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Francesco Mazzaferro
The Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura by Giovanni Gaetano Bottari
Part Two
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| Fig. 33) Giovanni Zanobio Weber, Medal of Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, Florence, Bargello, circa 1760. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Why a collection of artists' letters?
How to explain the reasons for the
appearance of Giovanni Gaetano Bottari's Raccolta, the first collection of artists' letters, in 1754?
Giovanna Perini Folesani [40] saw in it the culmination of a XVII-Century tradition of
collecting the letters of the artists, which dated back to Bellori (1613-1696) and
Malvasia (1616-1693), or to art writers whom Bottari appreciated as
absolute reference points of his aesthetics: it is not by chance that one of
the two characters of his Dialoghi sopra
le tre arti del disegno (Dialogues above the three arts of drawing)
published in 1754 was Bellori, while Malvasia was continually cited in that
work.
According to the scholar, there was
evidence that Bellori made a first attempt to publish his collection of letters
in 1665 [41]. In his speech on the Idea
of 1664, moreover, he inserted a letter by Guido Reni. As for Malvasia, he had
arranged a collection of letters from artists (including 150 from Albani and 60
from the Carraccis) and tried, in vain, to publish it in 1672, as an independent (parallel)
project to the Felsina Pittrice. In fact,
Malvasia had reserved a key role to letters also in his Felsina: "Indeed, for
the lawyer Malvasia, now dressed in the toga of the historian, the written
document (the letter in particular) was, like a verbal testimony, a voice that
dialogued with other favourable or adverse views, an element on which a closing
statement in front of the court might rest or that, conversely, had to be
refuted: with a declared aim to obtain a hopefully favourable judgment”
[42].
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| Fig. 34) On the left, The Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Modern Architects by Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1672) (Source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k851200q. On the right: Felsina Pittrice by Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1678) (Source: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Title_page_of_%27Felsina_pittrice%27_by_Malvasia_-_HathiTrust_(Getty_Research_Institute).jpg) |
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According to Ms Perini, Bellori and
Malvasia would therefore be the true first creators of a collection of artists'
letters, while Bottari had ‘only’ the merit to be the first to implement a project
in reality planned in the previous century. Why did Bellori’s and Malvasia’s
projects not materialize, while the one of Bottari did so? In the XVII Century,
in her view, the time to publish a collection of letters was not yet ripe: she
wrote that letters, ultimately, are "self-referential
documents, free from a biographical individuality to be historically
ascertained or from a theory to be implemented or refuted” [43]. In other
words, for writers with a strong aesthetic identity such as Bellori and
Malvasia, writing a ‘simple’ collection of neutral texts without a uniform
orientation would have made no sense. In addition (as already mentioned in the first part of this post), while compiling an anthological history of poetry did not pose
problems of unrepresented authors, writing an art history through the letters
of the artists was intricate, because it clashed with the absence of documents
for many of the major artists, and their abundance for some minor authors. For
Ms Perini, thus, one should wait for the "historiography of weak profile” [44], typical of the XVIII Century
(i.e. a phase in which simple erudition was really the exclusive end goal of
historical research), before a collection of artists' letters could appear:
"In short, it is not fortuitous that
the first collection of artist's letters was released in the mid-XVIII Century
and not before: its heterogeneity, additivity and apparent objectivity
corresponded to a level of pure documentation, of teleological indifference, or
at least of attraction, impossible to implement within the context of
theoretical motivation and concrete polemics of XVII Century historiography”
[45].
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| Fig. 35) On the left: Paolo Gherardo, New book of letters of the rarest authors of the Italian vernacular, 1545. Source: https://books.google.de/books?id=R7JdAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP7&hl=it&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false. On the right: Dionigi Atanagi, About the wittily and pleasant letters of several great men and clear minds, 1601. Source: https://fr.maremagnum.com/libri-antichi/delle-lettere-facete-et-piacevoli-di-diversi-homini-grandi/138084715 |
I would like to disagree, in
particular, with the idea that Bottari's Raccolta
was born in an environment of 'weak thought', to use this poststructuralist
concept of last century’s philosophy. What has just been mentioned about the
'ideological' reasons of the instrument of historical sources by the Jansenists
would oppose, in my opinion, the thesis of Ms Perini Folesani. Furthermore, the
significance of the Raccolta could not
be fully understood, if one did not consider that the epistolary form imposed
itself, in late XVII-Century Europe, as a key instrument of communication
between those who were interested in culture; this did not take place
exclusively as a private contact, but also as a testimony destined to a wider
circulation.
It goes without saying, of course,
that Bottari made systematic use (as a source for the Raccolta, especially in Tome V of 1766) of the many Venetian ‘cinquecentine’
which offered series of letters by famous men (published and edited, among the
others, by Paolo Manuzio, Paolo Gherardo, Ludovico Dolce, Dionigi Atanagi,
Bernardino Pino and Francesco Turchi) and did certainly not ignore the conceptualization
of the epistolary instrument already widespread in the early XVII Century
(think of "The idea of various
letters used in the secretariat of every prince, and lord with different
conceptual principles, and purposes of the missive" by Benedetto
Pucci, published in 1608). And yet, precisely in the XVIII Century, the letter
became a fundamental tool not only for bilateral communication, but also for
the dissemination of knowledge. Since 1684 we have been speaking, not
surprisingly, of République des Lettres,
with the expression coined by Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). The main men of culture
wrote and retained their correspondence, also in the perspective of
publication. Also in the case of art, with the circulation of magazines
debating on artistic themes, the publication of the letters became a privileged
form of aesthetic discussion [46].
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| Fig. 36) On the left: The title page of the Collection of the most beautiful French poems of 1692, the first literary anthology of modern times. Source: https://books.google.de/books?id=szBbAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=it.On the right: the third volume of the Latin Collection of Italian Poets, co-edited by Giovanni Gaetano Bottari in 1719. Source: https://archive.org/details/carminaillustriu03bott/page/n7 |
A second process - contemporary to
the first one - was the diffusion of the collections of texts. In France, the Recueil des plus
belles pièces des Poètes français, tant anciens que modernes (Collection of the most beautiful
pieces of French Poets, both ancient and modern) in five volumes attributed to
Bernard Le Bouyer (or Bovier) De Fontenelle, (1657-1757), was released in 1692.
The first Italian anthology of modern times was the Scelta di sonetti e canzoni de' più
eccellenti autori d'ogni secolo (Choice of
sonnets and songs by the most excellent authors of every century), published as
a posthumous work by Agostino Gobbi (1684-1708) between 1709 and 1711. It was
an anthological story of Italian poetry in four volumes (the first volume about
poetry up to 1550, the second about the following centuries and the last two
with the works of living poets).
