification of a "fair price" for artworks,
in fact, is to be crucially seen as the thread of the entire manuscript. How to
determine the price of a work? And who should be able to do it? Scrolling
through the posts of Lotto, a constant will appear immediately: the artist
always sold his works (when he succeeds) at a lower price than what he, in his
opinion, should actually achieve. No doubt, it is an index of his personal
artistic failure. However, perhaps there is something more: for instance, it is
particularly interesting to distinguish between the value of a 'honest' or 'good'
piece for a work (which does not mean a discounted price, but still a price on
fair market terms) and the selling price, which, instead, is identified as the
agreement between 'dear friends' or 'good friends'. It is clear that the
reference to friendship is merely a courtesy formula: often, the declaration of
the selling price 'between good friends' is followed by Lotto’s complaints.
‘Friendship’ in fact identifies a situation in which the initial proposal is
formulated by the artist and the final price following a negotiation is much lower.
There are, however, (and they are far more frequent) diametrically opposed
situations, in which the work of art is realized 'out of the market', without negotiations
determining the price: the quantification of the due is simply left to the
client in base of his level of appreciation of the work. Less frequent (but
equally significant) are the situations in which the indication of price is
left to experts appointed in advance. By and large, the most formal situations
are those of commissions from religious bodies, obviously preceded by a phase
of bargaining that leads to drawing up (or even register with notaries) real
preliminary contracts.
A guild member
Zampetti -
we saw at the beginning - defined Lotto as a man who did not take care of his
own interests. In light of what has been said so far, this seems to be an
erroneous statement. Lotto had a completely rational behaviour: he had his own
accounting book, in which he reported the economic operations of his activity.
Moreover, he was a member of the guild and scrupulously followed its
regulations: from the accounts at the end of the Book (those transcribed by overturning the notebook) it is clear
that he regularly paid the “luminaria di San
Luca” (a sort of 'membership fee' to the Guild of painters or Fraglia dei Pittori) and he brought his
paintings to the Sensa fair, which
was held in Piazza San Marco on the occasion of the Ascension and in which the
painters exposed their works to the public. When, in one of his many moves,
Lotto left Venice to go to Treviso, he worried about continuing to pay the
rent of his workshop in the lagoon because the regulations of the guild provided
that the masters' studies did not exceed a certain limit and provided,
therefore, that the shops could not be opened at distances of less than sixty
steps from each other. He therefore worried about maintaining a presence in
Venice. All this was the perfectly logical behaviour of a man who felt part of
the guild, and considered himself an artefice
(i.e. an art maker but above all a man of the Art, in the medieval sense of
guild) and not an artist. De Carolis rightly pointed out that the same
words with which Lotto complained that he had already changed so many apprentices
in his shop without finding one who would have the moral virtues necessary to
become his heir, approach him extraordinarily to Cennino Cennini and his Book of the Art, the guild artist par
excellence.
End of Part One
NOTES
[1] For the sake of brevity, I have omitted here the complicated (and in some respects less decorous) story linked to the quarrel which is soon unleashed on the merit of the discovery of the manuscript (see pp. 39-42). However, I would like to point out (as De Carolis established convincingly) that at the time of publishing his famous monograph on Lotto (1895) Bernard Berenson already knew Lotto’s Book through the news published by Gianuizzi between March and May 1894 on the Nuova Rivista Misena and the information received from Guido Levi, who was dealing with the transcription in 1893, when he died in August of that year.
[2] Lorenzo Lotto, Libro di spese diverse (1538-1556). Edited by Pietro Zampetti, Venice-Rome, Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1969.
[3] Lorenzo Lotto, Il libro di spese diverse (1480-1556). Edition and transcription by Floriano Grimaldi and Katy Sordi, Loreto, Pontifical Delegation for the Shrine of the Holy House, 2003. I did not have the opportunity to consult it. As reported by De Carolis, however, this is a 'diplomatic' edition, aimed at restoring the correct appearance of the manuscript, in which the editors refer, with regard to the apparatus, to the Zampetti edition, updating only some notes related to personalities lived in the Santa Casa (Holy House) in Loreto.
[4] Lorenzo Lotto, Libro di spese diverse (1538-1556). Edited by Pietro Zampetti, Venice-Rome, Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1969, pp. XXIX-XXX
[5] Lorenzo Lotto, Libro di spese diverse (1538-1556). Edited by Pietro Zampetti, Venice-Rome, Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1969, pp. XXXI-XXXII.
[6] Lorenzo Lotto, Libro di spese diverse (1538-1556). Edited by Pietro Zampetti, Venice-Rome, Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1969, pp. XL.
[7] I am intentionally using the term 'fortune'. See the interesting notes of De Carolis on the concept of ‘fortune’ in the commercial community of the XVI century (pp.32-33).
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