[Ceán Bermúdez as an Enlightened Art Historian and Collector]. Edited by Elena Maria Santiago Páez. Part Two

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Ceán Bermúdez
Historiador del arte y collecionista ilustrado

[Ceán Bermúdez as an Enlightened Art Historian and Collector]
Edited by Elena Maria Santiago Páez

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España and Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2016

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part Two

Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo, Two women at a Window, Washington, National Gallery
Source: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1185.html via Wikimedia Commons

Go back to Part One

The Diccionario historico 

Published in 1800 at the expense of the Real Academia de San Fernando, the Diccionario histórico de los mas ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España (Historical Dictionary of the most illustrious professors of the Fine Arts in Spain), according to what Ceán wrote in the prologue, was the result of a work that, since its first commencement, has lasted for twenty years [2]. We know, however, from the correspondence that has come down to us, that what gave impetus to the endeavour was the visit which his friend José Vargas Ponce (1760-1821) made to Seville, in one of the many periods of Ceán’s 'forced removal' from Madrid. It was in 1794. The date, in some way, can be considered symbolic. In that year, it was published posthumous the last (eighteenth) volume of the Viage de España (Journey through Spain) of the painter Antonio Ponz (1725-1792), a great project to describe the Spanish reality, started in 1772.

Francisco de Goya, Portrait of José de Vargas Ponce, 1805, Madrid, Real Academia de Historia
Source: http://www.rah.es/retrato-de-jose-de-vargas-ponce/ via Wikimedia Commons

Antonio Ponz, Self Portrait, about 1774, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ponz-autorretrato.jpg

Ceán had personally met Ponz in Madrid in 1779 and undoubtedly collaborated with the preparation of the volume dedicated to Seville. Quite probably, he had also begun to collect materials, in previous years, just to fill the gaps that he may have found in the Journey through Spain. Now that the scholar had passed away and the Journey had been completed, Juan Agustin and Vargas Ponce possibly reasoned around a new project, this time entirely dedicated to the fine arts. The following year (see page 226) Jovellanos advised Ceán to give his work the form of a dictionary (with the artists ordered, in a 'modern' way, by surname) to make it easier to consult and leave space to future appendices. The style with which the biographies were written aimed at combining clarity and conciseness. The first drafts (reached up to us) allow us to realize the consistent cuts made, compared to the printed version, for example in the biographies of Antonio Ponz and Anton Raphael Mengs.

Ceán's wanted to include, in his Dictionary, the cards of painters and sculptors, but also of protagonists of the 'minor arts', such as miniaturists, engravers, painters on glass, etc. Architects were excluded.

There are no doubts about the reasons for this exclusion. In 1799 (we have already mentioned the circumstance) another important figure of the Spanish Age of Enlightenment, that is Eugenio Llaguno, died; at least as from 1770 he was working on a historical catalogue of Iberian architects. By testamentary will, his cards ended up to Ceán Bermúdez, to complete the work and publish it. In fact (as we shall see) Juan Agustin’s Noticias de los arquitectos y arquitectura de España (News from the architects and architecture of Spain) were published only in 1829; they were derived from the manuscript of Llaguno, but enriched decisively by Ceán. It is not clear to me, however (and it is quite possible that I was a bad reader) whether Juan Agustin excluded from his Dictionary all the already collected news on architects (this seems highly unlikely, given the very short time between Llaguno’s death and the presentation of the Dictionary to the Academy of San Fernando to obtain the placet for publication - see below), or whether he did not collect such documentation at all; or, again, whether in his travels and research activity Ceán recorded the data relating to architecture, but with the intention of providing the news to Llaguno himself. The two knew each other, and their mutual collaboration was confirmed, first of all, by the trust with which the dying Llaguno entrusted his papers to Ceán; and then by the fact that the former had been direct predecessor of Jovellanos in the role of fiscal judge, entrusted to the mentor of Juan Agustin in 1778.