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| Fig. 37) The Collection of Florentine Prose in a Venetian edition by Occhi publishers of 1730-1734. Source: https://www.maremagnum.com/libri-antichi/prose-fiorentine-raccolte-dallo-smarrito-accademico-della/150795135 |
Bottari himself participated to this
'anthological' movement; in his thirties, in fact, he contributed in Florence to
the Raccolta
Di Prose Fiorentine (Collection of Florentine Prose, 1716-1745)
in 5 volumes and to the Latin collection Carmina
illustrium poetarum italorum (Collection of Illustrious Italian Poets, 1719-1726)
in 11 volumes. As for the first series of volumes, it was the continuation of a collection begun
in Mid-1600 by the Florentine philologist Carlo Dati [47] (1619-1676) and
interrupted at his death; Bottari participated in the XVIII-Century extension
of the work together with Tommaso Buonaventuri [48] (1675-1731) and Rosso
Antonio Martini (1696-1762), within the Accademia
della Crusca. As for the second series, edited by Bottari always with
Tommaso Buonaventuri, it was a collection of Italian poetry in Latin, where the
authors were reported (from the first volume) in alphabetical order: this means
that the immense wealth of poetry had already been ordered before the
publication’s start.
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| Fig. 38) On the left: The recent study by Emmanuel Fraisse on anthologies in France (2017). On the right: The first volume of the study on Anthology in German (1970), which contains among other things a list of a thousand anthologies of various subjects in the German world between the XVIII Century and today |
Obviously, there had been
collections of literary texts (starting from the "Parnasse des poètes françois modernes" of 1571) already in
previous centuries. And yet, from the end of the XVII Century, literary
anthologies flourished everywhere, consolidating as a massive phenomenon in the
XVIII Century. What are the reasons of this proliferation? Italian scholars
seem to have ignored the question. French [49] and German [50] studies on the
subject identified at least three, often closely interrelated causes. First of
all, the increasing diffusion of repertoires to support scholarship from the
end of the XVII Century (it is the erudite element already identified by Ms Perini,
which should however not be interpreted as an expression of a minor culture,
but on the contrary conceived of as one of the earliest expressions of
encyclopaedism); then the explosion of publishing and of the number of books,
which made it necessary to offer the reader new tools to be able to selectively
approach literature without having to fill the houses with volumes and spend
excessive amounts; finally, the affirmation of a more 'ideological' vision of
the history of literature, which pushed to 'codify' the literary heritage according
to a coherent interpretative thesis going, in reality, beyond the production of
a simple anthology of texts. For example, Fontenelle compiled an anthology of
French poetry to demonstrate the superiority of moderns over the ancients,
while Gobbi wanted to proclaim the primacy of petrarchism through the centuries, up to its contemporaries. It is
evident - in the work on the Latin literature of Bottari and Buonaventuri - the
desire to demonstrate the continued vitality of the use of Latin in the world of
letters in Italy, starting from Petrarch and Poliziano up to the XVIII Century.
The accentuation of the three factors (erudition, publishing and ideology) would
make the anthology one of the most successful genres of the following century,
the XIX Century.
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| Fig. 39) The pages of Tome II of the Raccolta in which Gabburri explains to Mariette the first attempts to create a collection of artists' letters, in the Florence of 1729. Source: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t8hd9cn7n;view=1up;seq=288 |
The Florentine origins of the Raccolta
We have already said in the first
part of this post that Bottari edited a proto-anthology, which preserved some
historical elements of erudite repertoires, displaying however some
characteristics of the first anthologies. Moving from theory to practice, and
therefore from the theory of the anthological form to historical reality, I am
absolutely convinced that the roots of the Raccolta date back to the years when Bottari was still active as an intellectual
in Florence (and participated - together with Rosso Antonio Martini and Tommaso
Buonaventuri - to the already mentioned collections of Florentine prose and
Latin poetry). An important source (in fact, one of the letters contained in
the Tome II of the Raccolta) illustrates what happened. Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri
(1675-1742) wrote a very long letter to Pierre-Jean Mariette on October 4,
1732, and told him about a first project to publish artists’ letters, which was
interrupted by the death of Abbot Antonio Maria Salvini [51] (1653-1729). Three
years had passed and a group of Florentine scholars wanted to relaunch that
project. Gaburri wrote about Rosso Antonio Martini’s intention of publishing a
tome of "Letters of Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects", and explained that he himself had contributed
by providing him some interesting letters from Salvator Rosa. He added he was
hoping to collect other letters from Bolognese correspondents and asked
Mariette to try searching in Paris letters of French painters; he explained,
finally, that everything had to be ultimately forwarded to Martini as
coordinator of the work. Rosso Antonio Martini (also called the 'Ripurgato') was an academic of the Crusca since 1719, chief officer of the
Royal Printing (where also Bottari worked with a managerial role in those years)
and director of the archives of the Academy. He was a central figure to
organize the systematic sieve of the great Florentine archives and to identify
letters of artists. So the origins of the collection were Florentine and dated
back to the years between the second and third decades of the XVIII Century.
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| Fig. 40) Salvator Rosa, Self-portrait, 1645. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In addition to the letter from
Gabburri, the Raccolta offered us other testimonies of the
search for artists' letters ("lettere pittoresche"), which became object of intense letter
exchanges just around 1732. The network of correspondents was going beyond
Tuscany and included direct relations between Paris and Bologna, at the search of written evidence about the Emilian painters of the early XVII Century. The Bolognese designer
and expert Giampietro Zannotti informed Mariette on June 3 that he owned some
letters from Albani, Guido Reni, Algardi, Ludovico Carracci and others (and he stated
he would agree in principle to let copy them for circulation and publication);
he then added that one of his 'friends' had also many Albani’s letters
(originally owned by Malvasia), although he had no idea of their content (and
could not verify it because his friend was out of town). On 5 August Zanotti
wrote to the Florentine Gabburri to rectify the information: Albani’s letters -
which he hoped to find at his friend’s house - were no longer to be found, and
he could only provide a copy of his owns; on September 6 he sent a copy of the
letters to Florence, admitting that he had overestimated the number of artists'
letters in his possession (many had been lost in a move). Other letters were
sent on October 4th. All in all, however, the search for texts in Bologna had -
at least for the moment - limited fortune.
