Luca Pezzuto. [Father Resta and the Kingdom of Naples A Contribution to the History of Painting in Early XIX Century Naples]

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Luca Pezzuto
Padre Resta e il Viceregno.
Per una storia della pittura del primo Cinquecento a Napoli
[Father Resta and the Kingdom of Naples
A Contribution to the History of Painting in Early XVI Century Naples]
Rome, UniversItalia, 2019

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

Front cover : Luigi Pellegrino Scaramuccia, Portrait of Sebastiano Resta, Amsterdam, Print Cabinet of the Rijksmuseum

Reconsindering Father Sebastiano Resta

For centuries, art historians have associated the name of Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714) to his famous collection of drawings on the one hand and to him being a charlatan (he was considered so since the eighteenth century) on the other one. Since twenty years, fortunately, the studies concerning the Milanese scholar, who had moved to Rome in 1661 and entered the Congregation of the Oratorians, have contributed to re-evaluate his importance. Without necessarily hiding his weaknesses (for example, his mania for Correggio, which led him to widespread attributions to this painter or his disciples), scholars have also highlighted his many strengths. These included his attention to the Primitives (which even Previtali had missed, for example), and also his attention to 'peripheral' art schools compared to the Tuscan-style canon which was the most popular at his time. Many of these merits must be ascribed to the scholars of the Roman University of Tor Vergata, which gave birth to the Father Resta Project, with the intention of cataloguing his work materials: I would like therefore to mention (apologizing in advance to those I will forget) Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Francesco Grisolia, Barbara Agosti, Carmelo Occhipinti, Maria Rosa Pizzoni, Michela Corso and Luca Pezzuto. In these years they have been produced a series of publications dedicated to the Oratorian monk [1].

The issue with Father Resta is that he was extremely atypical; his historiographical vision (because it is evident that he had one, and a particularly brilliant one for the times) did not take form  in a published or manuscript text (even if he had seemingly something in mind in this sense), but in his Albums of drawings. He organized them by themes, and gave them away as gifts (or sold them) along his life. Often, the fate of the drawing albums was to end up dismembered for reasons of collecting and (therefore) commercial reasons. The scholars' first task has been to reconstruct the original structure of the albums. Resta’s historiographical model was therefore, more than any other, a visual model, based on the examination of the artists' drawings. While he did not publish anything in traditional form, on the other hand it is equally true that he was sort of a graphomaniac: In fact, he delivered many of his considerations in the artistic field to an extraordinarily high number of annotations or glosses to the drawings he collected. Due to their fragmentation, those comments have confronted scholars with particularly acute hermeneutical difficulties. Simply considering the annotations to the volumes he owned, we know that Resta added comments to two specimens of Vasari's Lives (both in the first Torrentina version, although he knew also the most famous second one – and this is in itself atypical), to three copies of Giovanni Baglione’s Lives, to two of Father Pellegrino Orlandi’s  Pictorial Abcedario, to one of Sandrart’s Pictorial Academy  (in the Latin version) and of Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice respectively [3]

An Inclusive Historiographical Model

The most remarkable aspect, when one analyses Resta’s annotations and glosses, is the harsh challenge to the pro-Tuscan narration of Vasari's Lives. Considering his Milanese origins and the fact that his father was in turn a famous art collector, it is all in all understandable that he showed a predilection for Lombard painting, and he loved Correggio’s manner. Bearing in mind however that from 1664 Resta lived in Rome and that he also frequented Bellori’s classicist circles, it is more surprising that he sided with Malvasia in the exaltation of the Bolognese school against the 'winning' strand of art criticism with its distinctive Tuscan-Roman features. We know, for example, that the Milanese scholar set up a book of drawings programmatically titled Felsina vindicata contra Vasarium (Bologna vindicated against Vasari).

The volume reviewed here fits perfectly into Resta's attention to the "peripheral" realities (or, better to say, realities that can provide an alternative narrative of the evolution of the history of art). Indeed, Luca Pezzuto took into consideration glosses and annotations of Resta dedicated to the painting of the Kingdom of Naples during the sixteenth century. The first thing to say is that Resta made here the first effort  – in chronological terms – to give order to the history of the fine arts in Naples, very much in response to Vasari’s  vulgate, according to which the 'modern manner' would have been introduced in the city by Vasari himself, with his Neapolitan journey of 1544. De Dominici, with all the limits we know, in fact wrote his Lives of the Neapolitan painters, sculptors and architects only fifty years later, between 1742 and 1745. And it is without doubtful indicative that Resta's attempt originated, in fact, from a 'foreigner' who, however, here as well as when examining the Bolognese case, proved the desire to better understand artistic developments outside the canon that Vasari’s work had delivered to the Italian cultural world.