Still on the Diccionario

In August 1799 (Ceán returned to Madrid, during a three-year period in which Jovellanos’s fortune was on the rise), Juan Agustin presented the text of the first volume of his Dictionary to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, which decided to name a commission to assess whether the work would deserve to be published at their expense. Despite the hostility by Isidoro Bosarte (1747-1807), a member of the commission who was involved in his project for an updated version of Palomino's Lives, Ceán obtained the Academy's endorsement, with a single, important caveat: it was decided (on the basis of a custom that went back to Vasari) not to publish the biographies of living artists. The papers relating to those artists (including Goya) are preserved today at the National Library of Spain.

In reality, this is not the only concession that Ceán was forced to accept. It seems certain, for example, that Juan Agustin wanted to include the portraits of the Spanish artifices (at least the main ones) in his Dictionary. Needless to say, this was inspired by the example of Vasari and the portraits he proposed in the Giuntina edition (1568) of the Lives [3]. Ceán's archive folders, in fact, still host 69 portraits he drew, copying those proposed for the third edition of Vasari's Lives, published in Bolognes and edited by Manolessi (1647).

In the case of Juan Agustin, it is to be excluded that he knew directly Francisco Pacheco’s Libro de Retratos (Book of portrays), at the time considered lost. Ceán nevertheless managed to put together a series of portraits, some derived from Pacheco's models (he did not know, of course) and asked Goya to engrave them for him, whereas he was forced to refrain from their printing so as not to excessively increase costs.

Furthermore, he also had no way of inserting in the appendix the genealogical trees of the painters of the various Spanish schools, drawn up in Seville in 1797; it is assumed that even here, high costs induced him to renounce. The tables in question were called Árboles históricos de las vidas de los Pintores Españoles (Historical trees of the lives of the Spanish Painters). In them Ceán "developed the lines of influence between teachers and disciples through the three Spanish schools: Castilian, Andalusian and Aragonese, even if the latter still appears as Valencian. Ceán created a large chart in which, for example, starting from a master like Velázquez, the genealogical lines of his followers and disciples were unravelled. It is significant that, in order to describe the development of Spanish painting, he also took into consideration foreign artists such as Zuccari and Titian, from which a line of influence was generated which, through El Greco, reached Juan Bautista Maino, Fra Juan Ricci , Luis Tristán and Juan de Chirinos" (page 228).

The non-publication of those that, for convenience, we would call 'genealogical trees' gives us the opportunity to reflect again on the fact - already mentioned above - that the Dictionary, intended for centuries as a scholarly compilation, had to be based on a historical vision of Spanish painting. In the introduction to the first volume, Ceán emphasized that he had in mind a project that would clarify the evolution of painting, sculpture and minor arts in Spain; he somehow recognised that he had not been fully succeeded, in this specific case, announcing he would try later again. In the last tome of the Dictionary, however, he presented a long chronological index of the artists taken into consideration in the work, to help readers to orient themselves across time.

The sources of the Dictionary 

The contents of the Dictionary are, as a matter of logic, the result, first of all, of a careful re-reading of those great treatises of the Golden Age (from Carducho to Pacheco to Palomino) which at the time were available in printed versions. A key role was however attributed to the manuscripts that Ceán succeeds in obtaining directly or through his dense network of friends and correspondents. In 1795, for example, Jovellanos sent him a summary with the news kept in Lázaro Diaz del Valle's Lives; the following year the dean of the Cathedral of Zaragoza, Juan Antonio Hernández Pérez de Larrea, sent him an extract of the news on the artists drawn from Jusepe Martínez’s Discursos practicables del nobilÍsimo arte de la pintura (Practicable discourses of the most noble art of painting) (page 100). The mass of archival documents and unpublished texts which Juan Agustin manages to draw from was truly impressive; his research activity, moreover, did not stop with the publication of the work. Precisely to fill the lacunae of the Dictionary, Ceán asked for example to be sent a copy in 1807 of the Colección de pintores, escultores y arquitectos desconocidos (Collection of unknown painters, sculptors and architects), written by Agustín Arqués Jover in 1802 (page 269).


