[German Connoisseurs between 19th and 20th Century], edited by Francesco Caglioti, Andrea De Marchi, Alessandro Nova. Part Three

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I conoscitori tedeschi fra Otto e Novecento
[German Connoisseurs between 19th and 20th Century]
Edited by Francesco Caglioti, Andrea De Marchi, Alessandro Nova

Milan, Officina Libraria, 2018

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part Three

Hans Thoma, Portrait of Henry Thode, 1890, Frankfurt, Staedel Museum
Source: https://www.staedelmuseum.de/en?StoryID=1819 via Wikimedia Commons

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Donata Levi
Alcuni appunti sulla ricezione di Crowe e Cavalcaselle in Germania
[Some notes on the reception of Crowe and Cavalcaselle in Germany]
(pp. 89-101)

Rapid, precocious, but short (supplanted by the Morelli-inspired connoisseurship), the German reception of the three volumes of the New History of Painting (1864-1866) and the two of the History of Painting in North Italy (1871), signed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, had - in Donata Levi’s opinion - a twofold value: first of all, it constituted a sort of new palimpsest (after Vasari’s Lives) on which scholars could advance their studies. Somehow, this fact was already manifested in the publication of the German translation, edited by Max Jordan (respectively 1869-1872 and 1873-1876), which in reality was "a reworking, to which the two authors collaborated and which partly justified the definition of «Original-Ausgabe [original edition]»" (page 94); secondly, it solicited a reflection on the role of the connoisseurship, in years when it was difficult to outline a working method. It emerged that the texts by Crowe and Cavalcaselle were appreciated for their attention to the compositional technique of the work as a distinctive criterion for their attribution and originality (p. 97); more generally "they aspired to an overall reading that, starting from a plurality of technical and formal plans (procedures of image construction, type of drafting, influences and sources, etc.), tried to grasp the paths and their crossings, and aimed precisely to use the - only apparently apodictic - recognition in terms of historical-artistic reconstruction" (page 100).

Marco Mozzo
La raccolta fotografica di Henry Thode (1857-1920) al Vittoriale degli Italiani
[The photographic collection by Henry Thode (1857-1920) at the Vittoriale degli Italiani]
(pp. 102-112)

The examination of photographic funds is of particular importance for the study of the connoisseurship, as photography quickly imposed itself, in the second Nineteenth century, as an indispensable work tool for art historians (even if the 'trust' towards photographic reproduction varied from connoisseur to connoisseur). In this case, Marco Mozzo examined the photographic collection that belonged to Henry Thode first, and Gabriele d'Annunzio then, at Villa Cargnacco nearby the Garda Lake. The villa, as known, belonged first to Thode, formerly (briefly) director of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and then professor at the University of Heidelberg; he had however to abandon it precipitously when Italy entered into the First World War against Germany, leaving in Gardone Riviera his library, photographs, and collections. First rented, the villa was almost immediately purchased by D'Annunzio (we are in 1921), taking today’s name of Vittoriale (the ‘memorial of Italian victories’) two years later.

Ute Dercks, Almut Goldhahn
«Wer ist nun der so geschickt berechnende Meister?»: Media e strumenti della connoisseurship dei primi del Novecento al Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz»
["Wer ist nun der so geschickt berechnende Meister?": Media and tools of the connoisseurship of the early twentieth century at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz]
(pp. 113-126)