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| Fig. 41) Ignazio Enrico Hugford, Matilde of Canossa donates her patrimony to the church, 1750-1755. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In 1754 Bottari will confirm in the
introduction of the Raccolta that the
'primeval' collection was ready many years before. He will then mention the
centrality of the Tuscan friends, thanking first of all Rosso Antonio Martini,
but also the painter Ignazio Enrico Hugford (1703-1778), born in Tuscany but of
English origin. It must be said from now on that the two will continue to
support Bottari's effort for decades: traces of Martini's contribution will be
found until Tome III (1759), to which he contributed with sixty-five letters
from the XVI Century in Tuscany, while Hugford’s support will include around
one hundred letters sent by many senders to Gabbiani and Gabburri, published in
Tome II (1757). Hugford will be still thanked in Volume V (1766) for the 'many
letters' he collected and published there and will finally appear as a direct correspondent
in Tome VI (1768).
Bottari as an art writer in the 1750s
So, what was Bottari's intention
when he resumed, in the 1750s, the work which Salvini, Gaburri and Rosso
Martini has started twenty years earlier? According to Serenella Rolfi Ožvald
[52], far from wanting to assemble texts for mere reasons of scholarship, he aimed
at affirming a new way of narrating the history of art, alongside the
consolidated mechanism of the biographical story (which he knew perfectly,
preparing to take care of the first commented edition of Vasari's Lives in 1759 -1760, and having already
mentioned with great abundance both Vasari’s
Lives of Vasari and Malvasia’s
Felsina Pittrice in his own Dialogues
above the three arts of drawing of 1754). He privileged, in fact, the modern
method of setting up a chronological collection of the letters of the artists,
letting “professori” (the artists)
and/or “personaggi” (the broader
connoisseurs) speak directly. Ms Rolfi Ožvald noted that the Raccolta not only contained letters from the
past (taken from archives and libraries, to which Bottari had privileged access
both because of her professional position and thanks to a very large network of friends
who supported him in the research) but, starting from his transformation from a
single volume (1754) into a series of texts (1757 onwards) also included the
letters that Bottari himself was exchanging with other protagonists of the
aesthetic debate, such as the aforementioned Mariette. Some letters (for
example that sent by Luigi Crespi to Bottari himself on the life of his father
Giuseppe Maria, probably dating back to 1756 and published in Tome III, and
that of the decorator Giovanni Battista Ponfredi (or Ponfreni) (1714-1795) to
Count Nicola Soderini on the life of his teacher, the painter Marco Benefial,
published in Tome V and dated 1764) were nothing other but substitutes for the
lives of artists, according to the ancient Vasari model. Following the fashion
of the time, some texts published in essays or in magazine articles of the time
were even artificially 'converted' by Bottari into letters in order to appear
in the Raccolta. These were not manipulations or
fakes, but the expression of the passion of those years for all what is
literary, in the original sense of the term 'letter'.
A reading of the Raccolta as a new form of story in the
history of art was also proposed in 1984 by Paola Barocchi: "All this is made possible by a balanced
historical consciousness that, while drawing on the most famous literary
anthologies, did not let itself be tempted by the abstractness of the ekphrasis,
but was concerned with enhancing, through the testimonies of connoisseurs,
collectors and scholars, the fortunes of artists and works and their contexts.
In this sense, the simultaneity of the Collection of Letters and of Vasari’s
re-edition drew full coherence in the evident opposition to the popularizing
and reductive aspirations of the contemporary Abecedari. Thus a sort of history
of history was born within the artistic epistolography, which in a certain way
anticipated the great history of Lanzi and its dual interest for the ancient
and the modern” [53]. Collecting the letters meant, at the same time, to
verify from direct sources the narrative of the biographers (Vasari,
Baldinucci, Malvasia and many others) [54] and to be confronted directly with
the world of the artists. Even the early emulators of Bottari (including
Ticozzi and Gualandi, with the exclusion however of Gaye and, I would add, also of Guhl, both
impregnated with elements of positivism thanks to their studies in Berlin) did
not therefore fully realize, according to Ms Barocchi, the methodological
novelty of the anthological genre. In fact, Bottari’s work offered a new tool
for understanding the socio-cultural context within which the artists were moving.
Looking for an interpretation: the Dialogues
above the three arts of drawing (1754)
Let us consider again a central
question: was the collection of letters just a (highly laudable) scholarly
collation or was there a silver threat going beyond the assembly of texts? To
try and answer this question, I also read the Dialogues on the three arts of drawing, prepared and published by
Bottari in parallel with the 1754 Raccolta.
The two virtual characters of the Dialogues
were Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613-1696) and Carlo Maratta (1625-1713), or
two central figures of the Roman artistic life who had passed away when
Giovanni Gaetano was only seven and twenty-four years respectively. Both of
them had been exponents of that way of thinking about art that is often cited
as Roman classicism. The Dialogue had
therefore the tone of a conversation between friends who did not need, in fact,
to convince each other of their correctness, sharing the same fundamental views
(in short, there were no particularly aggressive tones in their conversations).
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| Fig. 42) Carlo Maratta, Portrait of Giampietro Bellori, without date. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
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| Fig. 43) The Life of Carlo Maratti, written by Giampietro Bellori in 1689. Source: https://www.walkaboutbooks.net/pages/books/19542/giampietro-bellini-giovanni/vita-di-carlo-maratti-pittore-scritta-da-giampietro-bellori-fin-allanno-mdclxxxix-continuata-e |
It must be said, first of all, that the Dialogues
proved to be well written, revealing still today, in my opinion, a great
ease of writing, almost three hundred years after the text had been drafted.
Unlike what I expected, it was neither a text of aesthetics on beauty nor a
discussion on style (as the presence of Bellori would have suggested). Nor was
it a conversation about painting technique, as the choice of giving the word to
a painter like Maratta might have suggested. The central theme of the five
virtual conversations was, in fact, the difficulty - I would almost say the absolute
impossibility - for the artists (here called ‘professors’, the same term used in the 1754 Raccolta) to be understood by their interlocutors, with the
exception of a small group of 'experts'.
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| Fig. 44) The first edition of the Dialogues on the three arts of drawing by Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, published in Lucca in 1754. Source: https://www.exlibrisroma.it/fr/9864-dialoghi_sopra_le_tre_arti_del_disegno |
In short, the Dialogues dealt with a very modern theme: the artist would be alone,
misunderstood, and a victim of the arrogance of the powerful and the ignorance
of most; he would be trapped by aesthetic evaluations most often conceived in
the past and unhelpful to understand the present (and which, therefore, would
hinder the renewal of the arts). Nothing could be further from the neoclassical
assessment that true artists should assert themselves as the champions of the
imitation of the past according to precise canons. According to Giovanni
Gaetano, instead, the past events of the artists’ lives could not but confirm
the miseries of the present. In short, the many quotations in the texts of art
writers of the past (taken from the art writings of authors like Vasari,
Baldinucci, Malvasia, and Ridolfi) never aimed at confirming the neoclassical
obligations of sticking to past standards, but served to confirm that the weakness
of the artist’s human condition had always been persistent (and this perhaps
explains why Winckelmann had an opinion negative on the Dialogues, which he considered "silly, dry and childish” [55]). For this reason the Dialogues ended in a substantially
pessimistic tone, as stated by Maratta: there would perhaps be no hope – also
in the future – for artists to be
completely understood.