Father Resta and the Kingdom of Naples in the Sixteenth Century

Pezzuto divided the volume into two parts, which nevertheless represent the faces of the same coin. The first concerned the historiographical framework that Resta provided to the events of the 16th century in Naples; the second focused on the scholar's knowledge and interlocutors in the same geographical area, starting, of course, from Don Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, marquis of Carpio.

Francesco de Grado (engraver), Portrait of the Marquis of Carpio
Source: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/antonio_enriquez_gomez/imagenes_personajes/imagen/imagenes_personajes_07-gaspar_de_haro_y_guzman_marques_del_carpio/

Raphael, Madonna with the Fish, Madrid, Prado Museum (but in Naples, in the church of San Domenico Maggiore from 1514 to 1638)
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raffaello_Sanzio_-_Sacra_Famiglia_con_Rafael,_Tobia_e_San_Girolamo,_o_Vergine_del_pesce.jpg

The two met in Rome (the Spanish nobleman was appointed ambassador of the King of Spain in 1677), most likely within the cultural circle of Christina of Sweden, and shared the same passion for collecting and art in general. When the marquis was appointed viceroy of Naples (1683), Resta followed him temporarily to the city of Campania as his spiritual father and stayed there for about four months. It was not his first journey to the town; certainly, however, that was the occasion to elaborate in a more organic way his considerations on the Neapolitan history. One should however not believe that, while contesting Vasari, Father Resta completely refused his views. In principle, for example, the Oratorian monk took over the same evolutionary vision subdivided into three ages (from the primitives, strictly speaking, to the intermediate phase, characterized by a softer but still laborious way of imitating nature, and finally to the modern way). If anything, Resta replaced Vasari’s heroes with other names: for example, Antonio Solario, known as Lo Zingaro, became the equivalent of Perugino and, therefore, of protoclassicism; Andrea Sabatini or Andrea da Salerno, if you prefer, was proclaimed as the Neapolitan Raphael. In anything, the real question is to understand what and how much Resta really knew of these artists and how he came to this information. With regard to this last question (and in the substantial absence of primary sources, expect periegetic texts or writings related to sacred publications), Resta’s know-how was  most probably based on four inputs. First, as already mentioned, the reading of Vasari and other authors (such as Lomazzo); Second, the direct sight of the artworks, in particular during his 1683 stay in Naples, which was the longest and most significant; Thirdly, his exchanges with the local erudite circles (therefore, in essence, he benefited from the oral tradition); Fourthly, and finally, one should not overlook how much he benefited from the other drawing collectors, with whom he was completely at ease: he benefited from their drawings to assign attributions to given painters (or to adopt attributions by other collectors).

The classical demonstration that the method followed had to be of this kind is given, by contrast, by a few absences in Resta’s reconstruction. One of the most important gaps, taking into account the attention he always showed for this artist, was, for example, that of Cesare da Sesto. Resta emphasized his importance in relation to the presence of Leonardesque artists in Rome. In fact, there is a trivial reason why Cesare da Sesto was not mentioned in relation to Naples: the only source that quoted him was Pietro Summonte in his letter to Marcantonio Michiel of 1524, a source that remained completely unknown until the end of the eighteenth century. Neither Vasari nor Lomazzo, nor evidently the local oral tradition transmitted any memory of the artist's presence in XVI century’s Naples.

Returning to the names enunciated by Resta, it must be said that he must have had a rather general view about Solario (p. 50), based on the cycle of frescoes with the Stories of Saint Benedict in the monastery of Saints Severino and Sossio, on a lost Deposition of Christ at the time in Vietri and on a small number of drawings. Nevertheless – as Pezzuto pointed out – those indicated above were sufficient elements to place it chronologically in a correct position and not too far from reality.

The judgment expressed on several occasions on Andrea da Salerno was certainly more articulated, above all in a long note present in the ms. Lansdowne 802 (pp. 63-64). Here Resta, basing himself on the vision of works that, unfortunately, today have almost all been lost, not only established the parallel between Sabatini in Naples and Raphael in Rome (Sabatini collaborated with Raphael in Rome around 1509), but even identified three phases on stylistic bases: A "good ... but still ancient manner" that recalled the Peruginesque protoclassicism of Sanzio; a "more tender and strong manner, and of raphaelesque drawing, invention and disposition with a colour that seems to be from Correggio" (Correggio was always a touchstone in Resta’s world) and, finally, an "indeed good and delicate, but weakened in colour and drawing" senile style. The most important aspect is that – as Pezzuto pointed out - despite the loss of the works, it is clear, from what can be read, that, in this case, the analysis was conducted with a strictly autoptic method. 