The famous photo library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz offers insight to examine the history of the Institute itself on the one hand and the broader issue of the connoisseurs’ approach to photography on the other hand. The «Kunst», as this research centre is known, was founded only in 1897, but already thirty years before "the ‘German colony’ of Florence had begun to cry out the desire of an institution that would «put a scientific apparatus at the disposal of all those wishing to deepen and expand their studies in Italy in direct contact with the monuments, thereby becoming a centre of fertile academic research»" (page 115). The first meetings were held at the home of Baron Karl Eduard von Liphart. A particularly significant moment in the journey towards the birth of the "Kunst" was identified in the seminar that August Schmarsow held in Florence in 1888, bringing with him students such as Aby Warburg, Hermann Ulmann and Max Jacob Friedländer. When the Institute was founded in 1897, its honorary director, Heinrich Brockhaus, set up part of his house as the headquarters of the «Kunst», with a library, a collection of images and a gallery of plaster casts. As it often happens on these occasions, the enrichments of the tools that were available to scholars depended on donations from members or individuals, both in financial terms and in terms of collections. Among the various legacies we must mention that of Ulmann. And the words of Ulmann clarified the attitude of many connoisseurs towards photographic reproductions: it was an approach that - as logical - underlined the usefulness of the media from a documentation and memory point of view; it also highlighted the use for educational purposes, but obviously could not admit the replacement of the direct vision of the artefact with that of his images. Ulmann's evaluations were strictly technical and deserve to be reported: "Given that in the photographs taken from the scaffolding [note of the editor: he is referring to a volume dedicated to the cycle of Hercules at Palazzo Venezia in Rome, published in 1894] the lens was necessarily at the same height of the picture, the figures conceived to be seen from below are more crushed than they appear from the real, that is, seen from the ground. It is a fact to keep in mind in the evaluation of the illustrations. The same applies to the clumsy and marked contours: as these were successive additions, not completely removable because they were made in oil, the master was not to blame. In the photos, however, they are far more conspicuous than in the original, which is more intense in terms of chromaticity. For the stylistic evaluation of this fresco, produced for purely decorative purposes, it is therefore essential to study the original on the spot" (pp. 119-120). Speaking in methodological terms, Max Jakob Friedländer acted as a counterpoint to Ulmann in his 1946 Von Kunst und Kennerschaft: "We photograph and publish with increasing alacrity; comfortable archives make huge quantities of reproductions easily accessible, whereas for many art scholars the possibility of traveling is limited. It follows that stylistic criticism is increasingly exercised on the basis of photographs, with sadly evident consequences. [...] There is no doubt that photography is a precious and indispensable tool, but in resorting to it, sensitivity and moderation are a must. Photography cannot and should not usurp the place of the original. It is necessary to define the scope and the limits of his contribution" (page 113). Those that may ultimately seem simple words of common sense were not always so obvious and, without a doubt, were one of the decisive elements in identifying the 'connoisseur'. One should think of Carl Frey (see Fabian Jonietz's essay below) that in 1890 wrote that "the «magnificent sheets» of exact reproductions of this kind [note of the editor: he is talking about photographic reproductions] let «trips and visits to the originals on the place almost look like superfluous». «On the contrary, certain monuments can be better studied at home from photogrammetric reproductions than from the original itself»" (page 157).

Gabriele Fattorini
Frida Schottmüller (1872-1936): connoisseurship al femminile nella Berlino di Wilhelm von Bode
[Frida Schottmüller (1872-1936): Women's Connoisseurship in Wilhelm von Bode's Berlin]
(pp. 127-138)

The Italian translatin (Turin, Itala Ars, 1921) of Frida Schottmüller's book Wohnungskultur und Mobël der italienischen Renaissance (Stuttgart, 1921)