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| Fig. 45) The second edition of the Dialogues on the three arts of drawing by Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, published in 1770 in Florence. The frontispiece - while containing the reference to the title in the base of the altar - was taken from a much earlier image, designed by Niccolò Berrettoni (1637-1682) and engraved by Benoît Farjat (1646-1724). Berrettoni and Farjat collaborated with Carlo Maratta, one of the protagonists of the Dialogues. Source: https://archive.org/details/dialoghisopralet00bott/page/n7 |
The first two dialogues were all
centred on the theme of the relationship between artist and power. In the first
one, the conversation was supported by numerous and long quotations of Vasari's
Lives, all of which were demonstrating
how even the greatest painters and sculptors (like Michelangelo himself) were
confronted with the greatest difficulty to gain and preserve their room of
autonomy from powerful politicians. The arbitrary decisions of people detaining
power often put the artists in extreme difficulty. In the second dialogue the
presence of Vasari continued, but their quotations were progressively more and
more juxtaposed by passages of other art writers from Tuscany (Baldinucci) or Emilia
(Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the contemporary Giampietro Zanotti, the latter
mentioned three times) or antiquity (the Latin Vitruvius), as if there were an
implicit hierarchy in their entrance on stage. The prevailing theme of the
injustice of the potent vis-à-vis artists did not vary, but it was here
extended to architecture. The powerful were paying a miserable income to
valuable architects (like Brunelleschi) and covered with gold those who worked
badly. For fear of costs, the tasks were assigned to secondary architects, for projects
whose final price was double compared to the beginning. Even the best ones (like
Bernini) were victims of envy. A chronological progression led Bellori and
Maratta even to touch recent themes for Bottari, such as the useless polemics
about the solidity of St. Peter's dome in Rome that developed between 1742 and
1753 (when both Bellori and Maratta had already died for decades) [56]. Obviously,
Bottari reserved himself the right to violate any temporal coherence to urge
the reader's attention to current and urgent matters. From a geographical point
of view, the discussion between the two virtual protagonists arose on
Florentine themes, but then developed on Roman issues and finally widened to
the difficulties encountered by architects in Venice and Mantua, in a kind of
tour touching all the major schools. Finally, the dialogues turned back to
discussing art in Rome, to focus once again on the difficulties of building St.
Peter's (Bottari let Maratta say words that were not very generous towards the
façade of Maderno, as it was not very respectful of Michelangelo's original
plans). Then Bottari introduced contemporary themes, like the reconstruction of
the façade of Villa Medici in 1741. The discussants concluded that good taste was
running out and that architects were less and less capable.
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| Fig. 46) Alessandro Galilei, The facade of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Rome, 1733. Source: Wikimedia Commons. |
Also the third dialogue was all
about architecture and the very difficult equilibrium that was always required
between engineering skills (which must be learned) and design (which are innate
in the artist): due to this mix, being an architect would be a difficult and
professionally risky job. The leitmotiv of the conversation was, once again,
the impossibility of communicating: "Those
who study architecture do not profess it, and those who profess it do not study
it” [57]. The two protagonists discussed, first of all, the merits of an
architecture based on good construction practices (and mentioned the case of
Brunelleschi, who managed to build the dome despite the exceptional technical
difficulties, and of Domenico Fontana, which raised the Antonina Column solving a series
of contingencies through last minute solutions). The discussants praised then
Alessandro Galilei and - among the technically most educated architects - Borromini. Architecture was
seen as a logical exercise (and compared to the game of chess). As bad
architects did not know the technique, they were making buildings that would collapse
during construction; with their inexperience, they were causing serious
accidents at work, which they charged to the insufficient skills of the
workers. The mastery of the techniques, however, would be a necessary, but not
sufficient condition: some technically perfect works would be horrible from an
aesthetic point of view (and here Bottari made a new leap forward in time,
dedicating a solemn crunch to the Trevi Fountain started by Nicola Salvi in
1731 and still under construction in the years of publication). The primacy
of good taste would explain the large number of good architects who were, first
of all, painters or sculptors (Michelangelo, Bernini and many others). Many
others copied them, but produced buildings without grace (and many churches
whose façades were, in the opinion of the dialogues, unacceptable, such as that
of St. Peter); the exceptions of good 'pure architects' who were not universal
artists themselves were few (Brunelleschi, Buontalenti, Borromini, Vignola) and
in any case always interpretable. As for the sources of art history mentioned
here, Bottari returned to the Latin classics (Pliny and Vitruvius) and to
Vasari.
The fourth dialogue returned to the
late XVI Century and the Baroque (with frequent quotations from Malvasia,
Baldinucci and Ridolfi): the victims of the patrons’ incomprehension of the
clients were prominent names such as Titian, Correggio, Paolo Veronese,
Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Poussin, Taddeo Zuccari,
Domenichino, but also less-known artists such as Fabrizio Boschi, Simone
Cantarini, Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli. In some cases their
works were distorted because of absurd requests, in others the artists were
underpaid, in others patrons preferred to them second-class colleagues
(Spagnoletto and Lanfranco, whom clearly Bottari disliked, were preferred to
Domenichino). In particular Annibale Carracci and Domenichino were seen as the
prototype of the artist victim of a cruel fate, as well as of ignorance and
human envy.
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| Fig. 47) The third edition of the Dialogues by the publisher Simoni of Naples of 1772 (with an error on the cover, where the year of publication was incorrectly indicated as 1372). Source: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24988201M/Dialoghi_sopra_le_tre_arti_del_disegno |
The fifth and last dialogue was a
variation on the theme, always supported by multiple citations from writings of
Malvasia, Baldinucci and Ridolfi. As a good Jansenist, Bottari did not believe
in papal infallibility (even in terms of art) and paid particular attention to
cases where the popes made sensational mistakes. Sixtus IV (1414-1484) paid
much more Cosimo Rosselli than Perugino or Luca Signorelli for the frescoes in
the Sistine Chapel; also Sixtus V (1521-1585) and Paul V (1550-1621) let secondary
artists decorate the Vatican library and forgot the Carraccis and their school
in Bologna. The Dominicans in Bologna preferred a fresco maker of poor quality,
like Giovanni Valesio (1579 - 1650) to Tiarini, but the result was so
disappointing that the painter was forced to cover his entire work with lime in
one single night. Artists could also be a victim of bad luck: the disappearance
of works was often a consequence of negligence or poorly made restorations (and
here Bottari quoted, with Giotto, for the first time an artist of the Middle
Ages; the most serious case was however the loss of the frescoes by Guido Reni
at S. Michele in Bosco in Bologna) or of wall collapses and other technical
incidents. An inexperienced chief engineer determined the vanishing of the frescoes
by Agostino Carracci in the Capuchin convent of Parma, accelerating his death.