Between neoclassicism and naturalism

At this point it is reasonable to ask what was the historical vision underpinning Juan Agustin's Dictionary (and many other works of his). For a long time it was considered that his views were strictly neoclassical. After all, it's more than logical. He felt the influence of Mengs' stay in Madrid; neoclassicism, moreover, imposed itself as a universal language. Having said that, it is clear that Ceán also had a profound awareness of his Spanish identity, which emerged more clearly after the War of Independence. On the one hand, he clearly attempted to claim a national cultural heritage; on the other he probably fostered a 'political' reaction to the neoclassicism of the French invader. Under this point of view, the most indicative writings are those dating back to the years from 1808 onwards: "The defense of the reputation of Spanish art was a constant in Ceán [...]. His attention and interest in periods such as the Gothic period are evident and, in particular, his praise for the Spanish school of painting. He dedicated several specific works and not a little information to this school and its brilliant baroque phase, having no doubts about recognizing pictorial values ​​that went much further than those of a neoclassical orthodoxy that had proved to be substantially indifferent to it. We have already said that he ended up placing one of his best representatives, namely Murillo, as a model before Mengs, with whom we know that Ceán had studied in his youth and who had been consecrated as the hero restoring the idea of antiquity. As an example, he justified Murillo, in some of his sacred representations, for not having used ideal prototypes of the Greco-Roman statuary, but expressions and faces of what he saw around him, sometimes without the "Attic grace", but provided of the «Romulian [note of the editor: Sevillian] grace which is the grace of the graces of Spain, unknown to those who live beyond the Pyrenees, whose frozen hearts are insensitive to its charms»" (page 84). The above mentioned text was taken from the Diálogo sobre el arte de la Pintura (Dialogue on the art of painting”) dated 1819, where Juan Agustin placed Murillo above the 'myth' of Mengs.

Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo, Holy Family with a Bird, about 1645-1650, Madrid, Prado Museum
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bartolom%C3%A9_Esteban_Perez_Murillo_008.jpg?uselang=it

I find of particular interest, moreover, a few lines that Ceán reported in one of his writings of 1791, and therefore much earlier than the presumed patriotic turn of the Spanish scholar. Speaking of the distinctive characters that belong to the original paintings, Juan Agustin wrote: "«An original is what is either realized by the invention or by copying nature, as Rembrandt, Velázquez, Murillo and others did; or according to the idea of ​​nature itself, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael of Urbino, Michelangelo Buonarroti and others of the Florentine school»" (page 142). In my view, already here (i.e. long before the War of Independence and in a fully neoclassical climate) his awareness of a 'Spanish specificity' [4] emerged. After all, the Spanish case is not very different from what happened in many other places in Europe, for example in Venice. The triumph of the Academies meant the victory of teaching methodologies based on the drawing from ancient statues or from the nude even also in regions, such as the Venetian area and in Spain, where the pictorial tradition was different and in which one had to try a demanding conciliation between a neoclassicism that had become an artistic koine and eccentric traditions [5].

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocenzo X, about 1650, Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilj
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Retrato_del_Papa_Inocencio_X._Roma,_by_Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez.jpg

The Dialogues

Let us return for a moment to the Diálogo sobre el arte de la Pintura, of 1819. It is only one of the dialogues written by Ceán, who made use of this literary genre especially to support the thesis of the nobility of painting. Another example was the Diálogo entre el cardenal D. Gaspar de Borja... y D. Juan Carreño de Miranda (Dialogue between Cardinal D. Gaspar de Borja... and Mr. Juan Carreño de Miranda), a Spanish artist who lived between 1614 and 1685. "The fictitious dialogue between the cardinal and the painter was undoubtedly the best output among Juan Agustin’s writings. With an agile style and an effective characterization of the characters, he opposed two different attitudes vis-à-vis fine arts [...]. The rough cardinal Borja embodied the ancient mentality, as a defender of the most traditional hierarchies, indifferent to the fine arts; the Asturian painter Carreño, on the other hand, supported these disciplines and those who protect and study them, highlighting the deserved recognition of their importance in all the «educated nations»" (p. 283).