Frida Schottmüller is the only female figure of connoisseur proposed in the volume, simply because the history of art world (not only in Germany) in the early twentieth century was de facto monopolized by men. Graduated in 1904 with a thesis on Donatello (one of her great passions), Ms Schottmüller had a professional career that developed entirely in the shadow of Wilhelm von Bode, who took her in 1905 as a research assistant for the new-born Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum Berlin (today Bode-Museum). In 1919 she was promoted to assistant curator and remained so for the next fifteen years. Fattorini has no doubt that her being a woman damaged her career and precluded her access to senior management. The relationship with Bode was clearly very close; it is evident that Frida moved to Florence at the «Kunst» between 1907 and 1908 at Bode’s initiative, as an expert in Tuscan sculpture, but also in the search of potentially purchasable works of art. Sculpture was, without a shadow of doubt, the field in which the connoisseur gave better proof of her stylistic reading skills, in particular in her Die italienischen und spanischen Bildwerke der Renaissance und des Barock, the catalogue she produced of Italian and Spanish sculptures at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. Two editions were published, one in 1913 and the second in 1933. But, in reality, the bibliographic production of the scholar was very intense and also reflected the true legacy of Bode, i.e. the versatility (I dare to say the encyclopaedism) of Frida’s connoisseurship, which ranged from sculpture, painting, to the so-called minor arts, including furnishings. Reviewing the second edition of the 1933 Catalogue, in 1938 (the scholar had died two years before) Ulrich Middeldorf was able to write, among other things: "Catalogues of such great importance like the present one are real milestones on the path of science and it is advisable to pause with recollection in order to orient ourselves and judge where we find ourselves, how much we have left behind us and how many tasks remain to us" (pp. 137-138).

Fabian Jonietz
Carl Frey (1857-1917) e il rapporto tra Stilkritik e Quellenkritik
[Carl Frey (1857-1917) and the relationship between Stilkritik and Quellenkritik]
(pp. 139-160)

The bilingual frontispiece of the life of Donatello by Vasari, edited in 1884 by Carl Frey in the series Sammlung ausgewählter Biographien Vasari's.

Finding a (nice) essay about Carl Frey in a book dedicated to connoisseurs is, without a shadow of a doubt, a surprise, because Frey is traditionally considered a champion of the study of sources and archive research compared to the stylistic analysis of the works, which is instead typical of connoisseurship. Frey is known, for example, for his edition of the Vasari correspondence and for an (incomplete) attempt of a critical edition of the Lives of the artist and writer from Arezzo.

The man - it must be said immediately - was never loved. This was due, first of all, to his personal behaviour. In this respect, a few amusing footnotes in  Jonietz’s essay reported the acid testimonies of many of his colleagues (for instance, he got a letter of censorship because, at the Institute of Art History in Berlin, he was taking the periodicals of public consultation and reading them in the bathroom). Moreover, he was also not esteemed by many of his colleagues in academia (during a long and clamorous diatribe with August Schmarsow, dated 1889-1890 - see page 148 - the latter wrote in an important humanistic journal: "I have not been entertaining any personal or professional relationship with him for years, nor can I say that I have never recognized him as a colleague in the strict sense [editor's note: as an art historian]". In addition, he was little appreciated also by contemporary artists: "Max Liebermann  [...] in 1900 quoted Frey as an example par excellence of those university professors of art history responsible for the misunderstanding of figurative arts in Germany, and contrasted him with museum directors such as Wilhelm Bode and Adolf Bayersdorfer"- page 143. For sure, he was hated by art historians in Italy, as well known: the Vasari correspondence was rediscovered in 1908 by Giovanni Poggi, at that time director of the National Museum in Florence, at the private archive of Count Rasponi-Spinelli. But Italy lost the ownership of those papers when, in fact, Germany bought the documents with a private financing of Emperor William II and entrusted Frey (who was the true creator of that blitz) the task of publishing the letters, exempting him in several occasions from teaching obligations. The story was told in detail by Julius von Schlosser in his Kunstliteratur (p. 301 of the 1924 original text at https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/schlosser1924/0320/image), which probably exaggerates by writing: "and even if it was a storm in a teacup [note of the editor: he was talking about the purchase of the archive in a not too orthodox manner] it was still one of those imponderable elements, which unfortunately had a part in the position taken by Italy in the storm that was gathering!", as if this episode had helped to determine the Italian will to enter the war against Germany (while it is certain that it had a weight when it hindered, after the German war, a prompt decision on whether to reopen the «Kunst» or expropriate it). And precisely the judgment of Schlosser, who was particularly authoritative in the context of history of art sources, seems to me to be particularly significant. The Austrian scholar, speaking of Frey, used respectful expressions, without ever calling him however a professor or art historian. I allow myself to report in full the judgment on the first volume of the commented edition of Vasari's Lives, where all reservations on the real stature of this figure emerged in all their clarity (p. 298, see: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/schlosser1924/0317/image): "All this, however, was simply a precursor to the great complete edition that the very active and solute author had planned and whose first (and last) volume, a huge quarto-book in 914 pages (+XXIV pages), was brought out in Munich in 1911 by publisher Müller. You take it in the hand with a strange sense of emotion, mixed with regret and gratitude. In fact it is tragic that a man who was no longer young had considered his life sufficient to carry out the initiated undertaking in a similar mass. Frey’s characteristic traits, especially his lack of method, were here aggravated in a frightening way. In fact, this volume contains nothing but the introduction of Vasari, then (quite mistreated) the introduction on art technique, the letter of Adriani (in fact, a useless writing which was given here too much attention), and finally only three of the first Lives (Cimabue, Arnolfo, the Pisanis), which occupied more than half the volume (387-899)! After all, it is incomprehensible how a publisher could allow a publication, which, if it had ever been finished, would have greatly exceeded the great Weimar edition of Goethe’s work and whose first volume would have already been old-fashioned at the publication of the last. In fact, in this first volume Frey tried to amass all our current knowledge about those three artists, in appendices, dissertations, extracts of documents, tables, etc.: they are all things that are foreign to a text and overload it unnecessarily; imagine what the addition of a photo apparatuses would imply! [...] It follows, as in all the publications of Frey, the lack of the overall vision, the fragmentation into innumerable details, which makes the use of the large volume a plague, because it lacks any index. This work of a worthy and tireless man, which had however to remain forever mutilated, is a classic example of the difficulty of art historians to orient themselves in a field that however owes so much to Frey".