Incidents and bad luck persecute Cigoli and Giulio Romano. Then there were
works of the greatest artists of the past (like Raphael and Michelangelo) who
would require urgent rescues. The work ended in a tone of deepest disappointment
and pessimism.
 |
| Fig. 48) On the left: the 1826 edition of the Dialogues on the three arts of drawing by Giovanni Battista Bottari. Source: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_7_FYAAAAYAAJ/page/n3. On the right: the Spanish translation of 1806. Source: https://archive.org/details/dialogossobrelas00bott/page/n3 |
It remains to say that Bottari’s Dialogues (now almost forgotten) had a
respectable fortune for centuries. A new "corrected and augmented"
version were brought out already in Florence in 1770 and in Naples in 1772
(therefore with Bottari still alive). In 1804 also a Spanish edition appeared (Dialogos Sobre Las Artes del Diseño).
New Italian editions were printed in Reggio Emilia 1826, 1832 and 1845. Evidently the
text was well suited to the concerns of the "romantic" era and to the
idea of the accursed artist, who prevailed in the readers' fashion during the
decades of the new XIX Century editions. Another indication corroborates the,
perhaps daring, hypothesis of the Bottari’s pre-Romantic suggestions (although
he certainly belonged to the classicist world): it was the friendship between
Bottari and Piranesi [58], a rebel spirit who interpreted love for ancient
architecture in a completely different sense from that of Winckelmann.
 |
| Fig. 49) On the left: Pier Leone Ghezzi, Caricature of Giovanni Battista Bottari, 1749. Source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?assetId=921413001&objectId=3086817&partId=1. On the right: Felice Polanzani, Frontispiece of Piranesi's Roman Antiquities, depicting Giovan Battista Piranesi as a Roman bust, 1756. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The Dialogues confirmed the idea - which is in line with the idea of
Bottari as 'committed intellectual' and proponent of a minority religious
tendency (Jansenism) in Italy - of a challenging and complex vision of the
relationship between art and society. Bellori and Maratta did not talk about
abstract issues or general principles, but about people's destiny. They
basically posed behavioural and ethical questions: Who depends on whom? Who has
the fault of what? How can we defend ourselves against the wrongs suffered?
Obviously, many of their conversations re-presented arguments and rhetorical
figures that were not original. For example, the question of what would account
more for good architecture (i.e. whether technical-engineering knowledge or the
artist's creativity), went back to Vitruvius, as documented by long quotations;
moreover, both Vasari and Malvasia had already documented numerous cases in
which artists were the victims of an ignorant or stupid client. And yet
Giovanni Gaetano also wanted to convey to the reader a precise idea: artists
are men who are able to take a risk but are often unsuccessful. Failing is
possible and it is an inevitable part of life. Fortune can come to artists very
soon or only posthumously, but it never depends solely on their qualities.
 |
| Fig. 50) Giambattista Piranesi, Dedication to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari of the volume Roman Antiques of the Temples of the Republic, and of the First Emperors, 1748. Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/365873 |
The Raccolta in the edition of
1754
Let's try to use what has been
learned about the Dialogues to read
the volume of the Collection of letters
on painting, sculpture and architecture in the version prepared in the
thirties of the XVIII Century, presented to the authorities in 1751 and printed
in 1754. On that date Giovanni Gaetano, most likely, intended to print a single
volume only; he structured it so that it would offer a cohesive idea of the
epistolary writings by the artists.
 |
| Fig. 51) Pierre Subleyras, Portrait of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, 1745. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The Raccolta was dedicated to Silvio Valenti Gonzaga (1690-1756),
Secretary of State of Benedict XIV (and therefore, in fact, number two of the
political structure of the state). Valenti was very interested in art (he
founded the Capitoline Art Gallery and collected "a treasure of prints, drawings, and paintings to envy a Monarch"
[59]). It must be said that Bottari had dedicated to him, six years before, one
of his writings on science, and notably on earthquakes: "Three Lessons over Earthquakes dedicated to
the most eminent and prince cardinal Silvio Valenti, chamberlain of the Holy
Church, and secretary of state" (1748).
As for the structure of the Raccolta, Bottari apparently stated in
the introduction that there was really no order: "While one could make an attempt to observe the existence of an order in
arranging the letters, this could not be entirely precise, since it was not
necessary, nor would it had been possible, since I received many letters during
the printing process” [60]. However, I would consider this statement as too
defensive and not accurate: while in a (few) cases the letters were badly
placed in order, in most cases the chronological structure held.
The volume contained 203 letters.
The first was from 1504, and it was in truth the only one of the early years of
the XVI Century, traced in the Gaddi archive in Florence: it was a letter to
Piero Soderini (1450 -1522), Gonfalonier of the Republic of Florence, which
Giovanna da Montefeltro delle Rovere (1463 -1513) would have sent to recommend
a young, twenty-one old, Raphael. It would reveal itself, with the passing of
centuries and studies, as a fake. The Raccolta
did not include any previous text, not only because Bottari did not seem
interested in the primitives, but probably also because the availability of
texts of those years was much more scarce in the Florentine and Tuscan archival
collections to which the anthologizer had access. The most recent letter was
from 1665 and was sent by Salvator Rosa to his friend Giovanni Battista
Ricciardi (1623-1686), a poet, playwright and philosopher from Pisa; it was the
latest in a long series of letters that Rosa had sent to the same recipient
since 1652.