Antonio Solario known as  Lo Zingaro, Scena from the Life of St. Benedict, about 1502, Naples, Cloisters of the Monastery of Saints Severino and Sossio
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antonio_Solario_-_Scene_from_the_Life_of_St_Benedict_-_WGA21612.jpg

Andrea Sabatini (known as Andrea da Salerno), Deposition from the Cross, 1520, Naples, Museo di Capodimonte
Source: Mentnafunangann via Wikimedia Commons

Resta's influence on Neapolitan historiography

If we go back for a moment to De Dominici's Lives of the mid-eighteenth century, we find that, in a completely analogous way to Father Sebastiano, the author spoke of Antonio Solario and Andrea da Salerno as respectively the Neapolitan Perugino and Raphael. In my opinion, convincingly, Pezzuto maintains that De Dominici knew neither Resta’s comments nor his glosses; if he had known, he would have cited them, as he did whenever he had the opportunity to give credibility to a work which, as is known, was based very much on the author's imagination. The question that follows is, therefore, very trivial: How was Resta’s 'nomenclature' transmitted to De Dominici, especially considering that his classification was essentially 'for private use'? The answer lies in the figure of Father Pellegrino Orlandi and his Abcedario pittorico (Pictorial Alphabet) (1704). It is known that Resta wrote at least two copies of the work and that at least one of them ended, after Sebastiano's death, right in the hands of Orlandi, who made use of it to modify his own work (without citing the source of the changes made) in the second edition of 1719. It is also not completely absurd to think of an exchange of information between Orlandi and Resta even before the release of the princeps. The fact is that De Dominici (at least in the case of Andrea da Salerno) drew from the Pictorial Alphabet (the citation of the source was explicit). In short, it is clear that, although confined to the margins of printed specimens and below or on the back of drawings, Resta’s periodization fifty years later still shaped Bernardo’s Lives. Pezzuto also proved cases in which Malvasia (pp. 73-74) and Bellori (p. 78) showed interest in the same periodization. In short, Resta’s annotations and glosses impacted indirectly several writers on art over centuries, in a way that Luca Pezzuto has brilliantly managed to recover.

NOTES

[1] Excusing myself here for possible omissions, I would like to recall here: Dilettanti del disegno nell’Italia del Seicento. Padre Resta tra Malvasia e Magnavacca (The drawing laymen in seventeenth-century Italy. Father Resta between Malvasia and Magnavacca), curated by Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Rome, Campisano publisher, 2013; Le postille di Padre Sebastiano Resta ai due esemplari delle Vite di Giorgio Vasari nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (The annotations of Father Sebastiano Resta to the two specimens of Giorgio Vasari's Lives in the Vatican Apostolic Library), curated by Barbara Agosti and Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò. Transcription and commentary by Maria Rosa Pizzoni, Vatican City, Vatican Apostolic Library, 2015; Le postille di Padre Resta alle Vite del Baglione (The annotations of Father Resta to Baglione’s Lives), edited by Barbara Agosti, Francesco Grisolia and Maria Rosa Pizzoni, Milan, Officina Libraria, 2016; Padre Sebastiano Resta. Milanese, oratoriano, collezionista di disegni nel Seicento a Roma (Father Sebastiano Resta. Milanese, Oratorian, Collector of drawings in the seventeenth century in Rome, Rome, Oratorian Editions, 2017); Notizie di pittura raccolte dal padre Resta. Il carteggio con Giuseppe Ghezzi e altri corrispondenti (News on painting collected by Father Resta. The correspondence with Giuseppe Ghezzi and other correspondents), edited by Maria Rosa Pizzoni, Rome, Universitalia, 2018.

[2] Resta’s 'misfortune' was also due to the fact that the documents related to him were not always correctly displayed. We know, for example, that Bottari published many letters written by Resta in the second and third volumes of his Collection. However, at least in one case – as Francesco Grisolia wrote - he arbitrarily merged two different letters, thereby causing short logical circuits that were then at the basis of the alleged lack of reliability of the scholar.