Juan Carreño de Miranda, Foundation of the Orden de los Trinitarios, 1666, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carreno-de-miranda_Orden_de_los_Trinitarios.jpg

The Noticias de los arquitectos y arquitectura de España

The history of architecture, which had been delivered to him incomplete by Eugenio Llaguno in 1799, was published by Ceán only in 1829, shortly before his death, under the title Noticias de los arquitectos y arquitectura de España desde su restauración por el Excmo Señor D. Eugenio Llaguno y Amírola, ilustradas y acrecentadas con notas, adiciones y documentos por D. Juan Agustin Ceán-Bermúdez (News from the architects and architecture of Spain on restoration by the HE Mr. Eugenio Llaguno and Amírola, illustrated and enlarged with notes, additions and documents by Mr. Juan Agustin Ceán-Bermúdez). The first, great novelty of the News with respect to the Dictionary is, this time, that the structure of the work was chronological and not alphabetic. In the 'Preliminary Discourse' at the beginning of the work (there is also a longer draft preserved at the Biblioteca Nacional de España), Ceán identified a series of ten Spanish architectural ages to which he dedicated individual chapters. To be precise, he also indicated an era related to Roman antiquity, which was not discussed and would be the subject of the posthumous Summary of Roman antiquities in Spain (1832). The News started, as the title states, from the 'restauration' (in concrete, from about the VIII century AD). Clearly, Ceán kept separate the information contained in the manuscript of Llaguno separate and the result of his research. It is hardly evident that, in reality, Juan Agustin's contribution was prevalent, beginning with the chronological arch taken into consideration, which in the case of Llaguno was interrupted with 1735, and now reached 1828.

The reasons for such a long postponement (originally the work had to be ready by 1810) were numerous; apart from the continuous overlapping of new documents (this is the case, for example, of some reports sent by Jovellanos from Mallorca between 1806 and 1808, or a manuscript on the history of the new cathedral of Salamanca, sent by Domingo González Valle in 1807) political turbulence led to a delay of more than ten years. There were also contemporary and pressing commitments brought forward in parallel.

Michel-Ange Houasse, View of the Monastery of El Escorial, 1722, Madrid, Prado Museum
Source: https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/vista-del-monasterio-de-el-escorial/57de3513-a7b9-4cd3-b41a-8ad8a59e724e via Wikimedia Commons

The foundation of the work (and could not be otherwise) was classicist. However, there was no lack of attention and interest in the 'heterodox' architectures, from the Gothic to the Arab subsistence, in an attempt to clarify whether the origin of the first was due precisely to the Arab world. In any case, the golden age of Spanish architecture coincided with the sixteenth century and the construction of the Escorial. It is interesting, rather, to note (see page 254) that one of the commonplaces of Enlightenment historiography was that Spanish architecture had experienced a profound crisis with the affirmation of the more 'charged' forms of the Baroque. The second half of the seventeenth century was considered, in this regard, dominated by the so-called "churriguerresca sect", or the presence of at least two generations of architects belonging to the Churriguera family, considered to be responsible for the degeneration of the Baroque. In this regard, in a speech read in the Academy in 1816, Ceán presented the thesis – which had later on some fortune - that in reality these extravagant forms would have been largely borrowed from the handbook of the German architect Wendel Dietterlin (1550-1599), entitled Architecture and published for the first time in 1593. In other words, the 'corruption' of the good standards would have been actually favoured by the Habsburgs and have its origins well beyond the Pyrenees.