A collection of letters identified
by Bottari sorting the archival funds of the recipients
The letters were presented in
chronological order, but in a very curious way. Instead of being listed and
proposed according to the senders, they were organized according to the
recipients. Considering the people to whom the letters were sent, there seem to
be five groups of letters: those to the humanist Benedetto Varchi (1503-1565);
to the secretary of Cosimo I Jacopo Guidi (1514-1588); to the notable, writer
and collector Ferrante Carlo (1578 - 1641) (it was the pseudonym of Ferdinando
Carli [61]); to the scholar and art patron Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657); and finally
to the playwright Giovanni Battista Ricciardi (1623-1686) [62]. With the
exception of the letters sent to Varchi (in the context of the discussion on
the comparison of the arts) the letters did not discuss issues of aesthetics.
 |
| Fig. 52) Tiziano, Portrait of Benedetto Varchi, 1540. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In some cases, the letters documented
true friendships between the correspondents and some artists (Cassiano dal
Pozzo and Nicolas Poussin, Giovanni Battista Ricciardi and Salvator Rosa); more
often the letters referred however to commissions, business transactions and
differences of opinion on the orders, often revealing the dependence of the
artist both from the taste and the power of the client, even if in different
forms: Jacopo Guidi was in condition to dictate his conditions to the artists,
because he decided the artists’ access to the Medici’s commissions; Ferrante
Carlo, an unsuccessful poet who worked for cardinals first in some towns of the
Po Valley and then in Rome, was not only an intermediary of Ludovico Carracci
and Giovanni Lanfranco and other artists, but also their confidant; Cassiano
dal Pozzo was a great intellectual who created - for reasons linked to his
desire to document knowledge - one of the major libraries in Rome and, above
all, a huge collection of prints (the Paper Museum), and had either more friendly or more formal
relationships with several artists (including female artists, like Giovanna
Garzoni and Artemisia Gentileschi). In short, the letters bore witness to what
Bellori and Maratta had discussed in a pleasant way in the Dialogues: artists depend on the counterparts, both for good and
for bad. Well, it is not surprising that the German translator of the letters
in the mid-XIX Century, Ernst Guhl, saw in the missives above all an instrument
to study the evolution of the relationship of power between artists and society
and that many of the letters belonging to Bottari’s Raccolta were considered with great attention by scholars of art patronage
such as Francis Haskell.
 |
| Fig. 53) Jan van den Hoecke, Portrait of Cassiano dal Pozzo, between 1630 and 1650. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
An important exception, in which
clearly the work of Bottari had started from the archive of a sender, and not
of a recipient, was represented by the twenty-one letters signed by Vincenzo
Borghini (1515-1580), philologist, scholar and great friend of Giorgio Vasari,
whom he helped both in the editing of the Lives
and in the preparation of iconographic programs. The numerous texts actually
revolved around a fifty-page letter of his (and, therefore, in fact more a
report than a letter) addressed to the Grand Duke on the occasion of the
wedding celebrations of Francesco I dei Medici with Johanna of Austria. Giovanni
Gaetano added Borghini’s letters to many other artists (Vasari, Bronzino,
Buontalenti, Caccini) engaged in the same festivities, in which Borghini revealed
himself as a man of great inventiveness as an organizer of parties and proposed
themes and solutions.
Parallelisms between Dialogues and Raccolta in the letters of Tuscan artists of the XVI Century
 |
| Fig. 54) On the left: the quotation from the letter of Francesco da Sangallo to Benedetto Varchi in the first of the Dialogues on the three arts of drawing. Source: https://archive.org/details/dialoghisopralet00bott/page/28. On the right: two pages of the long letter by Francesco da Sangallo to Benedetto Varchi, in the Collection of letters on painting, sculpture, and architecture. Source: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t40s19s1q;view=1up;seq=41. |
Considering the 'Florentine' section
of the volume (roughly eighty letters), the parallels with the first of the
five Dialogues were numerous. The
letters of Michelangelo to Vasari documented the difficulties or even the
impossibility of the great artist to convince the authorities about the
goodness of his projects: Pope Julius III del Monte on the chapel for his
family; Paul III Farnese on Saint Peter’s construction; Cosimo I dei Medici on
a (later not used) project for the construction of the Church of San Giovanni
dei Fiorentini in Rome. Similar were Michelangelo’s difficulties with
colleagues like Bartolomeo Ammannati in the case of the staircase of the
Laurentian Library in Florence. Compared to what was written in the Dialogues, the Raccolta added new episodes of incomprehension between Michelangelo
and the papacy.
 |
| Fig. 55) Michelangelo, Plan for the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, 1559, Source: https://operaduomo.firenze.it/blog/posts/disegni-architettonici-di-casa-buonarroti |
Obviously, the link was not simply
univocal (from the Dialogues to the Raccolta). It is obvious that it is
entirely legitimate to investigate the inverse relationship: if Bottari chose
the theme of the dependence of artists from power as the focal point of the fictitious
conversations in the Dialogues, it
did it also because he was inspired by the misadventures witnessed in the Florentine
letters he had consulted already for decades; after all, he put in the mouths
of the two protagonists of the Dialogues
the same words he was reading in the letters. It is therefore not surprising
that the symmetry between Dialogues and
Raccolta was particularly pronounced
in the Tuscan section.
Parallelisms concerning the Emilian
artists of the early XVII Century
The Raccolta of 1754 hosted forty letters from Emilian artists, with Ludovico
Carracci (1555-1619) as the main protagonist. He signed sixteen letters to
Ferrante Carlo (from 1608 to death) and received two letters from his own cousin
Hannibal. Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647) also wrote to Ferrante with ten
letters from 1636 to 1641. The presence of other Bolognese school painters such
as Guido Reni (two letters), Guercino (1591-1666) and Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614)
was smaller.
 |
| Fig. 56) The case of Domenichino exploited in Naples where he frescoed the chapel and dome of San Gennaro, and was then replaced by Lanfranco, after his own works had been covered with lime. On the left and in the center, in the Dialogues on the three arts of drawing (with quotations from Malvasia and Bellori). On the right, in the Collection of letters on painting, sculpture, and architecture.
|
Here too there were parallels: we
have already said that the Bolognese art entered in the Dialogues in the second fictional conversation between Bellori and
Maratta, and then became predominant in the fourth dialogue, when the quotes
from Vasari's Lives were first placed
side by side and then replaced (in extension and intensity) by those taken from
Malvasia’s Felsina Pittrice. In short, the two works defined the same
chronological sequence of artistic literature, which saw Bologna (Malvasia and
letters of Carracci / Lanfranco and others) as the new art centre after
Florence.