Frey’s career all developed within the Institute of Art History in Berlin, still without obtaining a fixed professorship (in 1901 the concrete possibility that he would became ordinary professor aroused lively controversy). There is not the slightest doubt that ha also suffered very much about criticism about the inaccuracy of his visual examinations; therefore – as Jonietz noted - in many of his writings he almost maniacally insisted on the circumstances in which he had the opportunity to see the works he spoke of.

In reality, any attempt to better understand whether and how Frey was an integral part of connoisseurship, must follow various tracks, starting from an appraisal of the reviews that the scholar wrote on numerous occasions in the periodical press. In them, even if he fell into errors that were not only his own (think of his support for the attribution of the San Giovannino Medici to the young Michelangelo advanced by Bode - see Francesco Caglioti, On Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929), Frey discussed the problem of the stylistic analysis of the artefacts; in the same way, the two journals of his Italian journey are useful, and the interest in photographic reproductions cannot be silenced, even if, in the specific case, his trust in the pictures appeared so unconditional that it would make it possible to replace the direct vision of the works (see page 157).

The method used by Frey in his publications deserves a separate mention: Schlosser wrote - and Jonietz confirmed - that many Frey's works consisted of a chaotic sedimentation of documents, correspondence, appendices. However, the German scholar was the first to use, in the first and only volume of his Vasarian Lives, the compared examination of the Torrentian and Giuntine versions of the Lives, highlighting differences and similarities. It was a method that would be reused, fifty years later, by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini in the Lives edition that is nowadays a reference. He differed from the two Italian scholars in the ultra-conservative transcription criteria of the text, which were the cause of some substantial misunderstanding (and Schlosser did not renounce to point out that, in the case of a non-Italian scholar, this was obviously a sin of presumption). However, in the field of drawing (Frey was the author of three volumes on the corpus of Michelangelo's drawings), the scholar inaugurated an appealing method of cataloguing, much better than those proposed by Berenson or Thode: in essence (and it is not minor aspect) he created "a system [...] that placed in the hands of the connoisseur an equipment that, with Frey's parameters, showed itself in harmony with an objective and rigorous science of art (Kunstwissenschaft)" (p. 160).