The Sumario de las antigúedades romanas que hay en España, en especial las pertenecientes a las Bellas Artes

Posthumously published in 1832, the Summary on Roman Antiquities was thought at least in 1818, when the Real Academia de la Historia (another academic institution in which Ceán moved with great commitment) had approved its publication. Even though it was dedicated to all the artistic artefacts of the Roman era, the Summary was concentrated, for the most part, as logical, on architectural remains. Among the many writings of Ceán, it was probably the one in which the scholarly and classifying aspects prevailed most. It is clear that the Summary has been designed to complement the News on Architects, which we have already mentioned (and which, by no coincidence, began in the 8th century AD). The two writings, in fact, shared the same objectives: "to claim the rich constructive and artistic heritage of Spain, to present a report on its evolution and to propose models «to our professors, without having to go and track them out of the kingdom»" (p. 248).

The Historia del Arte de la Pintura

The last great work written by Ceán was the Historia del Arte de la Pintura. It consisted of eleven tomes (seven of text and four of appendixes) left in manuscripts, in which Juan Agustin proposed "the evolution of painting from its origins until the eighteenth century and carefully studied the different European schools: the Italian, the German, Flemish, Dutch, French, English and, of course, Spanish (divided into Castilian, Aragonese and Andalusian)" (page 270). It was an endeavour with few equivalents in Europe in those years, and which however was a child of the times. We know quite well the chronology of the work’s build-up, which went from 1822 to 1828. Most likely, to influence the editing, was the opening of the Prado, in 1819, which presented the artistic artefacts of the royal collections dividing them by eras and national schools. And the Prado, in turn, was the 'son' of the Louvre and its staging in Napoleonic years by Dominique Vivant-Denon. It is evident how important they must have been, for the preparation of his History, on one hand the direct vision of the works of the Madrid museum, on the other hand the collections of drawings and prints that Ceán had collected for over thirty years. Of course, the lion's share belonged to the analysis of Spanish painting (which occupied two of the seven text volumes). In fact, with the History of the Art of Painting, Juan Agustin placed Spanish art within the European scene. Much could be expressed on this aspect. It will suffice to say, for now, that in the same year of the release of this catalogue, in 2016, David García Lopez and Daniel Crespo Delgado published, for the first time, the full version of the section dedicated by Ceán to Spanish painting (for the types of KRK ediciones) [6]. We will be able to talk about it on a future occasion.


NOTES

[2] The Dictionary (available online) has recently been republished in a reduced facsimile version co-issued by Ediciones Istmo and Akal Ediciones. See Juan Agustin Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España. With a prologue by Miguel Morán Turina, Madrid, Ediciones Istmo and Akal Ediciones, 2001.

[3] Allow me to refer, in this blog, to my Hand-drawn Portraits in Giorgio Vasari's Lives: new discoveries.

[4] This also reflected an academic vision of Italian painting. It is evident that the Leonardo mentioned in Ceán was the one that emerged from the Treatise on Painting in 1651, which was published in Paris with classicist and academic teaching purposes. See Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900, by Claire Farago, Ashgate Publishing, 2009. We are very far from the Leonardo for whom painting was science, as an investigation of nature. The teaching of the precepts of Leonardo in the context of the Spanish Academy, moreover, benefited from the first Spanish translation of the work, made by Diego Antonio Rejón de Silva in 1784. See Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga, TheTrattato in Seventeenth- andEighteenth-Century Spanish Perspective and Art Theory in Re-Reading Leonardo ... cit.

[5] On the history of the Venice Academy see my reviews to The Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. The Eighteenth Century, by Giuseppe Pavanello and to The Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. The Nineteenth Century, edited by Nico Stringa.

[6] Juan Agustin Ceán Bermúdez, Historia del arte de la pintura en España, curated by David García Lopez and Daniel Crespo Delgado, KRK ediciones, 2016.