 |
| Fig. 57) Panorama inside the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro in the Cathedral of Naples, with frescoes by Lanfranco and Domenichino, 1633-1643. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In line with the same themes already
dealt with respect to Florentine artists, in the Dialogues the two fictitious interlocutors exchanged information on
the cases in which the Bolognese were victims of commercial exploitation, and
spent a lot of time in particular on Domenico Zampieri, known as Domenichino
(1581-1641). They recounted in detail the case of the chapel and dome of San
Gennaro in Naples, which was documented in numerous passages of the Dialogues with a quote from Malvasia
[63] and one from Bellori [64]. It is by far the worst case of exploitation
documented by Bottari: the frescoes in the Chapel of the Treasure of San
Gennaro were made by Domenichino under the threat of local painters, who even
forced him to escape; in the story told by Malvasia and Bellori, the Bolognese
painter died of a broken heart in Naples because he had been replaced by
Lanfranco, after his frescoes had been covered with lime. The case returned in
the Raccolta: in a letter dated 23
January 1632 and addressed to Cassiano del Pozzo, the painter himself informed
the scholar about the unfair conditions imposed to him for the execution of
those Neapolitan works [65].
 |
| Fig. 58) The painter Giovanni Valesio as a prototype of an incapable painter, unjustly preferred painter to others (Tiarini). On the left, the drastic judgment in the Dialogues. On the right: a letter from Valesio to Ferrante Carlo, dated 1608. Source: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t40s19s1q;view=1up;seq=237 |
The opposite situation was that of
the Bolognese engraver and painter Giovanni Valesio (1579 - 1650), who was
described in the Dialogues as the
prototype of an incompetent taking advantage of the ignorance of the clients
(specifically the Dominican Fathers in Bologna, who prefer him to Tiarini). I
do not think it is a coincidence that the Raccolta
included a letter from Valesio to Ferrante Carlo (in itself completely devoid
of content): it offered an opportunity to talk about Valesio in both texts.
The letters of the Baroque artists
working in Rome and Naples
The last eighty letters of 1754’s Raccolta were dedicated to the Baroque,
and among them sixty were received by Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657). In the
introduction to the Raccolta Giovanni
Gaetano thanked Cardinal Albani for placing at his disposal Cassiano’s library
and papers: "I still have to give
due praise to the most eminent Mr. Cardinal Alessandro Albani, possessor, and
high expert of the rarest antiquities, and lover and promoter with all his
strengths of the three fine arts, who kindly authorised me to extract from his
copious library all those letters, which I would find appropriate, and which he
owned in the books of the already famous Cassiano del Pozzo” [66].
Cassiano’s correspondents included
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) with twenty-three letters concentrated between 1641
and 1642, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) with six letters between 1630 and
1637, Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) with six letters between 1641 and 1646 and
finally Pietro Testa (1612-1650) with three letters between 1632 and 1637.
There were also missives by lesser-known artists, such as the miniaturist
Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670) with four letters from 1630-1631 or artisans today
practically forgotten, like the Augustinian Father Giovani Saliano, whose date
of birth and death are unknown. Implicitly, the Raccolta thus offered a coherent idea of the Roman Baroque art,
based on the network of knowledge and aesthetic preferences of a single
protagonist (who clearly preferred a baroque style of classicism).
 |
| Fig. 59) Nicolas Poussin, Seven Sacraments - Baptism (I) 1642 Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The only case relevant to this
period, outside Cassiano’s correspondence, was that of the 16 letters sent by
Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) to the aforementioned Giovanni Battista Ricciardi. In
the Dialogues he was considered an erratic
but brilliant artist (the source from which Bottari drew on his personality was
Baldinucci).
What was missing in 1754’s Raccolta compared to the Dialogues?
If we consider the content of the Dialogues as an expression of Bottari's
taste (and therefore as a paradigm of good taste), what was missing in the Raccolta published the same year?
Evidently, the architecture's coverage in the collection of letters had a much
reduced coverage compared to the long fictitious conversations on it between
Poussin and Maratta. Some of the 'masters of painting', such as Guido Reni, were
underrepresented: in the Dialogues
Reni was exalted as the greatest artist of all time, in the Raccolta he was present with only two
letters (one, very short, to an unknown interlocutor [67] and the other to
Count Bolognese Count Antonio Galeazzo Fibbia, in which he discussed
exclusively monetary aspects). And obviously there were no living artists,
those with whom Giovanni Bottari might have had personal acquaintance.
Did these gaps perhaps solicit the
continuation of the work? We will see it in the third part of this post.
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three
NOTES
[41] Perini, Giovanna – Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di comunicazione, a documento, a cimelio (quoted). P. 172
[42] Perini, Giovanna – Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di comunicazione, a documento, a cimelio (quoted). P. 170
[43] Perini, Giovanna – Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di comunicazione, a documento, a cimelio (quoted). P. 177
[44] Perini, Giovanna – Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di comunicazione, a documento, a cimelio (quoted). P. 177
[45] Perini, Giovanna – Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di comunicazione, a documento, a cimelio (citato). P. 179
[46] On the publication of letters by artists and contemporary scholars on art in XVIII Century journals in Rome, see Perini, Giovanna – Nuove Fonti per la ‘Kunstliteratur’ Settecentesca in Italia: i giornali letterari [New sources of a Kunstliteratur in Italy in the XVIII century: the literary journals], in: Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, Serie III, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1984), pp. 797-827. See:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24306583?read-now=1&seq=17#page_scan_tab_contents.
[47] On Carlo Roberto Dati see the corresponding entry in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians of 1987, edited by Magda Vigilante. The entry is available at the address:
[47] On Carlo Roberto Dati see the corresponding entry in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians of 1987, edited by Magda Vigilante. The entry is available at the address:
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/carlo-roberto-dati_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ .
[48] On Tommaso Buonaventuri see the corresponding entry in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians of 1972, edited by Paolo Cristofolini. The entry is available at the address:
[48] On Tommaso Buonaventuri see the corresponding entry in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians of 1972, edited by Paolo Cristofolini. The entry is available at the address:
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/tommaso-buonaventuri_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ .
[49] Fraisse, Emmanuel – Les Anthologies en France, Paris, L’Hermattan, 2017, 310 pages.
[50] Die deutschsprachige Antologie [The anthology in German language], edited by Joachim Bark and Dietger Pforte, Frankfurt am Main, V. Klostermann, 1970, in two volumes (216 e 341 pages)
[51] On Anton Maria Salvini see the corresponding entry in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians of 2017, edited by Maria Pia Paoli. The entry is available at the address:
[49] Fraisse, Emmanuel – Les Anthologies en France, Paris, L’Hermattan, 2017, 310 pages.