Antonie Rita Wiedemann
Wilhelm Suida (1877-1959): la formazione di un conoscitore tra Henry Thode e la Scuola di Vienna
[Wilhelm Suida (1877-1959): the formation of a connoisseur between Henry Thode and the Vienna School]
(pp. 261-272)

The frontispiece of Genua, a monograph on Genuan art written by Wilhelm Suida in 1906
Source: https://archive.org/details/genua00suid/page/n5

In 1959, just shortly before he died, the Kress Foundation published a collective volume conceived for the eightieth birthday of Wilhelm Suida, an Austrian art historian who, following the Nazi annexation (Anschluss) in 1939, had first moved to England and then to the United States (1940), where he had duties of particular responsibility at the Kress Foundation, proving decisive in the purchase campaigns operated in Europe by Samuel Kress. The names of the several contributors of that volume clearly demonstrated a fundamental aspect: Suida's fortune was mainly linked to his Italian and Anglo-Saxon acquaintances; the specific weight of German-speaking scholars, on the other hand, was actually very low (page 271). Of Suida, however, it has been often said that he had been part of the Vienna School and had been a pupil of Wickhoff, but without going into too much detail.

Wiedemann tried to focus, above all, on Suida’s education. It emerged that Suida was primarily a student of Henry Thode at the University of Leipzig (it is not certain that they were relatives, but Suida called him 'uncle'), sharing his passion for Wagner music and the historical research aimed at defining and exaltation of an authentic German art, which, in terms of contemporary art, was reflected in the support of artists like Hans Thoma and Böcklin as opposed to the negative influence exerted by French art [8]. Suida's career should therefore be reread in the light of the teaching of Thode, from which, however, Wilhelm was able to free himself at least partially when, in 1905, he moved to Vienna, studying under Wickhoff and Riegl (considered by Thode as mortal enemies) and approaching Morelli’s attribution methods.

In concrete terms, Suida's career mainly focused on the art of Lombardy and Genoa (the latter substantially unknown in the German-speaking world at the time). Although not detailing it, the authoress of the essay believes that Suida took the view that, in the mental process leading the connoisseur to the attribution, "first of all comes the intuition, which only subsequently is confirmed by the historical-critical study and above all by the knowledge of artistic techniques" (page 269).

But the Suida case is of particular importance because it also marked a moment of reflection and rejection of the research world towards collectors and markets. Suida (coming from a rich family) owned his own collection and had relationships with the world of art dealers, who did not hesitate to contact him in matters of purely commercial purposes. Already in 1911 his appointment to the chair of History of Art at the University of Graz was skipped because of findings on the correctness of his behaviour. He joined the Joanneum (also in Graz), where he was director of the artistic collections. There, he was forced to sign in 1917 a declaration in which not only all employees had to commit not to be part of the antiquarian market, but even to renounce their collection; in 1920, nevertheless, he was sent in forced retirement precisely following a disciplinary measure that censored its behaviour on the antiquarian market.

In short, Suida represented the refusal of the Austrian academia towards the art trade; a clear rejection that probably reflected the dominant position of the Vienna School (so much so that Schlosser did not even mention him among the pupils of the Viennese school in his memoirs). On the other hand, the removal from the Joanneaum gave him the opportunity to approach the world of Italian connoisseurs or those living in Italy, from Longhi to Berenson, and inserted him into a circuit certainly less hostile to commercial practices. With the transfer to America, therefore, he was engaged by the Kress Foundation. 

End of Part Three

Go to Part Four 

NOTES

[8] On this topic see, in this blog: Thomas W. Gaehtgens. The reception of modern French art in Germany between 1870 and 1945 in Perspectives croisées. French-German art criticism between 1870-1945, edited by Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Mathilde Arnoux and Friederike Kitschen.