[50] Die deutschsprachige Antologie [The anthology in German language], edited by Joachim Bark and Dietger Pforte, Frankfurt am Main, V. Klostermann, 1970, in two volumes (216 e 341 pages)
[51] On Anton Maria Salvini see the corresponding entry in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians of 2017, edited by Maria Pia Paoli. The entry is available at the address:
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/anton-maria-salvini_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/
[52] Rolfi Ožvald, Serenella, Lettere ad un amico. Da Bottari al giornalismo artistico degli anni Ottanta del Settecento (Letters to a friend. From Bottari to the artistic journalism of the eighties of the eighteenth century), in: Le carte false. Epistolarità fittizia nel Settecento italiano (The false papers. Fictitious epistolary in the Italian eighteenth century), edited by F. Forner, V. Gallo, S. Schwarze, C. Viola, Rome, 2017, pp. 469-490
[52] Rolfi Ožvald, Serenella, Lettere ad un amico. Da Bottari al giornalismo artistico degli anni Ottanta del Settecento (Letters to a friend. From Bottari to the artistic journalism of the eighties of the eighteenth century), in: Le carte false. Epistolarità fittizia nel Settecento italiano (The false papers. Fictitious epistolary in the Italian eighteenth century), edited by F. Forner, V. Gallo, S. Schwarze, C. Viola, Rome, 2017, pp. 469-490
(https://www.academia.edu/32003116/LETTERE_AD_UN_AMICO_DA_BOTTARI_AL_GIORNALISMO_ARTISTICO_DEGLI_ANNI_OTTANTA_DEL_SETTECENTO);
[53] Barocchi, Paola - Fortuna della epistolografia artistica (Fortune of artistic epistolography), in Studi Vasariani, Turin, 1984, pp. 83-111. Quotation at page 92.
[54] Grisolia, Francesco: «Di queste bagattelle ella ben vede pieno il Vasari». Spigolature alle Vite nelle lettere di Domenico Maria Manni a Giovanni Gaetano Bottari ["Vasari is full of these baubles." Comments to the Lives in the letters of Domenico Maria Manni to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari], in Studi di Memofonte, Numero 8, 2012, pp. 95-120.
[53] Barocchi, Paola - Fortuna della epistolografia artistica (Fortune of artistic epistolography), in Studi Vasariani, Turin, 1984, pp. 83-111. Quotation at page 92.
[54] Grisolia, Francesco: «Di queste bagattelle ella ben vede pieno il Vasari». Spigolature alle Vite nelle lettere di Domenico Maria Manni a Giovanni Gaetano Bottari ["Vasari is full of these baubles." Comments to the Lives in the letters of Domenico Maria Manni to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari], in Studi di Memofonte, Numero 8, 2012, pp. 95-120.
http://www.memofonte.it/studi-di-memofonte/numero-8-2012/.
[55] Perini, Giovanna – Nuove Fonti per la ‘Kunstliteratur’ Settecentesca in Italia: i giornali letterari, (quoted) , p. 813.
[56] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno, Reggio Emilia, Per Pietro Fiaccadori, 1826, pages 216. Quotation at pages 60-61. See:
[55] Perini, Giovanna – Nuove Fonti per la ‘Kunstliteratur’ Settecentesca in Italia: i giornali letterari, (quoted) , p. 813.
[56] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno, Reggio Emilia, Per Pietro Fiaccadori, 1826, pages 216. Quotation at pages 60-61. See:
https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_7_FYAAAAYAAJ/page/n3 .
[57] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno, Quotations at pages 82, 95, 107 e 116.
[58] See: Monferini, Augusta - Piranesi e Bottari [Piranesi and Bottari], in Anna Lo Bianco, Piranesi e la cultura antiquaria, gli antecedenti e il contesto: Atti del convegno, 14-17 novembre 1979 (Roma: Multigrafica, 1983), pp. 221-29; Gallottini Angela - Vasi, Piranesi, Bottari: un’impresa editoriale tra Napoli e Roma [Vasi, Piranei and Bottari: an editorial endeavour between Naples and Rome], in: Arte e storia dell'arte, 2009; Casadio Martina - Bottari e gli incisori. Lettere di Bartolozzi, Billy, Caccianiga, Campiglia, Morghen [Bottary and the etchers. Letters to Bartolozzi, Billy, Caccianiga, Campiglia, Morghen], in: Studi di Memofonte, Numero 8, 2012. The text is available at:
[57] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno, Quotations at pages 82, 95, 107 e 116.
[58] See: Monferini, Augusta - Piranesi e Bottari [Piranesi and Bottari], in Anna Lo Bianco, Piranesi e la cultura antiquaria, gli antecedenti e il contesto: Atti del convegno, 14-17 novembre 1979 (Roma: Multigrafica, 1983), pp. 221-29; Gallottini Angela - Vasi, Piranesi, Bottari: un’impresa editoriale tra Napoli e Roma [Vasi, Piranei and Bottari: an editorial endeavour between Naples and Rome], in: Arte e storia dell'arte, 2009; Casadio Martina - Bottari e gli incisori. Lettere di Bartolozzi, Billy, Caccianiga, Campiglia, Morghen [Bottary and the etchers. Letters to Bartolozzi, Billy, Caccianiga, Campiglia, Morghen], in: Studi di Memofonte, Numero 8, 2012. The text is available at:
http://www.memofonte.it/studi-di-memofonte/numero-8-2012/.
[59] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori che in dette Arti fiorirono dal Secolo XV. al XVII., Rome, Per gli Eredi Barbiellini Mercanti di Libri e Stampatori a Pasquino, 1754, p. 328. Quotation at page v
[59] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori che in dette Arti fiorirono dal Secolo XV. al XVII., Rome, Per gli Eredi Barbiellini Mercanti di Libri e Stampatori a Pasquino, 1754, p. 328. Quotation at page v
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t40s19s1q;view=1up;seq=9
[60] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. viii.
[60] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. viii.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t40s19s1q;view=1up;seq=11
[61] See the entry Ferdinando Carli, edited by Martino Capucci, in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians (1977), available at the address
[61] See the entry Ferdinando Carli, edited by Martino Capucci, in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians (1977), available at the address
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ferdinando-carli_(Dizionario-Biografico)/.
[62] See the entry Giovanni Battista Ricciardi, edited by Salomé Vuelta García, in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians (2016), available at the address
[62] See the entry Giovanni Battista Ricciardi, edited by Salomé Vuelta García, in the Biographic Dictionary of Italians (2016), available at the address
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-battista-ricciardi_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/.
[63] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno (quoted), p. 201
[63] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno (quoted), p. 201
https://archive.org/details/dialoghisopralet00bott/page/200
[64] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno (quoted), p. 201
[64] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano - Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno (quoted), p. 201
https://archive.org/details/dialoghisopralet00bott/page/220
[65] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. 247
[65] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. 247
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t40s19s1q;view=1up;seq=259 .
[66] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. vii
[66] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. vii
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t40s19s1q;view=1up;seq=11 .
[67] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. 204
[67] Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura scritte da’ più celebri professori (quoted), p. 204
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